I remember asking my 8th grade english teacher if she got tired of reading young adult books. She said no, good books are good no matter the age range. Now I'm a couple decades older and 100% agree.
I'll never understand the culture of belittling YA fiction, people reject the genre wholesale and it drives me crazy
I think my challenge is that it isn’t a genre, it’s a demographic. It’s somewhat insulting to young adults to believe the only novels they should consume conform to the genre as you’ve said.
Good books are good books. I’d rather they start slapping PG-13 on books instead of designing an entire YA “genre”.
Maybe calling it a genre modifier or medium would be more accurate but that's semantics.
It's not called YA because young adults should only read YA, more like it makes a good stepping stone for young adults to get into reading.
I dont belittle the genre, I like a lot of YA books actually, I belittle the people that in their 30s still only read YA and fanfiction and refuse to branch out while simultaneously thinking that they are well read.
I totally get what you're saying, but at the same time most people these days just don't read for pleasure whatsoever. With that context I would prefer people only read YA than not read at all. I'm not here to gate keep reading you know, there's endless phenomenal YA books out there.
I find it that fascinating that there are actual people being appalled when hearing a swearword. Reading is even… further. It's insane, why would that be bad in any way?
Sex scene is something I find prude but at least can somewhat understand when someone just doesn't like very sexual stuff or so (but I mean, that is just important for the plot in most cases as well)!
To some extent I can understand it, it's very normal to have both of those things just for the sake of it in today's media, to that guy it might look even more rampant than to you and I.
Similarly, I personally like manga/anime but kinda hate how fanservice gets inserted with little to no consideration on how it affects a scene (and it seems to happen in most works aimed at a male demographic, can't speak for all genres), if I want to see some actual skin I can always look up porn.
There's definitely some works that have unnecessary sex scenes; it's more obvious in movies, though. A lot of the time, the entire romance subplot is utterly unnecessary, and sometimes horribly executed on top of that. Remember The Hobbit, now imagine they also had a sex scene!
In at least a few cases, the "unnecessary" sex scene is necessary to get the film the rating that the director feels is appropriate for the film, because violence and adult themes don't always get the rating they probably should and the MPAA is a bunch of prudes about sex.
Well, if a scene is just unnecessary and out of place, that's bad, but I mean, kind of every unnecessary scene(?) is. Idk, I just know many instances of sex scenes that I'd consider rather important for the plot (e.g. in Black Mirror), and just erasing them would make the art worse.
That would feel weird in Hobbit because it's a story he wrote for his kid. At the same time, I find George RR Martin's critique of that aspect of LOTR valid. He said something along the lines of "It's a neat world, but it doesn't feel real. Can you imagine dwarves having sex?" Meanwhile, due to its grit, the GoT world feels very believable. Humans are messy, primal creatures at the core.
There's works with sex scenes that make sense, and works where they don't. A Song Of Ice And Fire is definitely an example of the former. On top of that, both the books and the TV show had tons of time, which is in stark contrast to most movies and many shorter books.
Heard the hungry caterpillar was good and had no swears. Unfortunately it showed virtue in greed so I had to bury it with the others.
The caterpillar is an allegory for man’s metamorphis. It shows how once we shed our childish desires such as greed, that we can be reborn as truly beautiful beings free to fly away from our worldly connections.
i'll stand by the fact that one of my favourite books of all time is the phantom tollbooth. the best children's content is something that can also be enjoyed by adults.
I thought they meant The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I read some of his books as a teenager. Looking back they felt weird. I think I just thought everything was deep back then.
Looking back The Zahir definitely felt like cuckold smut though. The main character's wife leaves him for another man and he has to go on a spiritual journey to find her. The spiritual guide is the man she left him for. At some point he talks about having fantasized about his wife with other men. In the end when they are reunited she is pregnant. Just a very odd book looking back.
