YABookgate

[Dirty Mug]

Wamman here, I never had a YA phase when I was a teen, maybe because I lived in a third-world shithole where the books I could get my hands on were either very old or secondhand novels selling for cheap; books by the likes of Sheldon, King, and Koontz were passed around in my HS class, and the romance novels the girls read were those by Nora Roberts and her contemporaries. If someone read YA, they'd also read the novels for adults. We were lucky that there was no "assigned reading" like the ones this thread bitched about. (ETA: this was several years ago though)

Then again some of those girls grew up and their tastes regressed to YA shit.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Granted, they'd probably just end up getting stuck in their own YA bubble too from the looks of it, but stuff like YA was supposed to be the bridge for your middle school (and high school to a lesser extent) kids to move on from kid's chapter books without diving headfirst into "real" books like Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, or John Grisham, let alone the classic novels or "proper" literary fiction.

Boys have to look back into the "classics" to find good YA. Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit are very much YA level and were popular when I grew up thanks to the adaptions (Narnia and LOTR, the bloated mess that is The Hobbit trilogy had thankfully not been unleashed at that point). Lord of the Rings was considered YA when it came out but I'd argue it's more complex than modern YA, but it always hit the middle school boy demographic thanks to Peter Jackson's trilogy.

In general movie and video game adaptions fill that role for the male demographic. When I was young shit like the Star Wars EU and the Halo novels kinda formed that bridge as adaptions of popular movies and video games. For all it's acclaim, Tim Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy resembles an adaption of a non-existent film trilogy and isn't really a complex read and me and my friends loved the hell out of it in middle school. We also read some other Star Wars EU shit, some Star Trek novels, and some of the Halo novels. There was also a YA adaption of Revenge of the Sith (it's mostly beat-for-beat with the film, not the "adult" ROTS novel) that I remember liking when it came out and it wasn't uncommon to see kids in elementary/middle school reading Star Wars stuff.

For me it was reading Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and some Star Wars/Star Trek stuff in elementary/middle school to reading The Hobbit and LOTR at the end of middle school to reading other fantasy like all of Tolkien's other works (Silmarillion, Children of Hurin, and some of his other backstory works), Michael Moorcock's Elric/Corum stuff, Frank Herbert's Dune, and GRRM's ASOIAF (before the TV show came out). I'm by no means much of a reader, but I think this a typical "male" path most guys 25-35 (as of 2020) would've followed.

Clancy and Grisham are airport novel-tier and for the former I knew some people in high school who read Tom Clancy's stuff (I always associated John Grisham with my grandmother who'd spend all day watching Law and Order reruns and true crime documentaries and had a giant stack of his books, never knew anyone my age who read him). There was also Left Behind, the Christian version of airport novels, which was cheesy as all hell and also had accompanying YA books I remember some kids reading.

The only YA franchises I can think of that were more gender-neutral are stuff like Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and A Series of Unfortunate Events**. The former two are Tumblr/SJW bait and the latter was mostly seen as a relic of 2000's era mall goths and emo middle schoolers, at least until the Netflix miniseries came out.

As I've mentioned, Artemis Fowl certainly counts and the early ones (the first four, never read the rest and I've heard they're shit) are very much male-centered to the point my YA obsessed sister has never liked them. I think I mentioned that the same writer Eoin Colfer also did a YA cyberpunk novel I liked too growing up.

 

[-4ZURE-]

Hey, quick question, does Diary of a Wimpy Kid count as young adult literature? If so, that is likely the last big YA novel I have read willingly other than maybe the Hunger Games.

Honestly never got into the genre. Hunger Games was fine until the last book, and most of the Tumblr bait stuff never appealed to me. It also doesn’t help that a majority of my reading is now down to online material.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Hey, quick question, does Diary of a Wimpy Kid count as young adult literature? If so, that is likely the last big YA novel I have read willingly other than maybe the Hunger Games.

Within the industry the series is treated as a "Children's" book and not as "Young Adult," but sometimes the audience acts differently, dunno.

FWIW, The Hunger Games is also apparently treated as a Children's book by the NY Times. This surprises me, in a way calling the Wimpy Kids books Children's does not.

