My YA IQ just went up.
It’s been decades since I read Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic “Dune.” I’m old enough, however, to have not been a youth when I read it, nor did I read it because it was aimed at youths.
I read it because I liked science fiction.
So when did Dune become a YA novel?
That’s pretty much the question I had after reading NPR’s 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels. I’ve never heard of most of the novels listed. But the ones I have read left me asking the same question: How is this a YA novel? Here’s a few of the titles I was surprised to find on the list:
- Dune
- The Hobbit
- The Lord of the Rings
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Something Wicked This Way Comes
- Fahrenheit 451
- Lord of the Flies
- Flowers for Algernon
According to the American Library Association, Young Adult Literature (YA) is anything someone between the ages of 12-18 chooses to read — which leaves the door open for just about anything to become YA. However, the most common definitions of YA fiction involves the age of the lead character and their quest toward adulthood.
Which, I guess, qualifies Dune as YA fiction.
And bunches of other books.
At one time, the squishyness of the label bugged me. Heck, even those who buy, publish, and write YA differ in how they define it. For one, we’re not talking about genre, because YA contains multiple genres. We’re talking category. And with the proliferation of darker themes — like sex, language, drug use, and despair — YA can’t be said to be less graphic, more youth-friendly. Furthermore, some novels now classified as YA are as complex and literary as anything in the adult market (or is it that some adult novels are as simple or poorly written as kid stuff?). Then you’ve got the fact that as many adults read YA as teens. Point being, YA is a really big, rather nebulous, category.
And lists like the one above do more to muddle the definition of YA than clarify it.
The upside of all this is that my YA IQ has skyrocketed!
I mean, if The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and Something Wicked This Way Comes are now YA, then I’m a certified YA expert. If Dune is now a YA novel, I’m suddenly a lot more hip and youthful than I once thought.
Heck, in another 20 years, half of what’s written will probably be considered YA. Which, in that case, would make the entire category moot.
These lists make YA authors itch, if not outright bang their heads on the desks in frustration. Yes, Dune is read and enjoyed by a lot of teens and it does involve the story of a teenaged boy growing up. But I would put David Eddings’ Belgariad in the YA category a long time before I put Dune there. Dune is far more concerned with the machinations and concerns of its adult characters than it is about Paul Atreides’ adolescence, and despite being superficially a “coming of age novel” it really shares very little of the sensibilities of YA.
The really sad thing is that I’m pretty sure a lot of the books in the above list would never have got published in this present marketplace. Publishers would lament that they were great stories but didn’t fit into any of their traditional marketing categories and it would be very hard for such books to find their proper audience. “So I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass on this one, Mr. Tolkien, but we wish you all the best and hope you’ll share with us anything you write in future.”
I guess you have to keep in mind that when books like The Hobbit were written, there was no official YA classification like there is today in literature. And many early books that may be considered YA were more interested in telling stories where the main character reflects on past events in a nostalgic manner, whereas today you have all manner of storytelling devices for a YA audience, but most often involving characters of the age group that are reading the stories. How a book like Dune became of interest to YA readers I’m not sure, but I WILL say that I picked up that book myself as a teen, so there must’ve been something that appealed to teens in the book. Dune was clearly written for an adult audience. I’m thinking that since there was no YA shelf to pull books from, teens who wanted something a little more complex would go to the adult bookshelf, and that’s how these early YA favorites were found.
Mike, I don’t believe those authors intentionally wrote stories for children.
I read all those novels above between the time I was twelve and the time I was fourteen. But that was probably because there wasn’t really a YA category when I was a kid. We simply read whatever we wanted.
Also, some of those books were assigned reading in high school. That’s what teachers assigned then. Now they are assigning The Hunger Games.
It’s a different world. I agree with RJ Anderson. Those books on the list were read by teens, but they wouldn’t be published today as YA novels.
Well, Tolkien intentionally wrote The Hobbit for his children, so if it belongs in any category it should really be the old-fashioned term “juvenile” or what we would today call “middle grade”.
But yes, there was no real YA category until 10-15 years ago. When I was growing up, the closest thing to today’s YA were Judy Blume and Lurlene McDaniel, and for kids who weren’t interested in teen “problem novels” in quasi-realistic contemporary settings, there was nothing between Narnia and the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Which made it frustrating for young readers like myself who longed for more mature tales but dear merciful heavens, please not THAT kind of mature, ew.
ew, indeed. I began reading adult novels in the fifth grade, and I never stopped reading YA, or picture books for that matter. This discussion is helping me understand some of the distinctions in categories.
