I have not thought of America's Worst Mother™ in a long, long time.
YA fiction shamelessly peddles in trauma.
Like the TV or worse? I didn't even read YA fiction when I was a teenager.
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
The Idiot
Since I read a ton of SF, along with highlit, I presume I read things that could be aimed at the YA audience, like Heinlein and Rite of Passage. But in line with the complaints of Malzberg and Disch, I didn't really differentiate, but just worked with the continuum from Doc Savage to The Dispossessed. Some of it, like the Panshin above, or early Anthony or Delany/Russ/Le Guin dealt with sex (even underage!) or gender
Of course much of it would be controversial on political or social grounds but those aren't the kind of controversies anyone cared or cares about.
I do find a tendency for YA fiction to wallow in implausible horrors a bit. Sally brought something home from school a few months back about a kid who lives in a town where pigeons are imported by the thousand to be shot as a fundraiser for some festival, and ten-year-old boys are expected to wring the necks of any wounded birds. And the hero nobly resists the peer pressure to be cruel to animals, and his own beloved pet pigeon survives, and everything works out fine in the end. The premise seemed so over the top -- it was like that episode of The Tick where the Tick is trying to pose as a supervillain, and another villain challenges him to prove he's really evil by eating an adorable kitten.
5: That does seem a bit over the top. However, I do know a guy who has his dogs trained to bite the neck of a wounded bird do he doesn't I have wring it.
The Chocolate War, which totally upends the genre expectations created by books like the one in 5. (Made into a movie which is amusing for the presence of Bud Cort but which didn't get the point.)
Since I suppose no one follows my link about RoP:
"...like most of Ship-bound humanity, regards the colonists as "Mudeaters", a derogatory reference to frontier life on a planet."
Soon after Mia and Jimmy return from Trial, a Shipwide Assembly debates what to do about Tintera. The Tinterans are Free Birthers, possibly slavers, and a potential danger to the Ship itself. As Mia hears the Assembly's debate, however, she understands that her views have changed. Her moral world has broadened to include the Tinterans as people, rather than faceless spear carriers to be used and discarded. Thus she cannot bring herself to condemn the Tinterans en masse. However, under the leadership of Mia's father, who perceives the Tinterans as beyond re-education, the Assembly votes by an eight-to-five margin to destroy Tintera in the name of 'moral discipline'. Mia and Jimmy, as adults, prepare to settle into their own living quarters on board Ship. Jimmy offers the hope that they will someday be in a position to change their society.
Okay, so get this. The sophisticated, liberal cultured, female-liberated birth-controlling commercial ship democracy sees the slaving reactionary primitive (religious?) rural farming planet society, without any means to be anything but an imaginary threat to a spece-going culture...and the liberals vote for genocide. (Yeah, 1968, allegory about Vietnam, among other things)
*Grin*
Is that less "controversial" than Hinton?
5, 6: Pigeon shoots are over the top, but they are not fictional. At least not in Pennsylvania. The one in Hegins went nonpublic in the 1990's after too many protests.
9: I've shot pigeons. They taste like chicken.
9: My ex-wife got arrested at one of those protests!
"Mia and Jimmy, as adults, prepare to settle into their own living quarters on board Ship."
They're 13.
Times have changed.
5 -- I went to a wedding on a "ranch" in Texas where the pre-wedding "tradition" was to shoot a bunch of wing-clipped pigeons with shotguns -- we probably slaughtered 500 or so pre-disabled pigeons. I found the whole experience extremely queasy-making, and I couldn't care less about animal rights and hate pigeons.
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
The Idiot
Holy shit! I am mcmanus!
I identified in some kind of crazy way with Roghozin, while my best friend was Myshkin.
At some point in my 20's I realized I'm more like a stereotypical high school cheerleader than a Dostoyevsky character.
When I was in elementary school, I was really into Anne McCaffrey, Jean Auel, Stephen King, Clive Barker (who wrote a very sweet and encouraging response to my "I want to be an author like you!" letter)--that is, a lot of fantasy and horror fiction, usually with somewhat explicit sex in it. Middle school was very Lord of the Flies. By the time I was in high school, I was more into Irvine Welsh and similar--terrifying and violent drug fiction.
Now I don't like violent/overstimulating fiction anymore. I read shitty 18th-19th-c gothic novels for fun, but I'm way too sensitive for the super-emotional and super-violent stuff. As an adult, I don't respond well to romance, bombast, or torture porn.
I'm pretty sure that there were dogs who came in and took care of the remaining injured but not dead pigeons and not a bunch of young boys, but this was a long time ago and I may be misremembering.
Even if pigeon shoots exist, the premise of the book is that all ten-year-old boys are heavily pressured to get involved as 'wringers'. And that's kind of absurd.
Halford, I have a paleo-diet question. At one point I went carb-free for about a week. A few days in, I tried to go jogging, and it was the most pathetic endeavor of my life. Like, a third of the way through my standard route I petered out, and I couldn't even resume after resting a bit. How do the paleo advocates deal with exertion?
I, like all the other girls in my middle school, read The Flowers in the Attic and skimmed various other V.C. Andrews books. Can't say they "meant a lot" to me, though.
The only thing I can remember in that category was Madeleine L'Engle, all of her. By the time I got out of high school I had even read all her non-fiction. I must have read A House Like a Lotus twenty times at least. Hard to call any of those "troublemaking," unless you count stoking the desire to live abroad and learn multiple languages.
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
I know this will attract the scorn of AWB and a few others in this crowd, but Bridge to Terabithia had a uniquely subversive impact on the 10 or 11 y.o. Knecht.
