It’s 2022, and Apparently People Are Still Bashing Adults Who Read YA (Here Are All the Things They Get Wrong)

Introduction

On January 28, Beth @BooksNest tweeted that someone doesn’t need to read the classics to be a “reader” and the replies were . . . interesting. For some reason, many of the replies were not even about classics and why one should read them (hey, I like classics myself!) but about why YA books are garbage and adults who read them are stupid and juvenile, possibly creepy. You know, the usual insults people have been throwing at adult YA readers for at least the past 10 years.

This “debate” has been going on for so long, in fact, that a couple years ago, Krysta published a post here at Pages Unbound arguing that it isn’t even much of a debate anymore, that, sure, some people will always be around to hate on YA and its readers and the topic is always good for clicks for mainstream media, but the general consensus, especially in the online book community, is that YA books are valid book and no one cares if you read them.

Personally, I find the people who complain about YA laughable because, frankly, they tend to not even know what they’re talking about. Here are some things that they seem not to know:

People Can Read More Than One Type of Book

This is apparently news to a lot of people, but readers can read more than one kind of book. Reading YA does not mean a reader (whether a teen, an adult, or a child) does not read other age categories and genres. Reading YA does not mean someone has not ALSO read the classics. Or adult contemporary. Or whatever type of book is supposedly “better” than YA.

I have a master’s in English literature, and I would laugh my head off at someone who told me I wasn’t “well read” because they saw I was reading or had reviewed a YA book. It’s very possible I’ve read more classics than they have.

Many YA Books Were Originally Written “for” Adults

YA is just a marketing category. While many authors are very thoughtful about writing for and appealing to a teen audience, other authors write a book they personally find interesting, and then their agent/editor decides it should be marketed either as adult or YA. I remember going to a talk by Julianna Baggott where she said she’d written Pure as a adult book but was told by her publisher it would do better marketed as YA.

The YA Market Isn’t Twilight and The Hunger Games

Any time someone says YA books are bad, there is at least a 50% chance they are going to bring up Twilight or The Hunger Games as their example. One could debate whether these two books are bad or not, but an indisputable fact is that they were published over a decade ago, and anyone who can’t name a more recent YA book clearly has no idea what they are even talking about. (And I would suspect half of them didn’t read Twilight or The Hunger Games when they came out either; they just read about them in the media.)

Popular Books Written by Women Aren’t All YA

Related to people who bash YA not even knowing what YA is, I have seen many of them giving examples of “trash YA books” that are, uh, not YA books. Think books like Circe, The Poppy War, A Court of Mist and Fury, The Night Circus, The Bear and the Nightingale, etc. Again, I suspect most of these people have not even read these books; they see a popular book by a woman and liked by many women, and apparently that makes it YA, and that makes it bad. But it’s absurd to mock people for “not reading adult books” when the books they are reading are literally adult books.

People Can Read What They Want

The most obvious point: People can read whatever they want, and it’s not really a commentary on whether they’re smart or “able to handle” the types of books they’re not reading.