I vividly remember simultaneously chowing down on “Dune” and thin mint Girl Scout cookies when I was in high school years ago. It was a marathon event because the book was that good (the cookies were awesome, too). I had never heard of YA books at the time — I just read what interested me. In my thinking, there were two types of books: little kid books (lots of pictures, simple vocabulary, short chapters) and grown-up books (no pictures, challenging vocabulary, long chapters). When you reached a certain age — usually 12-13 — you starting making the switch (consciously or unconsciously).
Nowadays, I choose my books the same way — I just read what interests me. Some of it happens to be considered YA. A few years ago I read “The Book Thief”, an excellent book with some mature emotional, social, and historical themes, a book I don’t think anyone under high school age should read. And yet, I am discovering that this books is being marketed as a “kids’ book”. Astonishing. I am also knee-deep in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” with plans to read the full series (I’ve already read “The Hobbit” twice). It would never have occurred to me to call these Tolkien books YA, though certainly that age group could read and enjoy them as well as a middle-aged reader.
It used to be “you’re only as young as you feel.” Maybe it should be updated to “you’re only as young as the books you read.”
R.J. Anderson has beaten me to the punch on pretty much all I would say in answer to this :). I agree wholeheartedly.
I will add this: any real reader or writer of YA knows YA when they see it. We may disagree on how to define the differences, but we recognize them. It’s not just something that an age group will read, much less books that are *assigned* reading in high school. (I had to read The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby in high school, but they are NOT even close to YA.) It has to do with the way the main character sees and interprets the world, and how they interact with it. I’ve read some great articles online that capture that essence, as well as what the difference between YA and MG is.
In all honesty, I haven’t actually read Dune, nor Flowers for Algernon, but the others I have, and of those the only one I could see as YA is Lord of the Flies, and I won’t swear to that because it’s been a long time since I read it. Even To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t YA because it’s told with an adult’s perspective–as though the adult is looking back on the experience and you feel their present knowledge seeping through. To be truly YA, imho, a book needs to be presented in the perspective of the teen as they experience the story, not looking back on it later.
There’s a difference between YA and what’s assigned to teens in a high school English class. Dune is the latter, and many of those are only there because they are common reading list bait. “A Flower for Algernon” is virtually never read outside of high school English, and you can tell from the famous authors there that the “short” books, like Fahrenheit 451 and A Hitchhiker’s Guide are still popular. Dune is a strong enough book to ensnare a teen, but it’s surprising it made the list.
Adult novels though aren’t strangers to YA reading, even trashy ones. V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic comes to mind; that pretty much was default reading for many young women in the 80s. That was Twilight before Twilight.
The list is somewhat discouraging though. Stripping out the obvious reading list stuff, it’s so blatantly targeted to girls that you wonder if boys even read these days.
There are a lot of books that I consider all-time favorites that are now in the library’s YA section. Although I read them when I was a teen, I never considered them teen stories.
I suspect that the YA category (and those who write for it) are as frustrated about the labeling as many of us writing spec fic from a Christian worldview. We don’t really want to be stuck in the box labeled “Christian books” — the true audience for our story is much wider than that. Such a label artificially limits our reach.
People ask me what I write, who I write for, and I still don’t have a good answer. I’m a reader who never respected the bounds of category. As a kid I read adult stories. Now as an adult, my reading diet includes a good number of “YA” titles. I expect that others like myself will do the same. And since I’m writing what I like to read, I expect it to defy such labels.
And yet, labels seem nearly unavoidable. I’m keenly interested in discussing how the current publishing frontier might open up some new ways of categorizing books and getting them into the hands of readers who might enjoy them.
For example, I really wonder: Why not have the same story branded two different ways? Different title, different cover, different cover copy. Maybe even a different pseudonym. Put the book in the Christian spec fic market and in the general spec fic market. Have a little note in the book description on Amazon, “Previously published as ‘Other Title'” just so people don’t buy it twice on accident.
I’ve even wondered about taking the same story and doing different versions. One sanitized version (cut out details or scenes that might offend more sensitive Christians) and one geared towards those who aren’t sensitive to those things. Like those churches who offer both wine and grape juice in their communion service. Follow your own conscience.
The multiple branding thing has happened in the past with romance titles, and not infrequently. It was popular for awhile but even with the small print “previously published as” there were still enough customers irked by “hey! I read this 10 years ago” to kind of chill the market on that particular strategy.