I'm not sure that I ever read anything else that fits the YA genre definition. 1984 was troublemaking for me, because when I read it, it was 1984, man, and Reagan was, like, totally using doublespeak to manipulate the nation. Along the same time I got my hands on* a copy of Rules for Radicals and The Strawberry Statement, to which I attribute a lot of my trouble-making instincts, such as they were.
* thanks to a couple of highly unusual circumstances
I, like all the other girls in my middle school, read The Flowers in the Attic and skimmed various other V.C. Andrews books.
Those were severely fucked up, weren't they.
21 -- you probably weren't eating enough, especially enough fat and protein. Also it takes a few weeks for your body to adjust to the change, so that might have been it.
21, 25: I have the same problem. If I want to run, I have to have a big carb meal a few hours before or my ass drags.
I went to a wedding on a "ranch" in Texas where the pre-wedding "tradition" was to shoot a bunch of wing-clipped pigeons with shotguns
I am not even going to get into the symbolism of celebrating a wedding by taking a lot of beautiful white birds, deliberately crippling them, and then blasting them into bloody shreds with shotguns.
26 -- if you want, try eating a big meal w/lots of fat the night before, and then run in the morning before eating again. But it does take your body a few weeks to adjust.
Even if pigeon shoots exist, the premise of the book is that all ten-year-old boys are heavily pressured to get involved as 'wringers'. And that's kind of absurd.
I can't vouch for the particulars, but it doesn't strike me as implausible at all. I have childhood memories that are not so far removed from that -- close enough that I'm pretty sure such a book would have "spoken to me" at that age. Redstatia is a different country from NYC.
27 -- well, right. OTOH, that couple is still very happily married after 15 years, and I've had extremely tasteful weddings with no bird slaughter and have been divorced twice.
But it does take your body a few weeks to adjust.
Just like the "no soap" thing.
18: By the time I was in high school, I was more into Irvine Welsh
This is one of those weird, micro-generation gap things that made me do a double-take. Even though it technically would have been possible for me to read Trainspotting in, or just after, high school, and while there was plenty of Bukowski and that sort of thing around, I still associate Welsh and Palahniuk so strongly with my college/dropout years that it is weird to think of a rough contemporary reading them in HS.
I didn't read too much of that stereotypical YA stuff, except when it was assigned. I found a lot to identify with in Rosemary Sutcliff's work though. Plenty of death and violence there, though not much sex and no drugs. In jr. high we were assigned Charles Crawford's Bad Fall, which kinda impressed me. Partly that my later-to-betray-me-and-then-turn-into-a-junky friend was so obviously well set up to turn into a sociopath like the villain, and partly because I read the villain as more of an anti-hero, and was bereft when he was defeated.
24: I remember girls from school reading those. IIRC, it was all incest all the time.
33: Yeah, I was always appalled that so many girls I knew doted on them. Hella squick.
know this will attract the scorn of AWB and a few others in this crowd, but Bridge to Terabithia had a uniquely subversive impact on the 10 or 11 y.o. Knecht.
Why scorn? For whatever reason, I didn't get so that into that one, but I adored Katherine Paterson's other books.
Oh wait, not The Great Gilly Hopkins either. But I loved Jacob Have I Loved and all the ones set in Japan.
20: I think your New Yorkerism is showing. Spinelli says he got the idea after reading about the real-life wringer boys.
(Spinelli himself is from Phoenixville, PA, IIRC.)
I just read the "Chaos Walking" series, which was decent, and certainly dealt with dark stuff: slavery of and genocide against a sentient species; male fear of and need for control over women (heightened here, as on this planet men's thoughts are audible, while women's are not), leading to mass-murder; domination and tyranny more generally; the inevitably of complicity in dark times. There were also talking pets.
Insofar as I have an objection to the Lessons Taught by YA stuff, it's that it perpetuates the myth that heroic (and necessarily rare) individual effort, rather than tedious institutional reform, is the key to overcoming the Voldemorts of the world. (And that, similarly, the problem with the world is Voldemorts rather than the structures that allow banal nonentities to destroy the world's economy, etc.)
Spinelli himself is from Phoenixville, PA, IIRC.
And Pennsylvania is basically one horror after another.
9, 29, 37: Yet again, I am Pauline Kael.
rather than tedious institutional reform
Is that really bad? Thinking that tedious tasks stop once you reach adulthood may be a necessary delusion.
Why scorn? For whatever reason, I didn't get so that into that one, but I adored Katherine Paterson's other books.
I simply, straight-up do not believe the story Gurdon sets up to excuse her rant. I've seen YA publishers' catalogues. They were part of my regular reading for over a decade, and unless circumstances have changed radically in the last four or five years, there is absolutely, positively no shortage of safe, saccharine material being published for the YA market. That she should begrudge the existence of the less saccharine material because there was once a more "innocent" age when we pretended bad things never happened to children is idiotic and faux-moralistic.
So, the OP is wrong, I think: Gurdon is certainly overstating things, and Alexie is certainly not overstating things.
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
Uhhhh... the teen years were pretty much wall-to-wall SF for me. Does Dune count as a troublemaking book? I remember reading The Outsiders and Manchild in the Promised Land at my dad's insistence, but they only became interesting to me in retrospect.
As a young lad, I was mostly reading non-YA genre fiction (woo, Jean Auel!), though "Dragonlance" is probably closer to YA than it is to, say, China Mie/ville. I do remember The Chocolate War depressing the hell out of me, though. Oh, and once, at Quaker summer camp, borrowing a friend's Christ/opher Pike book, the one where the protagonist photographer guy is forced to snort fatal amounts of cocaine at the end, or something. I remember finding it pretty tawdry.
