Wow, part 2

[yendi]

John Clute isn't the only one moronically attacking YA lit.

Roger Sutton, editor of The Motherfucking Horn Book, for god's sake, seems to have issues of his own:

As annoying as adults who dismiss children's books as unworthy of attention can be, I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories. This is just sentimental ignorance.

It's not as bad as the Clute review (especially since there's back and forth in the discussion area), but it's still disappointing.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I don't see that remark as obviously wrongheaded. I have a lifelong devotion to SF and fantasy, but a lot of the windy and thought-free rhetoric that we use to promote and defend it definitely sets my teeth on edge. Starting with the nitwit assertion that SF is uniquely a "literature of ideas." So I can well imagine where Roger Sutton is coming from. Humbug is everywhere.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

It's dissapointing because it's Roger Sutton, but he explained himself better in the comments to that post--he said that he doesn't like it when people are proud of themselves for ONLY reading children's books. I think what he meant was that, there's merit in both, and for an adult to close themselves off from adult books as a whole was silly. Not that it was silly for adults to read and enjoy children's lit.

But it was a really poorly framed comment.

[nishar.livejournal.com]

I think they like such kids books better cause that is all they can really mentally handle.

[stevietee.livejournal.com]

This is the mindset that led the New York Times to create a Children's Bestsellers list, just to get that nasty, popular Harry Potter garbage off the real bestsellers list!

[ninjakitten]

I don't know... I don't honestly know anything about the guy, but purely from that comment what I get is, "C'mon, people -- a book being a children's book neither makes it crap nor gold, and ditto for it being an adult book. Insisting otherwise is willful ignorance and annoys me."

[yendi]

I see (and agree with) what you're saying here, and I do see some of that in some of Sutton's comments, but I also see him falling into the casual assumption that the James Pattersons of the world (the adult-aimed books that aren't more complex than the YA ones) and the William Maynes (those who write YA lit that can be appreciated by older audiences as literature) are outliers. I probably picked the wrong quote to focus on, but the casual dismissal there -- the idea that the "fellow adult" might not, based on their own sampling, be correct -- got to me.

[yendi]

*nod* And there are a lot of assumptions in what he says that the truly good and literary works in YA are rare beasts. I find that idea frustrating, at best (that said, the comment threads did lead to some great discussion).

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Understandably.