Here's the most recent NY Times "Children's Series" Bestseller list, as of my screen capture:

Children’s Series Books - Best Sellers - The New York Times

archived 5 Jun 2020 14:14:12 UTC

archive.is

You can see a book from Hunger Games at #1 and a Wimpy Kids book at #4.

 

[-4ZURE-]

Within the industry the series is treated as a "Children's" book and not as "Young Adult," but sometimes the audience acts differently, dunno.

FWIW, The Hunger Games is also apparently treated as a Children's book by the NY Times. This surprises me, in a way calling the Wimpy Kids books Children's does not.

Here's the most recent NY Times "Children's Series" Bestseller list, as of my screen capture:

http://archive.md/xatI5

You can see a book from Hunger Games at #1 and a Wimpy Kids book at #4.

Strange? I would imagine Wimpy Kid books are as they were pretty big with middle schoolers and are now loved by an older audience. They also have a teen character dealing with teen issues, though it is not cringe like most.

ehh...Whatever.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

As I've mentioned, Artemis Fowl certainly counts and the early ones (the first four, never read the rest and I've heard they're shit) are very much male-centered to the point my YA obsessed sister has never liked them.

This is quite the oxymoron. I thought girls loved Artemis Fowl because cute boys and he's like an evil little genius. Bitches love evil geniuses.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

This is quite the oxymoron. I thought girls loved Artemis Fowl because cute boys and he's like an evil little genius. Bitches love evil geniuses.

J.K. Rowling apparently made Harry Potter the main character of her books BECAUSE she thought boys would only read books about boys, but girls would in fact read books about boys. Not sure how true that is, but it seems few are interested in testing the thesis these days.

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

I suppose that's true, but I never saw YA as a "bridge" into reading. Even at the age when it would've been appropriate for me I was reading "real" books and so were my male classmates.

This may be the case for some kids, but to an 11-13 year old boy who maybe already has difficulty reading, YA books should be that bridge to him. Stephen King or Dean Koontz books would be too challenging and he would have grown past the kinds of stories in kids' chapter books, and then nothing in current YA is appealing to him (and a lot of it is trying to actively repel the average teen boy), so it's likely kids like that would just stop reading altogether unless it's something forced by their school.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

J.K. Rowling apparently made Harry Potter the main character of her books BECAUSE she thought boys would only read books about boys, but girls would in fact read books about boys. Not sure how true that is, but it seems few are interested in testing the thesis these days.

I think this was true at first, but as the books continued and Harry hit puberty (and then the movies were first coming out), girls started squealing over him and the other boys more and more and the girls were... just kinda bland in comparison (Fleur was supposed to be the most beautiful female character in the series). Hermione wasn't really all that pretty to begin with, Emma Watson just happened to turn out hot when she finished going through puberty. I think if it wasn't for her, there'd be even less male Harry Potter fans. Ginny's actress kinda gets a pass because she's a redhead, that's practically exotic to some people. Other than that, boys just weren't interested once Harry started noticing girls, and girls just coo over anything romantic.

Actually, I think if it wasn't for the movies, we might have a better way of projecting the male-female readers ratio. The movies really skewed it unfavorably towards girls.

 

[SnarkySperg]

Hey, quick question, does Diary of a Wimpy Kid count as young adult literature? If so, that is likely the last big YA novel I have read willingly other than maybe the Hunger Games.

Honestly never got into the genre. Hunger Games was fine until the last book, and most of the Tumblr bait stuff never appealed to me. It also doesn’t help that a majority of my reading is now down to online material.

DOAWK is definitely middle grade. It can be appealing for anyone (I enjoyed it even into my 20s), but it's about a middle school boy and is presumably for middle school boys.

Hunger Games was one that I read and enjoyed enough to finish the series, but I didn't like how it wrapped up. I'm shocked to learn that it's considered children's, I wouldn't think it would be, unless all YA is.

There are a couple of series that are kind of more universally appealing (in that neither gender would have a larger preference than the other). The Maze Runner trilogy was mostly guys, though even that one had some odd moments (the love triangle was fucking weird). The Unwind Dystology might be more universally liked (as in both guys and girls would enjoy it), but it is very intense and there is a romantic subplot some guys might not like. I guess Ender's Game counts as YA? I know Ender is supposed to be very young but it reads more like YA than children's or middle grade.