Jean Auel was my introduction to how straight-up porny romance fiction could be.
Does Dune count as a troublemaking book?
I got to the end of the series and all I could think is, "People who said life isn't a rose garden were wrong."
47: My 7th grade homeroom teacher read us My Darling My Hamburger. That seems to be all I remember about the book.
45: Mists of Avalon. Read it twice through.
I seem to recall something called "The Undertaker's Gone Bananas"; there was a decapitation/trash compactor scene.
45: The first Auel book wasn't that porny -- IIRC all the sex was arguably non-consensual and certainly non-fun. The later books, in which she invents horseback riding and the sports bra, get pretty porny, I admit.
If you don't have a horse or a sports bra, it can't be fun.
Paul Zindel is exactly the type of stuff I tried to stay far away from. Way too earnest.
52: I'm not sure which scenes belong to which books in retrospect. I remember one in which Ayla invents fellatio for the first time ever, and one about the l33t deflowering skills of one of the clan members, but they might be from different books.
(If 55 gives the impression that at a certain point I was just skimming the books looking for these scenes, that impression is exactly correct.)
Jondalar's l33t deflowering skills are in the first book but all of Ayla's experience were non-consensual and non-sexy in that one. It picks up after that. Not that I would know, or anything.
23: No, I don't judge! I liked it as a kid, too. I bought it to re-read as an adult when I was prepping a children's lit course and found it really appalling, in that the boy blames himself for his friend's death because he was off trying to flirt with his teacher at the museum, and the sexual self-loathing, while a very accurate depiction of that feeling, really stung me at that age.
Jondalar doesn't appear until the second book, I thought. And he doesn't hook up with Ayla until the very end of the second book. The first book is not sexy and very scarring/rapey.
57: Huh, I haven't read them in forever, but I didn't think Jondalar was in the first book at all -- I thought that was all Cro-Magnons and Ayla looking despairingly at herself in puddles wondering "Why am I so ugly, with this unattractively cornsilk-like hair, limpid blue eyes, firm yet delicate chin, high, smooth forehead, and impudently perky breasts? I wish I looked more like the other hunched, hairy, sloping-browed and chinless Clan members."
59: I must not have read the first book then. The Valley of Horses has Jondalar in it, right?
59: Ah, you're totally right; I was misremembering how his and his brother's story was interposed with her's. (I'm sort of glad to realize that I haven't spent too many brain cells remembering the contents of the series, since it has been 16 years since I read the books.)
CotCB: Ayla tries to get along after being adopted by Neanderthals, who have an interesting sign-language/healing/hunting culture, but rape her. She hunts with a slingshot and has a baby.
VotH: Parallel stories of Jondalar the expert sexxor traveling while doing it with chicks and Ayla inventing animal domestication and making tools and hunting a lot. They meet at the end and do it a lot.
TMH: They go live with a group for a while. There's a hot African guy who Ayla does it with sometimes. She learns how to bleach leather by using old urine. Eventually she gets back with Jondalar.
PoP: They travel back to Jondalar's home, where he's going to introduce her to his family.
That's what I remember from reading these books 21 years ago.
That sounds about right, but I think I never got to PoP. I remember the hot African guy being hilariously smoove -- I swear he asks if she wants to see his mammoth-bone etchings at one point.
How did I miss these books? Was this the movie where Darryl Hannah walks around naked and grunts?
Does Dune count as a troublemaking book?
I certainly read them that way. The leaders at Camp Mormon for Girls were a little weirded out when I started wearing turbans and used one of the sayings of Muad'dib as an inspirational quote at flag-raising one morning.
Wikipedia confirms that it was. Man did that flick suck. As a teenage boy consumer of premium cable, that film was memorable for not actually showing anything despite DH walking around ostensibly naked all the time, plus WTF with the grunting. Sexy my ass.
You weren't supposed to be looking at DH, you were supposed to be gleaning dietary tips.
69: "When religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows?"
Or perhaps: "What do you hate? By this are you truly known."
My subversive young adult reading was Kerouac. Sex, drugs, and nontraditional sentence/paragraph structures!
Any Judy Blume readers here? I literally grew up inside a Judy Blume novel, in the sense that Judy Blume lived about 5 miles away and the stores and parks in her generic suburbs were obviously based on a stroll through our downtown section. Wasn't a big fan though.
"Why am I so ugly, with this unattractively cornsilk-like hair, limpid blue eyes, firm yet delicate chin, high, smooth forehead, and impudently perky breasts? I wish I looked more like the other hunched, hairy, sloping-browed and chinless Clan members."
I think I was too old for CotCB, but this entertains me, because I loved Dance of the Tiger when I read it as an adult, and of course I have a clear image in consequence of the Neanderthals as blond (or red) haired and blue eyed and the Cro-Magnons as black. Apparently Kurtén was almost certainly right about that.
I sort of regret answering this honestly given that my first response is to confess my undying love for both LB and Moby after their recent conversations, but YA was very helpful for me when I was coming out as a teen.
I can't think of specific titles (well, M.E. Kerr's Deliver us from Evie was one for complicated reasons) but I used them as a road map to read my way through the main library at the big city. Gay or gayish books dropped hints when the characters read other books or listened to music, and I could go right to the library catalog and get those myself and keep following the trail of bread crumbs.
The book Sister Safety Pin wasn't classified as YA but did play a pivotal role I don't think I want to discuss in my first sexual encounter. I probably shouldn't say that, though, because of course it invites questions. I guess I'll just say that sharing literature allowed me to let my girlfriend at the time figure out what lesbians do/could do in bed without me as the "actual lesbian" suggesting anything that might thus pressure her. That was such a fucked-up secret relationship, but oh well.
