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

[marveen.livejournal.com]

I have not read Mr. Stein himself.

I did read the rebuttal, and was left agape at this quote from Stein:

Books are one of our few chances to learn.

Few? Few?

Clearly [extrapolating here a little] Mr. Stein trundles down the same staircase every morning, eats the same cold cereal, and adjusts his tie the same way before setting out to catch the same bus on the same street while wearing the same overcoat.

Learning nothing, staring into empty space, using the same tools to do the same tasks every day until ennui so overwhelms him that even dreary and nihilistic "adult" literature seems attractive by comparison.

I'm sorry for such an existence...

This week alone I learned that silk neps won't work with cat-brush handcards, that even a drop of water in a candle mold will sink straight to the bottom and soak the wick, that Thermos makes cold-only thermoses (thermi?) these days, that the housebrand pepperjack cheese at Fred Meyer's is really quite good, that Hy-Top Honey Nut Toasted O's are better than the name brand, and that heavy paper makes excellent "sub-folders" for organizing one's financial documents. Oh yes, and bleach will whiten yellowed Tupperware right up.

Small discoveries in everyday life. Each and every one without opening a book...."adult" or otherwise. My precious reading time is spent in other ways.

Really, what does he propose to learn that would not be better lessoned by actually getting out and DOING things?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

*applauds*