As far as having an “airplane version” of a book I can see a few different arguments:
1. Why can’t you just write the story without the objectionable content?
2. They don’t want to support an author who does write “that type” of thing. I have not a few friends who write for the general market AND the Christian-targeted market. They have to universally publish their CBA fic under a pseudonym otherwise the focus groups show that the bulk of the CBA audience won’t purchase their books.
3. You’re splitting your brand, incurring larger print costs for a smaller return , all to please a demographic that won’t be pleased at all once they find out that you do traffic in more inclusionary work.
It’s a rebranding of backlists designed to pull in readers who balk at anything non-YA. The designation “YA” was so associated by newcomers and light-readers with “fun” books like Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Hunger Games that there are many post-35 women who avidly read anything with “YA” labels even as they eschew anything else out of a sense of fear or intimidation.
I have one acquaintance who decided after reading Hunger Games that she was now “really into reading” and who likes YA because “it’s fun and not too hard.” (This is a person with multiple post-high school degrees.)
So publishers and booksellers are overeager to redefine anything as YA if it remotely breaths any of the YA air. This irks me because I don’t think we should have to bribe people to read books–whether with refrigerator magnets or cutesy covers with the actors from the movie or a recategorisation to something less daunting than “Science Fiction.”
But I’m an idealist used to being disappointed.
*grin* I hear ya, Katherine. We shouldn’t have to bribe people to read.
Then again, what was the purpose of books? To communicate information, to entertain with a story.
Many people today would just as soon watch a movie or documentary. I suspect that’s not going to change, even though there is already evidence supporting the idea that reading is better exercise for your brain. And in a less scientific way it has been discussed how reading a book creates a fresh and unique story in the mind of the reader every single time — what I experience reading the same book is different than what you do. Also, what I experience reading the same book 20 years ago is different than what I experience reading it today.
I think that makes reading a unique and valuable experience. But I don’t know that society at large will agree, and we may yet see digital things dominate and push reading away a little more each decade.
What I don’t get is why our society considers reading to be so blasted important. Who cares if teenagers like to read or not? There are other, probably more important, activities for teens to become skilled at. So I guess I don’t get the YA book label at all. It’s not like the label is a content filter. If a book is good, then it should appeal to a wide age span of people who enjoy reading. We collectively raise children who have no survival skills, but, yay! they can read books.
If you can read you can learn survival skills.
Reading helps people think.People who can’t read don’t have the world open to them in the way people who read have. If you can read you can go to China while sitting in your living room. You can understand what others have thought before you. You can build on the groundwork they’ve laid.
If you can’t read, your world is very small.
That’s a lie. It’s virtual reality w/o the fancy suit. You aren’t in China when you’re sitting in your bedroom in Whateverville USA. You think you are, but it’s a lie. You don’t know what China is truly like if you don’t go there. If you can’t cook food, sew clothes, build houses, fix cars, fly planes, fight fires, [fill in the blank] your world is very small. Physical reality is MUCH larger than book reality.
*grin* What a great philosophical spin-off discussion!
Jill, I think you oughta write a book that illustrates the value of real-life skills over reading. (And yes, I realize the irony of the suggestion.)
Physical reality may be larger than book reality, but most kids (and even most adults) have constraints that limit their physical reality. Books allow them to expand beyond those limits. If I want to learn to can vegetables from my garden, build a house, sew my clothes, fix my car, and don’t have anybody available to teach me, I could learn from books. Most things I know how to do I learned by reading.
Our society has certainly swung the pendulum a bit further to the “lacking real-life survival skills” side than probably any other time in history. (Mostly because reading and writing ARE the survival skills of the modern business world.) Yet I wouldn’t dismiss reading as less important or not important. Keep the reading and get the people back to real hands-on skills both.
And now I’ll pull the God card: God used the written Word for His message for a reason. God thinks reading is important, too. Heh. 😉
I agree and I disagree. I think books do give you the opportunity to expand your horizons and broaden your knowledge.
But I don’t think they have any more intrinsic value or inherent worth than other pursuits. Book-elitism makes me mad. I love to read. I think books are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually better than sliced bread because I don’t like sliced bread. But whatever.
But that’s my taste. Just like how I really enjoy omelettes but I’m not going to go around telling people that omelettes are better than every other food and you’re a better person if you eat omelettes instead of corn flakes. They both have things to recommend them.
And frankly, I’ve seen a lot of people who read, but what they read is of less use than if they were to watch, say, a Ken Burns documentary on TV. It is once again eleventing the medium over the content. Is it better to read _The Billionaire’s Buxom Bride_ than to watch Frontline on PBS? Is it better to read a book written for and aimed at fourth graders than to go outside and work in your garden?
