Every now and again, someone writes something so boneheaded, so hurtful, that you have to wonder if even commenting on it is giving it too much credit. Fortunately, one of the upsides of not yet having a readership is that I don’t have to concern myself with the possibility that I might send traffic anyone’s way. Nevertheless… ugh, fine, Ruth Graham at Slate thinks you should be embarrassed if you are an adult who likes Young Adult (YA) fiction.

OK. Look. I don’t read a lot of YA. I like my books plenty messy and ambiguous and surreal. But I do read a fair bit that is classified as science fiction, a genre the type of person who looks down their nose at an entire publishing category probably thinks is for underdeveloped children, too.¹ She certainly dashes off a quick comment that at least those adult YA readers aren’t reading, shudder, detective novels.

I also play games, a medium that has seen a wonderful flowering of very adult narrative possibilities as my generation ages. But I should probably be embarrassed about that, too. After all, I once watched someone play Call of Duty and all it offered was a bunch of high teenagers shouting homophobic things into a mic and shooting each other in the head. And I heard that it’s, like, one of the most popular games, so therefore I don’t see how games could offer anything compelling.²

Oh, and I heard this really bad song on the radio. It’s really popular, apparently, so I guess modern music doesn’t have any artistic merit.

All right, I’ll cut out the sarcasm, but seriously, it’s hard not to react to the article in that tone. And you get the point. Selecting a popular thing you don’t like may make a great straw man, but a solid basis for characterizing whatever category it belongs to, it is not. And insisting that rebuttal must seek to overturn her opinion about the example she chose is cheap rhetoric, too. When you get past the generalities, the core of Graham’s argument is that she didn’t like The Fault in Our Stars and concludes that because it’s popular and it offers an uncritical, simplistic view of adolescence,³ all YA is simple and offers an uncritical view of adolescence. She doesn’t seem to consider that she might just be reading bad YA. Or, more appropriately, YA that she doesn’t like.

In all seriousness, if you find yourself writing an article trying to convince other people that they not only shouldn’t like something they do like, but that they should be ashamed that they like it, you should stop and reconsider what you are doing with your life. By all means encourage people to read adult fiction. Explore why so many adults seem to be turning to YA to find literature that satisfies them. Explore why so many books are being sold as YA. Tell us, hey, if you liked this maybe you should try this other book. It’s similar but ultimately deeper. But if your whole shtick is to try to tell people not to like something that they do like, you have to consider that the problem just might be you and not them.

Like I said, I don’t read much YA, but I don’t agree with the premise that it is, by definition, uncritical of the process of growing up. A classic element of much YA literature is to tell kids that, yes, it is that complicated for other people, too. Adults have a tendency to look at children and say, “Look at them. So simple. Not a care in the world.” But it is a time of extreme turmoil where things change so fast in such fundamental ways, few adults could cope. Stories about teenage years remain popular precisely because of all the uncertainty and anguish that comes from not having yet carved out your own place in the world. Good literature for children recognizes this and capitalizes on it.⁴ There’s also a clarifying aspect to books written for children. Not all books for adults⁵ are needlessly long or over-wordy (and so what if some are, there’s a place in the world for long, heavy prose, too). But books for younger people must often do more with less.

If there’s a problem with our reading culture, as a man, the one I’d focus on is the assumption that adult men don’t read fiction at all. Or worse, the problem that it might be true. When preparing to query a novel, as I am at the moment, you definitely do get the sense that out of ten books being published seven are for young adults, three are for adult women, and maybe somewhere there’s room for an eleventh. Editors and agents aren’t stupid. This isn’t some plot. I’m sure it reflects the reality of what sells and who buys books. But I wonder what happened to make reading, reading whatever, something that men apparently feel they aren’t supposed to do. It can’t possibly help men, or adults of any shape and flavor, to be interested in reading to slap the book they’re enjoying out of their hands and to tell them to be ashamed because people who look like them shouldn’t be reading that.