different markets, different audiences, and recreational reading
After having been fairly publicly snippy in Roger Sutton's blog, I feel a need to explain myself. For one thing, Roger Sutton is a big macha in children's literature and I... well, I'm not. To a certain extent, you could even call him my boss; at least, the book I just put down to write this post was sent to me courtesy of Horn Book Guide, who will pay me to read and review it. Moreover, Roger is a very intelligent man for whom I have a lot of respect, and it feels weird to have people sending me e-mail saying "thank you for what you said to Roger!" And finally, I don't want to come off, as Elissa said, as a Trekkie angry at SNL Shatner's "get a life". I think Roger raised a lot of points, some good and some less so, and I do want to address them.
Roger makes an important and subtle point when he talks about the different audience for reviews of children's books and adult books. Reviews of adult books are sometimes intended for the readers themselves, the end-users, as it were. Reviews of children's books almost never are. Sure, publishers will selectively quote sections of children's book reviews which will be seen by the final consumer of the book, but reviews of children's books are essentially intended for teachers, librarians, and others who will mediate the book between purchase and reader. I would give a minor amendment to Roger's point: many reviews of adult books are also not intended for the final reader. There's a big difference between reviews published in Kirkus and reviews published in Entertainment Weekly in terms of the intended audience of the review and that audience's assumed relationship with the book and the marketplace. Yes, the individual reading the issue of Horn Book Magazine, Kirkus, or Publisher's Weekly probably loves books, and may be disappointed if a review spoils a major plot twist. But ultimately that individual is likely to be reading the reviews in order to make purchasing decisions, not recreational reading decisions, and that changes how those reviews are going to be written.
Roger makes another important point when he says "children's books tend to be easier and thus potentially "fun" for adults in a way they tend not to be for children, an incongruence librarians need to remember, not dissolve". He's quite right. There are exceptions, of course, but it's very important for those of us who mediate books for children (and I include reviewers in that chain) to remember that a book which seems trite to me might well be the first introduction of an idea to its implied readers, and a book which seems pleasurably simple to me might be less so to readers who are 10 years old, or who haven't read Milton, or who won't recognize the book's similarities to 1984.
I start to differ from Roger when he makes a blanket statement about people who claim the children's literature is better, claiming that saying so is "just sentimental ignorance".
"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."
There's one point in there where I can absolutely agree with Roger. Some of the people who make these claims are romanticizing childhood, claiming that children have some kind of true understanding of their elegant styles of fiction that we easily adults have forgotten about. Those people, the ones who have an essentialized and romantic view of child readers, those I agree can be extremely aggravating. But me, I happen to actually prefer the writing in books which are, in the 21st century, marketed to young adults in the United States. Notice my emphasis on marketing. It has nothing to do with who the readers are, nothing to do with any kind of pure ability of adolescents to understand concepts adults are too small minded to comprehend. For whatever reasons, though, the current trend right now is that books which are produced for and marketed towards adults are written in styles which I find less appealing than those books which are produced for and marketed towards young adults. I like my books to be character driven, plot-heavy, low on philosophical meanderings, fast-paced, ultimately optimistic, and to have high-quality prose. In general, I find it difficult to find all of these traits combined in individual books written for adults; they aren't fashionable. So by my standards of literary quality, books written for children and young adults
are "better". This isn't sentimental, this is my judgment
based on my tastes.
The one point that I am confident that I and others did successfully address in Roger's blog post (although I do wish I had proofread more carefully before I posted!), is the idea that readers who primarily read books marketed towards children and young adults are missing something in the world. As I said in that thread, there is a vast supply of recreational materials available for us. Every day I decide how I am going to spend my recreational time: reading, sleeping, watching television, watching movies, gardening, going for a walk, visiting friends? And if I pick recreational reading, what shall I read? An old favorite, a bestseller, a recent recommend, a children's book, a science fiction book, some political nonfiction, a blog post, romantic fanfiction, plotty fanfiction, my e-mail, some online news, popular nonfiction, scholarly nonfiction, a friend's academic paper? Regardless of what
the NEA may think, I do believe all of those are valid forms of reading which will enrich my recreation time (if I even need to defend my choices of how I spend my recreational time, which I don't believe I do). There are far more possible ways for me to spend my time than I could even if I were independently wealthy and had five clones. Even if all I do in my free time is read, I can't read everything fabulous there is to read. I'm a human being, with limited time, and yes, I mostly specialize. Most of what I read for pleasure is fiction for children and young adults. Not everything -- I also read romances, science fiction and fantasy, fanfiction, popular and scholarly nonfiction, blogs -- but even if it were everything, what of it? I know I don't have time to read all the great books by Barbara Kingsolver and Jonathan Gash, and if I made time for them, what would I have to give up? I missed out on majoring in history as an undergraduate because I majored in English instead; I missed out in minoring in gender studies because I minored in computer science. I missed out on traveling the country in a camper because I settled down instead. No matter what choices we make there is always something else we could be doing with our time. The world is a rich and wonderful place, and I can't possibly experience everything there is. And you know what? I'm okay with that.
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gnomicutterance) wrote,