Mentioned it here before, but The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks taught me the (as it turned out untrue) subversive message: don't bother washing your socks; a plant will eat them.
Is the Darryl Hannah movie the one where they hired Anthony Burgess to write linguistically accurate grunting?
Things like this make me wonder how I ended up in the sort-of-humanities. By most measures of people reading, I read a lot as a kid, but compared to kids who really did read a lot, I didn't read all that much. I remember reading books that were assigned, Hardy Boys, John Bellairs, The Great Brain Books, The Wrinkle in Time trilogy, but no other L'engle, some Stephen King (not really meant to be young adult but...), then I guess some H.P. Lovecraft and that was about it before college for fiction.
Obviously, the only real diversity (in just about any sense of the word) I got in what I read came from what was assigned for classes. I did a lot of aspirational used paperback book-buying, though.
I mainly read books by people like Agatha Christie and S.J. Perelman during my rebellious years. It was more about experimenting with listening to Earth Crisis and black metal.
It's amazing how terrible my memory of childhood is. I feel like I missed this genre, and perhaps awareness of it, entirely, but that doesn't seem possible. Were the books hopelessly unmemorable? I guess the Hardy Boys/Tom Swift/etc franchises count for something, but that phase only took a year or two to exhaust the back catalog. L'Engle counts? That too, though I think I read more than one but don't actually remember more than one.
72.---No, neither of those, but I'm not remembering off-hand what it was.
77: I think that might have been Quest for Fire, an earlier entry in the grunting Neanderthal genre of movie.
78: You know, I have no idea of this is in any way broadly true, but I associate voracious fiction reading with mathy/sciency nerdy types rather than humanities types. Not invariably, but in college, when I transferred from MIT where everyone I knew was some flavor of math/science type to U Chicago where I was hanging out with poly-sci majors and the like, a big difference was that fewer people had shelves full of stuff they were reading for fun. People I knew at U of C were more likely to have directly school-related books and a couple of things with sentimental value, rather than 'the ten paperbacks I'm reading this week'.
Oo. It was this one. God, I was so annoying at 12.
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
And on the question in the original post:
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
I can never come up with answers to this sort of question. It's part of the voracious reading -- I chewed through such an mass of verbiage at that age, with a whole lot of random crap, a lot of decent genre stuff, classics that I happened to run across, that while I enjoyed most of it a lot, and I'm sure it all affected me, I don't really remember a book ever having a particular impact on me. Nothing where I felt that reading that book at that time changed how I felt about the world or my life.
I like the story about how LB got caught reading the decorative books while baby-sitting.
What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?
Lust for Life by Irving Stone.
I associate voracious fiction reading with mathy/sciency nerdy types
This is what I was before college. But also outdoorsy, which cut down on the time for reading. I never mastered the walk while reading technique and tended towards the long hike kind of outdoors stuff, not the go to a place and sit there for hours stuff.
Oh wait, I did read a bunch of Edward Abbey when I was on an environmentalish kick.
I read the Monkeywrench Gang very young--before I was 12, surely--and I was just too shocked that the characters littered to be inspired by their actions.
I think of it as on the young end of YA, but I treasure Snarkout Boys And The Avocado of Death. I remember enjoying Yobgorgle but finding it a little light weight, reading Lizard Music at a young enough age that I don't remember it very well, and reading Alan Mendalson, Boy From Mars at just the right age.
As a teenager I, like many of the people here, was reading a lot of science fiction.
Loved Snarkout Boys. I read it when I was probably older than it was aimed at -- I missed a lot of good children's/YA books in elementary school, and had to double back for them when high school friends mentioned them.
I was reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut as a teenager.
I read "Lizard Music" about 250 times but never looked for anything else by that author. It was such a weird and unique book that it was more like a window into a parallel universe than something I wanted to comprehend fully. Like "The Phantom Tollbooth".
Like LB, I read so much that not much of it stands out. I remember a streak of reading about the Holocaust in junior high.
I can see the argument that YA novels are horrifically grim, but I also think my tolerance was a lot higher. I can't take the violent or sad stuff anymore, but I don't remember it being any barrier when I was a teen.
90, 92 - I obviously like Pinkwater a lot. Young Adult Novel is terrific, as is the terrifically weird children's book Ducks.
I, too, was a lot like LB in adolescenct reading habits. Of course, now, I still love YA fiction and read a lot of it. Usually fantasy.
I associate voracious fiction reading with mathy/sciency nerdy types rather than humanities types
If we're talking about SF, sure, but other than that I don't have this association.
I also have pretty strong memories of the things I tried to read as a teenager and failed, or at least found really difficult. Some of these include Absalom, Absalom! (Sassy magazine recommended it!), parts of Gödel, Escher, Bach, "Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius," and On the Road. (Now that I think about it, I may have just found the Kerouac tedious and given it up for that reason.)
My junior year of high school I convinced my dad to get a subscription to The New Yorker, never having read it and not even knowing what it was. I found the writing in it challenging and unenjoyable at first, but forced myself to read the whole thing every week until I learned to like it.
I remember failing to read Walden and Crime and Punishment my freshman year in high school. I still want to read Crime and Punishment; I probably will read Walden. I couldn't get into Poe until college, though there was a direct line of King - Lovecraft - Poe for me.
I remember Poe being hard too, though some stories were much harder than others. Didn't help that I had no idea what amontillado was (and was never a dictionary user).
99 -- it would have been great if you'd accidentally subscribed to New York magazine instead, and had grown up thinking endless 5000 word essays about the angst o getting your kid into Harvard were the height of cosmopolitan literary sophistication.
