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3/7/14 23:32![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyMy frustration with arguments about the literary value of YA is mostly that usually the most highbrow YA book that comes up in the discussion as a thing people have read is "The Fault In Our Stars." And -- it's kind of silly to pretend that there's some contest to read the most highbrow books possible, right, instead of reading what makes you happy (or gives you whatever you want from a book at any given point in time), but as somebody who really likes good sentences, and likes a lot of things that are deemed by the literary establishment to be "good literature," I can't help but feel like a lot of authors who are doing great work get erased.
There was some discussion over at the "Someday My Printz Will Come" blog when TFIOS didn't win a Printz award or honor, and there were lots of people who thought it should have won something and there were lots of people who thought it was right that it didn't -- because it was too sentimental, because the arc with the author character wasn't handled well, whatever. I liked it well enough, but I had to give "Code Name Verity" and "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" an edge in the plot-construction department and the prose department, respectively. TFIOS is not the beginning and the end of "literary" YA, and if you think it is, I WILL GIVE YOU A READING LIST.
It's a complicated thing to talk about because as a reader and as a librarian, I firmly believe in reading the things that you want to read for whatever reasons you have, and in not shaming people for their reading choices. But as a writer, I think it's necessary for me to hang on to my own not-objective sense that some things are better than other things -- that I have some sense of what craftsmanship looks like, what carefulness looks like, what creativity looks like. And there are so many YA books that I didn't read because they were easy, because they were fun, because they were escapist, whatever. I read them because they pricked up my sense of "this is what a really good book looks like."
There was some discussion over at the "Someday My Printz Will Come" blog when TFIOS didn't win a Printz award or honor, and there were lots of people who thought it should have won something and there were lots of people who thought it was right that it didn't -- because it was too sentimental, because the arc with the author character wasn't handled well, whatever. I liked it well enough, but I had to give "Code Name Verity" and "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" an edge in the plot-construction department and the prose department, respectively. TFIOS is not the beginning and the end of "literary" YA, and if you think it is, I WILL GIVE YOU A READING LIST.
It's a complicated thing to talk about because as a reader and as a librarian, I firmly believe in reading the things that you want to read for whatever reasons you have, and in not shaming people for their reading choices. But as a writer, I think it's necessary for me to hang on to my own not-objective sense that some things are better than other things -- that I have some sense of what craftsmanship looks like, what carefulness looks like, what creativity looks like. And there are so many YA books that I didn't read because they were easy, because they were fun, because they were escapist, whatever. I read them because they pricked up my sense of "this is what a really good book looks like."
Well...
4/7/14 09:52 (UTC)* touching on deep topics that raise questions for the reader
* teaching how to handle key literary techniques.
The Hobbit presents a magnificent argument on the awful waste of war, and it demonstrates how much higher you can crank the tension in a hurt/comfort story without burning out your characters or readers. It's usually billed at YA or even children's literature, yet it's easily deeper than most of what's written for adults.