I'm not a guy so I can't attest to how good these would be for guys, though my brother is who recommended Ender's Game to me, and I've recommended Unwind before to a guy who seemed to find it an interesting concept. Maybe one of the guys here can confirm or deny these recommendations.

 

[QuokkaCaptain]

This may be the case for some kids, but to an 11-13 year old boy who maybe already has difficulty reading, YA books should be that bridge to him. Stephen King or Dean Koontz books would be too challenging and he would have grown past the kinds of stories in kids' chapter books, and then nothing in current YA is appealing to him (and a lot of it is trying to actively repel the average teen boy), so it's likely kids like that would just stop reading altogether unless it's something forced by their school.

I cannot tell you how many boys I've seen who've had that exact problem, where they're not yet developed enough to get into the more adult literature, but are being pushed by teachers and parents to read something that isn't below their reading level (Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, etc.).

I'll tell you something else, too: There have been times where I've seen kids (girls and boys both) gravitate to a more adult novel, and the parents will immediately reject it because it's "too advanced, you're never going to finish it" or "I don't want you reading that, it's too mature for you".

I think it's an insidious combination of factors, where you have the YA genre being extremely biased towards one demographic, and then you have parents that are being more restrictive with what their children read because "Stephen King is too mature for you, I don't want you reading that".

Then they hand little Timmy a phone and don't bother checking up on what he's reading on the internet, because that's harder to monitor and they just can't be bothered

 

[SnarkySperg]

I'll tell you something else, too: There have been times where I've seen kids (girls and boys both) gravitate to a more adult novel, and the parents will immediately reject it because it's "too advanced, you're never going to finish it" or "I don't want you reading that, it's too mature for you".

My parents were like this. As an example, I wasn't allowed to read Nicholas Sparks because there was suggestive content. Nothing explicit, but characters were implied to have sex. My brother actually went through a long period where he barely read at all because his only options were middle grade, or YA that was mainly female centric (or classics, which can be heavy reads for a young teen). He did eventually find a niche he liked, but I think that it was a bigger struggle for him than it was for me, as a teen girl (thus in the demographic), to find something that appealed to him.

 

[Puddleduck]

The tough part is that there's no real pipe-line from 'web novel' to 'published novel' in the US. If you were Japanese, yeah, its WAY easier to get a LN published. But for the US, you're basically stuck with amazon. There's really no good 'web novel' sites (and any that did exist would be curated to fuck and back, defeating the point).

That could be a niche for people to carve, though. It's not hard to set up a website, and if it was catered especially toward getting teen boys decent things to read, it become the "go to"

 

[dirtydeanna96]

I'll tell you something else, too: There have been times where I've seen kids (girls and boys both) gravitate to a more adult novel, and the parents will immediately reject it because it's "too advanced, you're never going to finish it" or "I don't want you reading that

In my house (almost) everything was available. I read Lord of the rings at 9, and if I wanted to read the gunslinger or the back issues of "scientific american" my parents wouldn't tell me no.
The only thing that was really off limits were the copies of "high times" and Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" trilogy.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I'll tell you something else, too: There have been times where I've seen kids (girls and boys both) gravitate to a more adult novel, and the parents will immediately reject it because it's "too advanced, you're never going to finish it" or "I don't want you reading that, it's too mature for you".

I don't recall ever getting in trouble or having to be told what books I couldn't read because I already had my interests set in stone, and only read something from off my parents' shelves if I got interested/bored enough since up until middle school, we went to the library quite often. So when I was in high school, one boring summer I decided to poke through the romance novels my mom had sitting on the bookshelf in the lobby. She didn't object to me reading them, but asked me to be wary about them since they weren't age-appropriate (so then why even leave them in full view outside of your room where your children can reach them?), and I went "Okay, Mom" and went back to reading. Mind you, it wasn't like I didn't know about where babies came from and the like, my mom had her pregnancy books all over the place and I'd read through them, and at least one of the books I was reading involved like a mail-order bride or something so the characters were practically married by the time halfway in the book they fucked in the barn and he accidentally groaned his dead first wife's name and the sex came to a grinding halt. See, I already had my priorities straight as a teenager.