I had to do a skit for a horrible freshman English class that was some sort of adaptation of the cask of amontillado set in modern times as essentially the same story. All I remember is it involved using an (imagined) elevator.
This was actually unrelated to my own efforts to read Poe, which involved some book of his stories packaged for kids (you could tell by the cover of the paperback, may have even been a scholastic edition) that I just couldn't get into, but if you want students to get interested in Poe, I don't think a story about wine is going to do it, no matter how many people you wall up and abandon.
What finally got me to take another look at Poe was a dramatic reading/dramatization of The Tell-Tale Heart performed on a old radio show and replayed late at night on some radio station I was listening to, probably as filler.
I always imagined a cask of armadillo, like a barrel of monkeys. The story never really lived up to this, even though one fellow was dressed as some sort of clown.
I found the writing in it challenging and unenjoyable at first, but forced myself to read the whole thing every week until I learned to like it.
I saw my first issue of the New Yorker in college (the artsy girl next door was a subscriber), and I found it incomprehensible. Even the cartoons I didn't get.
I tried reading it again for the second time a couple of years after college. Same result.
Fast forward to age 30 or so. I started reading the New Yorker and was instantly hooked. I'm not sure what happened in the interim to account for the change, except that my SES evolved to the point that I'm somewhere in the penumbra of the target demographic now. (The editorship changed three times during that period as well, but I don't think that explains it; the first encounter was during the William Shawn era, and the second after Tina Brown took over, with the no difference in comprehension.) Further evidence for the SES thesis: I now own the hardcover compendium of New Yorker cartoons, and I totally get the vintage Shawn-era cartoons now.
it would have been great if you'd accidentally subscribed to New York magazine instead
This absolutely could have happened.
I'm also pretty sure that my learning to like the NYer at age 16 didn't mean I understood that much of it. I remember getting a lot more out of the long articles than the rest of it.
I still don't like the cartoons, and slol is no longer around to belittle me for it.
My grandmother got the New Yorker as back issues that a colleague of my mom's gave away at work. No one else in my family read it. I subscribed a few years ago and read such a small percentage of each issue, that I didn't renew. I've never seen a company so persistently try to get my business back. I should write them a letter to thank them for supporting the USPS bulk mail business.
I got a lot out of the listings in the front of my parents' New Yorkers, back in the mid-nineties. The movie and capsule reviews were great. And if you thoroughly pore over those things you get a real inaccurate perception of the music scene. I thought Soul Coughing, Francis Dunnery, and Skeleton Key (the band that recorded Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon) were the three artists everyone needed to know.
My parents subscribed only to middlebrow publications, so I missed out on any early exposure to the more highbrow stuff. On the other hand, middlebrow publications were pitched at just the right level for an intelligent 12-year-old, and I'm not sure I would have ever traded up to the better class of periodical if I hadn't cut my teeth on Time and Readers Digest.
I sometimes wonder whether I should consider taking some more middlebrow periodicals for the benefit of my children when they reach that age, sort of as training wheels for the more challenging stuff.
but forced myself to read the whole thing every week until I learned to like it.
I forced myself to drink Campari and soda with lime as a (end-stage) teenager in order to acquire a taste for it. It seemed very sophisticated-Roman-Claudia-Cardinale-Monica-Vitti to me.
I read A LOT of periodicals as a kid. We had subscriptions to Newsweek and The New Yorker and Harper's and The Atlantic, and my grandparents took Time and National Geographic. Plus I'd get copies of Twilight Zone, Spy and Punch for Xmas and Easter. There were also hundreds of old copies of mystery magazines lying around the house that I worked my way through. And I developed a strong predilection for Soldier of Fortune and S.W.A.T. in Jr. High. Plus all the comic books of course.
Things I tried to read but couldn't get into:
The Divine Comedy [5th grade and 9th grade]
1984 [3rd grade, finished it in 8th or 9th grade]
Godel, Escher, Bach [7th grade?]
Of course, I read a lot of mystery and SF&F the whole time -- Christie, Conan Doyle, Sayers, Allingham and that lot from age 8 to 15 or so. And Asimov, a little Heinlein, Simon Hawke, Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, LeGuin, & various SF and fantasy anthologies from 9 or 10 on. I read The Monkeywrench Gang in 7th grade, same Xmas I got a tape of Tone Loc's Loc'd After Dark, which makes for some odd associations nowadays.
So yeah, the standard psychological realist YA stuff never got much of a foothold. Stephen King was always looked down on in our household. I read The Stand when I was 15 or so, as we had an autographed copy, courtesy of a Maine relative who knew him when, but all the doorstop horror seemed terribly trashy.
112 - And now you have emerged from your chrysalis and are a beautiful elderly Italian man.
and are a beautiful elderly Italian man.
Nah, I don't put Sambuca in my espresso (yet).
I don't think I read any YA stuff at all, though I may be unclear on what qualifies. My recollection is going straight from kids' stuff (Hardy Boys, Famous Five, Secret Seven) to adult stuff (canonical literature, PKD, LeGuin). Where does Tolkiien fit into the taxonomy?
As for Poe, I was exposed at a very early age via audiobooks/radioplays, which we used to listen to on long car journeys. That was mostly the horrory stuff though. I remember being a bit surprised when I read his stuff and found that a lot of it was detective stories.
I read the Ascent of Everest at a young age and tried to make my own ice axe. Grivel of Courmayeur I am not.
I read Ayn Rand, but recovered.
Also got the idea in fourth grade that reading Mein Kampf would enhance my understanding of World War II. I think I made it 50 or 60 pages. Understanding was not enhanced.