Not to mention the fact that many people don’t read broadly at all. They select books that only reinforce their preconceived notions so they only see China as a Godless communist hole of evil than understanding that it is a complex nation with real people who need to eat just as badly as Americans do.
So yes, I agree with you Jill. But I also disagree in that I think you CAN learn from books. I taught myself to knit from a book. I taught myself to cook many new things from a book. I taught myself advanced geometry through a book, etc. I’m an autodidact. I think books are magic, literacy is God’s second greatest gift to us after Grace. But if we’re hiding in books we aren’t presenting Grace to the world.
Katherine, you probably already know that I’m book person who learns from books. But some people just don’t like reading. They should–obviously!–learn to read. There is no excuse for being illiterate in this society. Why not encourage people who would rather do than read to learn valuable hands-on, survival skills? If a boy absolutely hates book study and wants to be a mechanic, what is wrong with that? He can’t make a living reading about mechanics in books, but he can make a living as an active working mechanic. You can fill in the mechanic space with inventor or farmer or whatever. That’s all I meant in my original comment. Reading is fun and informative, but it isn’t the end-all and be-all of life in the modern world. The ONLY reason why I bring this up in a YA discussion is for the blatant marketing to kids who would normally not want to spend time reading. That would be fine as a marketing campaign (as in marketing special cigarettes to women, for example), except that it’s also pushed by the education system and librarians and parents. It’s almost become a religion.
So I guess we agree. We seem to be saying the same thing with different words.
Yep, me too. Reading as a religion is stupido.
I’m surprised to find such a literalist here at Mike’s site. Yikes, Jill.
It wasn’t really a lie. I was taking literary license and using metaphorical speech. You’re a writer. And you’re smart. You understand that all speech is not to be interpreted literally.
So…do you have a problem with me that we need to work out?
Of course I’m not in China when I’m reading about it. But I’m much more in China than the people who have never read about it.
I have two kids, and neither of them are readers. They would much rather watch movies than read. And, neither of them are going to college. I’m fine with that.
But I do wish they loved reading, because I believe that readers have better imaginations and have better critical thinking skills than nonreaders. They have better vocabularies and can think bigger thoughts, too, as well as having access to past knowledge that nonreaders don’t have.
No, no, I don’t have a problem with you at all. I call it a lie because, while valuable info can be gathered from books, it isn’t the same as living what you’re reading about. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh. I was using strong language to demonstrate my level of feeling about the subject. I feel very strongly that reading is practically worshipped in our culture, and it comes at the expense of people who are clever and adventurous but who don’t like to sit and read.
You’re overestimating the amount of physical choice a person has. People read because they can’t feasibly do those things; even something as simple as owning or riding a horse can be out of reach of many people due to cost. If you don’t go for a decent paying four year degree, reading is all you are going to get; you can’t go to China on a salary of $25k a year and no paid vacation time.
The guys I know that are unskilled and don’t read much just do things like golf, own boats, watch TV, play Xbox, or spend money on cars or motorcycles. They don’t own planes because the cost is tremendous and the requirements are steep, and they don’t fight fires because it is life-threatening, requires a huge level of physical fitness, and is mostly volunteer work. It’s not like it’s a particularly wide slice of physical reality that most of us can realistically do.
You’re being obtuse. I was simply talking about having skills. People used to have a different skill set than people have today. Pa in the Little House books knew how to protect his house when a fire swept the prairie. He had to know how because there wasn’t a fire station nearby. Some skills are life skills (growing food, sewing clothes). Some are just things that people dream of doing. If you want to do something badly enough, you figure out how to make it work. If you want to read something, you buy a book. I know a poor farmer who builds and flies his own air planes because that’s what he loves. He could have settled for reading about planes in books, but he’s not a reader. He’s a doer. And why is there something wrong with that? The school system seems disproportionately tipped toward favoring readers. Why is that? That question, by the way, is a cue for one of your favorite subjects.
That’s a romantic version of the past. You don’t need to grow food to feed yourself, and that’s great, because farming when your life depends on it really, really sucks. You can learn to repair goods, but that made sense when most electronics or things were very costly and rare. A lot of those life skills have degraded to hobbies or things you learn in case you are afraid of the zombie apocalypse.
Also no cue on that. I kind of think the reverse, that it’s insulting to assume all boys are those little Tom Sawyers who don’t cotton to no booklarnin’ from school marms and need to run around for eight hours a day, so we pull them from bad public school. A good formal education with focus on reading, math, science, and history is the basis on which you do anything, and you really do need to sit still and listen for that. Denying boys it because of their gender is pretty insidious.
