Right now everybody's talking about some guy I never heard of

[conuly]

who thinks that reading YA fiction is a terrible thing for anybody, especially adults, to do.

Whatever. If you feel you MUST dignify that sort of thing with a response, there's no need to waste your time and energy coming up with something novel. As always, the old quote from C. S. Lewis will more than suffice, and then you can spend your time doing something more productive than stating the obvious, like combing your hair or picking your nose.

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

It's no less true today than it was on the day it was written. Why reinvent the wheel? This guy, whoever he is, isn't worth the time.

Comments

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Lewis is missing one point, though I'm not sure how much it relates to choice of fiction. He was a man. Men are assumed to be adult. Women get infantilised: we're supposed to think that "cute" is a compliment, we're supposed to want to look younger than we are, not older, we get referred to as "girls" as if being immature was attractive. So yes, being regarded as adult by other adults isn't a battle that stops on your 18th birthday as it should, it's one we have to keep on fighting.