Of course, now, I still love YA fiction and read a lot of it. Usually fantasy.
I have a theory that YA is one of the few places to find interesting Bildungsromans (that aren't solely about sex and bureaucracy). Boy, do I go for coming-of-age novels.
I first read Poe in 6th grade, I think. "The Pit and the Pendulum" gave me nightmares for weeks. As for the Amontillado, I was already (always-already?) at the "eh, it's a silver-cow-creamer/whatsit/McGuffin" stage in my reading.
Like Ginger Yellow, I went straight from kid's stuff to adult fiction. With a long overlap. I started on ostensibly adult fiction at about 7 but still quite happily read things like Dr Who novels and kids adventure fiction for years after that. I hated YA stuff, though. It always felt like it was manipulatively button pressing. Not that I was immune to the button pushing but I found it uncomfortable. I preferred what seemed like the safety or honesty of adult stuff or genre fiction.
80: It's amazing how terrible my memory of childhood is.
This. I sometimes wonder if I should lament it, but of course there's little to be done about it.
Actually it's more that I have a terrible sense of when things happened. I could give a time-span of 2-4 years (i.e. I was about, uh, 11 or maybe 13, or maybe it was 10, certainly not as late as 15, so maybe 12). Most things are associated by where I lived at the time, since we moved every 2-3 years until I was 13.
Early on, very wholesome stuff: Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, etc., then expanding to Judy Blume, Encyclopedia Brown, Pippi Longstocking, then on to a lot of SFF (McCaffrey, Lloyd Alexander, LeGuin). I started working at a Youth Library when I was 15, and had some filling in to do around then (S.E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein -- it was to help the children!). High school was the truly voracious period, all over the map, with tons of classic SF, including Ayn Rand.
I think the first time it occurred to me that I was reading something troublemaking at all was when I read the Omen series and Fear of Flying at around the same time, around age 15. These I found a little disturbing, in a way that all the Stephen King hadn't been, and that my parents might look askance at.
By the time I was reading Samuel Delaney (age 17 with Dhalgren, the rest of his stuff in college), registering anything like "troublemaking" was way over.
I'm basically LB here. Ridiculous amounts of reading, as much genre as I could get my hands on, lots of classics. I remember a couple books where the sex shocked me (Lolita, Jerzy Kosinski's Passion Play, Mishima, Delaney, Piers Anthony) but not really much of an impact. I also didn't read any non-SF YA stuff (Heinlein, Norton, McCaffrey, etc.). On the other hand all the bookstores had big porn sections which I discovered fairly quickly.
I've always thought of YA as mainly being used to describe books for the 9-14 range, but wikipedia (and this thread) says it's 14-21. But the list of books in the wiki entry mostly feels like children's fiction to me.
" No, they are simply trying to protect their privileged notions of what literature is and should be. "
i think this is wrong. It is about sticking their head in the sand.
i don't think i read any 'troublemaker' books. I think the lack of them may have disrupted my growht. I mostly stopped reading, watching sports, and listening to rush limbaugh, and went all in on music (and jcrew catalogues). i finally read catcher in the rye when i was 19, told my friend about like it, and she's like "you never read that? i read that years ago"
I remember the Hardy Boys having some ridiculously high recommended age range printed on the back cover. I'm pretty sure I didn't know anyone in that age range still reading them. Maybe it was kind of like Seventeen's audience targeting.
I am now picturing a glossy magazine called Twelve, which makes me happy.
I tried to read 1984 in 1984 when it was getting promoted everywhere, but it was a little bit over my 8 year-old head.
I have a three year cycle with the New Yorker -- at first, I'm all, "look at these interesting and well written articles" and then the anger slowly builds: at the lameass cartoons and unfunny humor and Poke Boat ads and smug authoritativeness and annoying personalize-everything style (has there ever been an article in which we don't learn where someone went to college?) and the general awfulness of middlebrow New York cultural hegemony. So I cancel my subscription. And then, a year later, I glance at it and think "hey, look at these interesting and well written articles."
I've been going through this cycle in one way or another since about age 20.
129: Somehow I knew that was coming.
131: Malcolm Gladwell is your period.
131: Malcolm Gladwell is your period.
(has there ever been an article in which we don't learn where someone went to college
Funny, we were just discussing that over drinks at the alumni club.
128-129 the glossy comic version of Lolita?
137: That's the Japanese edition. All I was thinking of was a straight re-branding of Seventeen, honest.
All I was thinking of was a straight re-branding of Seventeen, honest
Seventeen targets 12-year-old lesbians?
I have a friends' band that wrote a song called "hey twelve" which is excellent.
(has there ever been an article in which we don't learn where someone went to college?)
If there has, you can be damn sure we learn what kind of clothes that person wears.
Hm, my mother read stuff to us when we were pretty young (oh and Dad read us Macbeth!) and then in High School I loved The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was kind of hilarious because it was all about sex and I did not exactly have anything to compare it to, but I can't remember much of what I read in between. I guess just stuff that was assigned for school and it wasn't really YA. The only YA I very clearly remember reading was Diana Wynne Jones, which was great and still is quite enjoyable, it turns out.
Hitchhiker's Guide is not YA is it? That was deeply formative.
Hitchhiker's Guide is not YA is it? That was deeply formative.
Oh yes, for me too.
Not YA, but definitely formative.
Bave and I were both addicts of Susan Cooper as kids, it turns out.