That people had a different set of skills in the past is NOT a romantic notion. Yes, the Little House books are romanticized, but they are still autobiographical and often very detailed in the description of what they did to make their lives work. But that just proves my point–reading about skills isn’t the same as accomplishing them. Many of those basic survival skills pioneers used have been lost. More obtuseness about growing food. Somebody has to grow food and raise animals. That is why we can buy it in the store. It is just another example of a skill. Food acquisition, in fact, is probably the most important skill to have.
I never said that boys should not be forced to do book learning. In fact, I never mentioned boys. I knew that question would cue the exact kind of response you just gave. And, surprise, it did! My point–my only point in my original comment was that reading is overrated, often to the point of religious devotion. Some people (I never specified boys*) are wired to be doers, so why try to push them to read if they don’t enjoy it?
*I guess I did mention a boy in connection with being a mechanic, but that actually sprang from a real life, ongoing saga of a friend who would rather do something manual like mechanics, but his mom wants him to get a college degree. I know some girls like that too.
Well, I was trying to understand what you were cuing, and a LOT of people make the “boys are not suited for school” argument. This is a not inconsequential reason why parents pull boys out of public school, because boys are often thought of as doers over readers. For example, Penelope Trunk:
http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/01/08/boys-stink-at-school-and-it-doesnt-even-matter/
It’s a common meme, and given my views many would expect me to agree with it. There’s many more posts like this; just google “school fails boys” to see a few. the “doer” mindset over reading I think disproportionately is targeted at men; Peter Thiel even offered a start-up fund for tech entrepreneurs if they dropped out of college right away to work. Not many people tell young women that they should drop out of school or be pulled from it to just “do” nursing, hairdressing, or other vocational trades.
I need to explain “romantic” better. It’s not romantic to assume that they had those skills. It’s romantic to think those skills have any real use in modern society, or are worth focusing over reading. It’s like bewailing the loss of blacksmiths. It’s just as important to forge your own tools to harvest your own food, but today it’s a hobby, a boutique business, or something you do waiting for the apocalypse in your shack off the grid.
I still think it’s important for teens to read. Even if you are a doer, you lose a lot by not reading. If anything, I’m more worried about the lack of doers caused by non-reading forms of entertainment like video games and television.
I find that I can’t disagree w/ your last statement. I just don’t see how food acquisition, such as growing it or hunting it, could not have relevance in modern society. It’s an ever-present necessity that we take for granted. In my locale, it hasn’t been fifty years since people still traded for food, grew subsistence gardens, and hunted rabbits to feed their children (bigger animals if they could get it).
p.s. I apologize about the cue. I was intentionally pushing your buttons. I’m in general agreement that schools write off boys, and I don’t like it anymore than you do.
It’s okay, I know it’s my berserk button.
I guess part of this is regional. I live up north in New England, and we simply don’t have that food gathering culture. You can grow food, but it’s always going to be more costly than gardening it, and squirrels are cute things that live in our trees, not added protein. City/suburb vs rural divide I guess.
Actually they aren’t autobiographical. They were ghostwritten by Rose Wilder Lane.
It’s my understanding that only the last one was ghostwritten by Rose Wilder Lane (The Last Four Years).
Not according to many current sources.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0826210155/ref=mw_dp_mdsc?dsc=1
Actually that’s exactly backward. First Four Years was the only one NOT “edited” (ie. ghost-written) by Rose.
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/book-review-the-ghost-of-the-little-house-a-life-of-rose-wilder-lane-by-william-holtz#axzz2dE4Vl4Fr
I’m one of those readers that never really paid attention to age labels on books except in an effort to find books that were more challenging. I was eight when I read my first young adult and adult books, even though I still read kids books, and, when I was ten or eleven, I read The Fellowship of the Ring, Perelandra, and Out of the Silent Planet with much pleasure. Now that I’m an adult, I still find myself seeking out adult, YA , and middle grade books on a regular basis. Book have always just been books to me, and I’ve got a pretty fun mix of things on my shelves (although with a bias towards fantasy and science fiction).
That said, I also like learning about abstract things like book genres, and so I’ve been learning a lot about how things like YA or New Adult differ from everything else and each other, the pros and cons of subgenres and crossovers, and what the purpose of genre even is. With all that in mind:
Dune as a YA novel? Nope, not how I’d categorize it. But I wouldn’t mean that to say that it can’t be on a list of the best teen fiction, either.