It’s #IReadYA week this week, and I’ve read a lot of
tweets and posts about the general awesomeness of the YA genre, and that’s not
surprising. Actually, what is surprising: given the brilliance of so many YA
works, how is it that any of us still need to defend or explain YA—to anyone?
I write YA, but I’m also an English teacher; my students
and I talk a lot about what constitutes a “serious” work of literature. On the
AP Lit exam, there’s an “open” question—the third free response essay, which
gives a fairly broad prompt, then suggests a list of works. Test-takers are
directed to select one of these books OR “a work of similar literary merit.” We
teachers learn in our training that more recent writers, and mostYA writers,
are not considered by College Board to be of literary merit. This means, for example, that J.K.
Rowling is not on the list. I always tell my students that she will be—if nothing else, age grants a
work that status (consider a writer like Alexandre Dumas, whose work was not
regarded as Serious Literature in its own time, but today, it is).
How
different, really, are The Catcher in the
Rye and Looking for Alaska in
terms of story and emotional resonance—and quality of writing? Yet my students
can write about one on the AP exam, but not the other.
Who decides what’s “serious” literature anyway?--is one
question my students always ask, and it’s a good one. Time is definitely part
of the equation, but if we just look at books released in the past fifteen
years, there’s definitely another layer of prejudice at work. Genre, for one:
books set in the real world are often automatically viewed as more serious or
literary. And the target audience is definitely another factor. Many adults
dismiss books written for kids. Of course, many more do not. I have an annual pass to Universal Studios and I never get
through the day without running into adults in full Harry Potter regalia. Maybe
most YA is just too darn much fun for some folks?
There will always be people out there deciding what’s
highbrow, what’s fancy, and what’s Serious Literature. And to me that’s part of
what #IReadYA week is all about. It’s a time for those of us who get it—that it
really doesn’t matter where a book is
shelved—to share our love of not just YA but reading in general. I hope that
someday we won't really need the hashtags anymore: #WeNeedDiverseBooks will be
redundant, because we’ll already have loads of them. And like all good book
nerds, I dream of a world when every day is simply #IRead day.
Nice.
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