Huh...I didn't read much SF at all beyond a few perfectly wretched Star Trek novels I later read somewhere were fanfic. I'm remembering, reading more of the thread, though, that I read Judy Blume and Madeleine L'Engle. And I loved Agatha Christie for a few years. A couple of years ago I picked up At Bertram's Hotel and couldn't be bothered to keep the mystery stuff straight, so I didn't make it through it, but it seemed to be lovely writing of a sort.
Oh, Susan Cooper. I either read or had read to me The Dark is Rising but I'm not sure I went through the whole....it was a trilogy, right? I can remember practically nothing about it except some weird little details that really stuck with me, and a sort of atmospheric memory of how her prose made me feel.
There were five books, each better than the last.
each better than the last.
It's been a while, but I'm not sure Junior High Neb would agree with that.
Oh yeah, I read Hitchhiker's Guide books. And now I remember reading The Boy Who Reversed Himself. I think I meant to read others by the same author but never did.
I had classes that assigned "true" YA books like Gilly Hopkins (mentioned above). They were usually ok; I don't think I ever went out and looked for another book by the same authors.
They made a movie of The Dark is Rising a few years ago that was apparently quite laughably bad and had very little to do with the book, which is a shame. Chalk it up to the Harrypotterification of everything, I guess.
148: Oh, if I think about it, I suppose I thought Greenwitch and Silver on the Tree were the best. I read them kind of out of order so I get mixed up.
150: discussed on this very site, in fact.
In fourth grade, I freaked out my teacher, who asked us to memorize a poem, by reciting all of the stanzas here, including the little Welsh bit, which I approximated given the pronunciation clues in the novels.
Have I mentioned how I didn't have any friends? Has that come up?
I may be wrong but I think I have had a subscription to The New Yorker for the last twenty years. My sister got it for me Freshman year of college which was really nice but I had no idea what to make of it. I must have stopped taking for a while.
Anyway upper middlebrow or not, I plan to subscribe until I die. I always think of the tv commercial with the same orange-purple sunset image of the skyline as was on my first copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker and the narrator with the unpleasant voice quoting someone as saying "the best magazine in the world...quite possibly the best magazine that ever was."
The New Yorker is my religion. Occasionally I get a little weary of this or that (Malcolm Gladwell) but it's the encapsulation of my intellectual aspirations in a certain period when I had those. I can't be very critical about it.
(Except the caption contest. Fuck that noise. I wrote a letter to the editor to that effect. It was not published. And I wrote a sarcastic caption contest caption about the caption contest. It also was not published.)
I should really be asleep.
Totally off-topic - do any of our many cat owners have good suggestions for getting the urine odor out of carpet? Before my cat died, she lost control of her bladder in a corner of the living room; at the time I didn't realize it and then everything was too crazy to really concentrate on cleaning it, so it seems to have set in. I did just try lifting up the carpet and spraying the pad and the carpet with some odor-remover that I had on hand, but I'm not very optimistic that that's going to be the solution.
Get a towel with cleaning vinegar, scrub the spot thoroughly with it, then put a dry towel on top and stamp it down firmly to suck the remaining moisture in. Let it stand for an hour or so and check up; repeat if necessary.
I never finished the 'dark is rising' series, i think i was like 2nd grade and not quite able to get it. I bought it (it came on one of those cubes with an open side to pull the books out of) a year ago and have only read 1.2 books or so.
I really liked the Dark is Rising, although I came to it quite late (for me) at about 11 or 12. I'd already had my big 'fantasy' period a few years before that, and I think at that time I was reading Chandler and Conan Doyle and similar things, mostly. Hitchhikers Guide I read when it came out, so when I was about 7 or 8. I also have vague memories of the radio series, which my Dad and his mates listened to. But I expect any details of that I confabulated later as it was on after my bedtime.
I am having trouble understanding what it would be like reading fantasy written with a setting of one's own country.
Really? I suppose I didn't really think of that. It did occur to me, at the time, when I read The Eagle of the Ninth that bits of it were probably set near or around where I lived. Frontier Wolf certainly was. I'd guess for Europeans it would be common to read historical fiction and fantasy fiction set where one lives.
I don't think I actually ever read "controversial" YA fiction, if only because I grew up in a time when "realistic" fiction about the very real problems young people are faced with today was de rigeur and pushed on us by school and parents. The school library was full of books about divorce, incest, racial hatred, child abuse and so on, sometimes with much graphic detail too.
It didn't interest me.
I am having trouble understanding what it would be like reading fantasy written with a setting of one's own country.
Wrt your country, they're usually called "Westerns".
YA is a fairly recent category. When I were a chabby there were kids' books and adult books. Bright kids were given adult books, which is why I still can't bring myself to read Dickens 50 years after being force fed David Copperfield at the age of 9. I'm still sad about this.
But most things which would be described as YA these days were shoehorned into one category or the other, e.g. The Hobbit was sold as a kids' book and LoTR was adult. Grimy angsty YA is even more recent. I imagine some publisher in the late 1970s suddenly thinking, "When I was an adolescent, I spake as an adolescent, I understood as an adolescent, I thought as an adolescent. Welcome, adolescents, here I come! Let's make millions of dollars together."
I read Tom Sharpe's "Wilt" and "Indecent Exposure" at the age of 10. Am I going to carry off the "Ludicrously Age-Inappropriate" trophy or can someone top that?
165. At about the same age I discovered an Olympia Press title badly concealed at a friend's house. I can't say I read it in depth, but my scanning of it was quite enlightening - the concept of BDSM had previously been quite unknown to me.
I am having trouble understanding what it would be like reading fantasy written with a setting of one's own country.
There's quite a bit of fantasy set in the US - HP Lovecraft for one. Maybe Poe too? More recently, Tim "Bugsy Siegel was the Fisher King of the West!" Powers, Neil Gaiman, and so on.