Anyhoo, I only read like three of those novels because they were the same damn books by three different authors, but I was just also sick of reading the similar euphemisms over and over again. I can't even read "milky white breasts" (bared or just suffocating in a bodice) or Tall, Dark, and Handsome being (sexually) hungry for the love interest anymore without feeling disgruntled and the need to roll my eyes into the back of my skull. Almost swore me off of the romance genre for good. Nowadays, I only poke through a romance novel just to giggle at the bad/rushed sex scenes.

You should've stopped me, Mom, so I would've never gotten disillusioned and forever silently judge your shitty tastes.

(But then again, throughout high school I mainly read political commentary and conspiracy theories books, so eh. So guess after Twilight, I just jumped ship from YA to head straight to political books and never looked back. Because I was that bored and disillusioned with romance.)

 

[Hazel Motes]

I cannot tell you how many boys I've seen who've had that exact problem, where they're not yet developed enough to get into the more adult literature, but are being pushed by teachers and parents to read something that isn't below their reading level (Harry Potter, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, etc.).

I'll tell you something else, too: There have been times where I've seen kids (girls and boys both) gravitate to a more adult novel, and the parents will immediately reject it because it's "too advanced, you're never going to finish it" or "I don't want you reading that, it's too mature for you".

My brother (12) reads a lot more than most and it is mostly "adult" books. He finished Of Mice and Men (once a staple of English Lit classes) and thought it was brilliant mainly due to the presence of the N Word. He doesn't like Lord of The Rings and has read some Harry Potter but his books taste tend to move into from my opinions or from video games. He's trying to read The Road because of The Last of Us for instance. He wants me to get a printed copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream because of the point and click game.

There's a quote from someone, maybe Peter Hitchens, who said that just "because a book is about a child, it does not mean that it is a children’s book." I think that's the same for great children's literature. Robert Louis Stephenson's Kidnapped or Ender's Game (sue me, Scott Card is brilliant) can be read as an adult and still be worth thinking about. This I think is a problem with YA Fiction. Are many really worth reading in maturity? Are they really worth reading in immaturity?

 

[Henry Bemis]

There's a quote from someone, maybe Peter Hitchens, who said that just "because a book is about a child, it does not mean that it is a children’s book." I think that's the same for great children's literature.

"Any book is a children's book if the kid can read."

– Mitch Hedberg, stand-up philosopher

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

Seriously, I don't see boys being forced to graduate to real books earlier than their pampered, cossetted, self-absorbed female / female-presenting / soydrenched sexual basket case counterparts as a negative in any way.

Hurr durr! Girls bad!1
Herp derp! Books for teen girls bad 'cause not real books!1

Who let the braindead trog out of his cave?

 

[Mola Ram]

Hurr durr! Girls bad!1
Herp derp! Books for teen girls bad 'cause not real books!1

Who let the braindead trog out of his cave?

Lighten up, Francis.

 

[whitepumpkin]

Herp derp! Books for teen girls bad 'cause not real books!1

The only girls I have seen reading YA are 12 year old girls and 40 year old women. I think most teens prefer watching television and reading fanfiction than picking up 'The House of Whinging and Love Triangles'. And this thread alone proves a lot of these YA writers are straight up mentally stunted women who use writing fiction as a way to jerk off their egos or to relive High School as one of the cool kids. In 10 years people are still going to know the names of John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Agatha Christie, and even Nora Roberts, but Sarah J. Maas is probably going to be irrelevant by then - if she's not cancelled by her own fanbase for being white.

Or just wait for the witch hunting to begin on which YA author hasn't posted BLM support tweets. They'll be cancelled and blacklisted, even if their book was about a Black Muslim Vampire scissoring an India Trans Princess. Because all that matters in YA is identity politics. Just slap them in some vague D&D fantasy setting so you can get the pretty sparkle book cover and watch the 30 year old women squeal and show off on their instagram that they got something soooooo pretty!

Who gives a shit about story and characters. Books now are about how they reflect your LGBTA Quirky personality. Not actual substance.