More Adventures in Reading

Someone at Readerville told me that she's heard some publishers are stretching the YA category (which has always been vague, anyway) to include people in their early twenties. We got into a discussion of how the literary world is concerned that "young people" don't read, and by "young people" they might mean twenty-somethings, since teen titles are moving right now. Thus, stretching YA to include people in their twenties might be an attempt to create some kind of product that those people will read.

This made me recall that when I was in my twenties I actually had trouble finding things I wanted to read. I would reread mysteries I'd read back in college (I didn't read much during the school year, then, either because I had too much to do with my classwork.), but I can also recall going to the library and just finding nothing there that grabbed me.

Such is not the case now. Now I go to the library and know very well that I'll never get to reading all the things that interest me.

For instance, I was in the library Monday and passed on Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published, The King's English, Adventures of an Independent Bookseller, and Neverwhere. Maybe some day.

I brought home Away Laughing on a Fast Camel because I'm a sucker for Georgia Nicolson, Whales on Stilts even though I don't think it looks all that promising because I liked one of the author's other books, and Godless because I read another book by the same author this past summer.

And I took out When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People because I'm always worried it will happen to me, The Polysyllabic Spree because I've read other books by the author, and The Gate to Women's Country because we're going to be discussing it at the YA bookgroup at Readerville.

Gee, I seem to be attracted to books because I've already read something by the author. If I keep that up, my reading is going to become very narrow. But I'm not going to worry about that while I have this stack of library books in front of me.

Plus I had three from an earlier trip.