I am assuming here that yoyo is American. If not, apologies.
165: I read "Nineteen Eighty-Four" at the age of nine or ten. Rather good, I thought, though I was a bit puzzled why Winston Smith was so excited about reading "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", which seemed extremely dry and boring.
165: "it" in third grade. So about eight. Really not appropriate.
I, too, liked Susan Cooper, as a child.
I didn't even know her as a child. I think she's probably a lot older than me.
I think she's probably a lot older than me.
She's 76. How old are you?
re: 166
We had quite a bit of Henry Miller on the family bookshelves, so I read a few of those in my early teens. Nin too, but that was a couple of years later. Mid-teens, maybe.
re: 165
I read those around the same age, Henry Miller [as per previous comment] at about 12 or 13. Various adult sci-fi and fantasy novels featuring sex from about 7 or 8 but not entirely sure I really comprehended what was going on; it was just bits I skimmed to get to the good stuff. I do remember Colin Wilson's The Killer disturbing me at about 10/11 or so.
148 is exactly right. Greenwitch is the scariest, too, or was when I was 10.
One thing I miss about reading as a teen is the sense of wonder and delight I always used to have. I'd find sentences, phrases that seemed so beautiful and true that I'd just burn with excitement. I'm not sure if I should read more poetry or if there's no way to get it back, but I miss it.
I was reading a book or two a day by age 11 and kept that up through most of high school and at times during college. I miss that, too.
There's quite a bit of fantasy set in the US . . . I am assuming here that yoyo is American.
Actually, yoyo is Monégasque. (Golly, those would be weird books.)
177. Does Casino royale count as fantasy?
I read 1984 as a 14-year old and thought it was overly unsubtle and politically unsophisticated. Top that, bitches.
I read Dr No aged 12 and am posting this from my technomodernist bachelor-pad tripod lair on the ocean-bed.
When I was 14, I read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and made puns on "Gibbon."
yoyo is Monégasque. (Golly, those would be weird books.)
Ah. I apologise in that case. And no, I can't think of any Monegasque fantasy novels...
178: Casino Royale is arguably fantasy but isn't set in Monaco; it's set on the Channel coast, in Royale-les-Eaux, near Dieppe. When the book came out, this counted as exotically foreign. Nowadays people nip over there to do their shopping. The Casino Royale itself is probably an hypermarché now.
Come to think of it, there are fantasy novels set in Vegas, so Monaco wouldn't be out of the question; unlike Vegas it has a real prince with a castle, for one thing.
183.2 The conventional wisdom is that Royale-les-Eaux is intended to stand to Monte Carlo. But who cares, it's a dreadful book and worse movie.
OT: A woman I work with is right outside my door talking very loudly about how well Dan Brown writes and reading the symptoms of E coli infection.
It's a terrible book, but the movie really isn't bad, though about 30% too long.
The symptoms of E coli infection was made into a movie?
187: She just finished saying that the book was a hundred times better than the movie.
The symptoms of E coli infection was made into a movie?
"The Time Traveller's Wife" I think they called it.
I think I bored uf with this before but Casino Royale has one of the great opening sentences ("The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning"), followed by one of the great action transitions ("Bond lit his 70th cigarette of the day").
James Blish's Black Easter: Faust Aleph-Null has a similar but better opening sentence ("The room stank of demons") and the er "hero" is decisively sonned by a snarky succubus a little way in ("Thinkst thou to copulate with fallen seraphim")
Now that's a book I hadn't thought of for years but remember fondly. The sequel not so much.
The sequel has the US army being defeated by the forces of hell (nuclear
yikes never mention magic or Satan! Or Milton or the Gorgons!
Anyway Satan has a massive long soliloquy in fake-Miltonic verse about it being his turn to be God, since old-school God is dead. And he will be good not evil now. Plus the war passages are awesome if yr 12, with marines falling out of helicopters and smashing to bits because Gorgons have turned them to stone.
165: I started on Tom Sharpe around age 10-12 as well. The first one I read was "Vintage Stuff." I recall I found it basically entertaining, but was upset that irrevocable bad things did happen to the characters - everything was not set right in the end. I suspect a lot of it went over my head - I'm not sure I understood what was happening when one male character got stuck inside a female character. As with LB's, my reading didn't really sort by age-appropriateness at all.
In other words, you were 14?
That might be it, but isn't it accurate? I think I read Karin Boye's Kallocain right before, which I think is subtler.
I do think that I have read far more YA fiction as an OA than a YA. Re: Heebie's take, I always regarded Of Mice and Men as kind of an ur-YA tragedy story. I don't know what age I read it, but I recall throwing it across the room in a rage. It was also sad that Lennie had to die. Oops, SPOILER ALERT!
"What troublemaking book meant a lot to you as a teenager?"
It's a toss-up between The Portable Nietzsche, Camus' The Rebel and the Holy Bible.
The older woman I was in love with -- she was a freshman at Georgetown by then -- tried to talk sense to me but...
That's at 14. At 12 it was Helter Skelter. "Kill the pigs! Acid is groovy!"
17: "At some point in my 20's I realized I'm more like a stereotypical high school cheerleader than a Dostoyevsky character. "
At some point in my 20s I realized I was a more like a Dostoyevsky character than the revolutionary messiah. So I started eating blotter by the fistful. I can't say if that helped or not, even with those parts I can remember.
"Life is hard!"
At least I managed to somehow become a non-virgin.
196. Yes, I think it was the fake Miltonic verse that made me not like it as much as Black Easter.
It is a bit of a bold stylistic experiment.