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It’s been an amazing first week here at Common Novel, and we’re so happy that you were all able to stop by. We’ll be picking up again next week, when you can look forward to a Father’s Day gift-guide, a piece discussing why you should care about young adult fiction, and our second Date Night article.
In the meantime, here are a few links we’ve been reading and thinking about this week. |
Photo Credit: Christian Mehlführer
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Ruth Graham’s piece over at Slate on why adults should be “embarrassed” to read young adult fiction raised a few hackles around here (unsurprisingly). There are a lot of eye-roll inducing statements in here—so many that it’s fairly obvious Graham herself has not read deeply (or even shallowly) in the genre—but a few stand out as particularly cringe-worthy. For example:
Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this. I know, I know: Live and let read. Far be it from me to disrupt the “everyone should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like” ethos of our era. There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. And if people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.
There are at least two major flaws in this argument (aside from its irritating pretentiousness—one imagines Graham also prefers to read Goethe in the original German). First, adult readers are perfectly capable of reading both young adult and literary fiction simultaneously and critically (indeed, I’m doing so right now: reading Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series has not stopped me from enjoying Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World—or from “getting things” out of both). Second, and perhaps more importantly, creating a dichotomy that places “maudlin teen dramas” on one side and “great adult literature” on the other erases both the complexity of young adult fiction and the major, major problems with the texts that have been designated “great literature.” Of course there are wonderful books in this “great” group—on the other hand, the make-up of the category also reflects extreme biases. How many female authors, for example, are included in the club? What about realistically written female protagonists?
In short: huffy sigh.
In short: huffy sigh.
Disney / Via http://thelustykrab.tumblr.com/
For those of you who have been following the Amazon-Hachette fight, Steven Colbert came out swinging against Amazon on Wednesday night.
George R.R. Martin will write one bajillion gazillion Game of Thrones books; live forever.
Richard Dawkins hates fairy tales.
At least one of Harvard’s “human skin books,” pleasingly titled “On the Destiny of the Human Soul,” is actually bound in human skin.
The time of The Fifth Element is now.
And because I’m still irritated over that stupid Slate article, here’s my favorite sloth video—guaranteed to lower one’s blood pressure.
Richard Dawkins hates fairy tales.
At least one of Harvard’s “human skin books,” pleasingly titled “On the Destiny of the Human Soul,” is actually bound in human skin.
The time of The Fifth Element is now.
And because I’m still irritated over that stupid Slate article, here’s my favorite sloth video—guaranteed to lower one’s blood pressure.
Much better.
What are you going to be reading this weekend? I’ll be finishing the sixth Vampire Academy book (I haven’t read a series this crack-like since The Hunger Games—I’ve read five books in two days) and starting Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. Rachel is planning on reading Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, possibly just to spite Ruth Graham.
See you next week!
What are you going to be reading this weekend? I’ll be finishing the sixth Vampire Academy book (I haven’t read a series this crack-like since The Hunger Games—I’ve read five books in two days) and starting Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See. Rachel is planning on reading Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, possibly just to spite Ruth Graham.
See you next week!
By Diana Christine Biller
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