74% of YA readers are adults
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
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I read "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" in my 50s without noticing it was YA. It was just good, light fantasy. Lovely book.
I loved Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, it was so cleverly written & surprisingly spooky at times.
Reading some YA books got me back in to full time reading . Particularly Charlie Higson's Young Bond books. I often pick up a YA book if the subject is interesting and well written . I have even read all of The Land of Stories series by Chris Colfer and they are for quite young readers but very entertaining . I find a lot of the ideas in YA books far more interesting and clever then in many adult books.
I loved Darren Shan's stuff as a youngster, especially his 'Demonata' and Vampire series. Even now as an adult I still hold a soft spot for them despite them certainly being young adult.
I read Bunker a few years back which is apparently YA. Jeez, it was well grim. Almost needs a place on the Disturbing Books list.
The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brook
Like every category, there's some great stuff in YA and there's some real garbage. The great stuff is often more cleanly written than adult lit -- and I'm not talking profanity but clearness of style and vision. There are some truly remarkable YA novels out there. Now if publishers would stop slapping ridiculous cartoon AI covers on them specifically designed to attract the TikTok crowd ...
Great video! I used to turn my nose up at YA due to the overuse of tropes, but the past few years I have changed stance on it and have enjoyed quite a few YA books and series. And I agree, the formulaic nature of trashy books like Gold Eagle is one of the things that I love about them. Sometimes you just want a Big Mac rather than a filet mignon.
Or Big Mack 😁
To me the problem surrounding the perception of YA books is a misinterpretation of the term adult. YA books are not for kids. They are for young adults. The age of majority (adulthood) is 17/18 so young adults are from 17/18 up. Young can be a state of being. We all know people who are well over 30 who we would call young at heart. So no adult should feel bad or be made to feel bad about reading YA. And if kids want to read them that’s ok too.🤓
I wonder how much of a role the Harry Potter books played in the increased adult readership of YA novels.
Just a guess but I’d say A LOT!! - Good question. 👍
As an adult who as a kid started reading full chapter books because of HP I would say A Lot as well.
It was definitely a Thing that adults read the Harry Potter books as well, I remember that the reason for giving the books another edition/set of covers was so that adults could read the books ‘in secret’ because apparently the colourful illustrated original covers were seen as ‘childish’.
But also the Harry Potter series was/is the first series I heard of that was noted to grow along with the reader.
I'd say it was significant. In the UK at least they were published in both "adult" and kids editions (same books, different covers)
I was a bookseller from 1988 - 2014, and YA as it is today didn't really exist before Harry Potter. Certainly there had always been books written with teens as the intended audience, but, as I and other Gen X-ers can attest to, by junior high, a lot of us kids were reading adult literature. The thing about Harry Potter is that it was a huge crossover (teen/adult) success. Publishers saw this and worked hard to keep that ball rolling, and the genre grew to be what it is. That adults who were kids at some point over the last 25 years are not "aging" out of YA isn't a huge surprise. If it's what they like to read, then, to each their own.
That'd be interesting figure since the Harry Potter series is really middle grade. And then ages up a tad as the series goes on. But, somehow, Rowling made it appealing to adults as well. At least younger adults. (Not me personally, to be honest.) There was just so much hype, and then s movie franchise, and so folks just had to see what that was all about.
Anyway. I would guess (and this is truly a guess) that maybe 5% of the adults I know eventually read it. But that's substantial considering most adults don't read.
I agree with everything you said in the video, I don't think YA should be dismissed by adults. I have read some great books that are apparently considered YA. Great video Olly.
I've got no problem with adults reading YA. It's more accessible and if people are reading, they're reading--that's a good thing.
My concern is that because most YA readers are adults, YA has been skewing more adult. (What was briefly called new adult but the publishing industry has dropped.) The age category is supposed to be 12-18... and very, very few are written with a 12-13 year old reader in mind. There's a gap that's not being served. Perhaps we need to create a new "tween" segment? Honestly, I've thought that for ages because what's right for a 17 year old is rarely right for a 12 year old in terms of their concerns and interests (including romance, but not only that.)
(1) Adolescence doesn't truly end until 25 or so (science!). For some much later. (2) If it is a good story, the juvenile nature of YA doesn't matter as much, I would think. Sometimes people just want an easy read that doesn't challenge them. There's a reason romance sales outstrip every other genre. It's candy for the brain.
As a 50 something year old male, I am reading a lot of the classics and YA books because I am sick to death of the absolute filth and rubbish being presented in so called "adult" books. I have returned 6 books recently, all of which received glowing reviews, but I found them full of F this F that F F F F all the way through. It's disgusting! Add to that the grotesque violence and sex scenes, which are so badly written you might as well just go and watch porn. Add to that again the quality of the writing; it is horrendously bad in most cases within modern Sci-Fi and Fantasy at least. YA books generally speaking present a much better, more considered approach to story telling. I heard someone recently use the phrase, "the uglification of society". I find it genuinely disturbing that so may reviewers on social media, young woman, so called university educated individuals are singing the praises of utter rubbish. God help our civilisation if this is the chosen route!
Amazing video. Thank you for speaking about this!
As a YA author, I've noticed this. I see some teens at my signings/events but at least half or more are always millenials/Gen Xers.
What books have you written?
@@Reading975 The Teenage Wastelands books, a trilogy of SF-Horror books for teenagers.
I also wrote a picture book called The Star Pixie and the Serpent Queen. Ironically, that one was intended for littler kids and is read mostly by teenagers xD
@@thoughtfuldevil6069 I’ll check them out! Thanks!
@@thoughtfuldevil6069 I can’t find it anywhere…Suggestions?
@@Reading975 If you look up my pseudonym, Kent J. Starrett, my books should come up! Failing that try "Jackie and Craig" (the first one) or "The Star Pixie and the Serpent Queen."
YA does allow you to turn your brain off and just enjoy a good story, but I’ve found if you read a story a few times or when you’re older, there is some depth, but handled in a less intense way. And I just love the fast pace happy endings whereas adult books can be angering and depressing at times with no guarantees that it’s going to work out for the good guy at the end after they go through all the bs of trying to do things right. I will forever be a Harry Potter fan, though the later books do get dark so I have to be in a certain mood to deal with it. The last two always make me cry, but the good guys get to win instead of “well we fixed this one little problem but overall life is still a pain” that even some of the more light hearted adult fiction still end on. Gimme some badass female MC YA stories all day and I will not complain or be ashamed. Gotta mix it in with some grown up action packed adventures and monsters, but I keep coming back to YA when I want to put myself in a good mood and be able to “accomplish” something as I know I can just fly through the book and have finished something.
I was easily in my mid fifties when I started reading The Hunger Games and didn't even realize it was a YA book until I was halfway through it. It was well written and interesting.
I think there is a bigger conversation to be had around YA. As an old lady, I read YA because that is where the female protagonists are at, especially in genres like fantasy and sci-fi. In a lot of instances my options are to read a book about adult men or teenage girls. I don’t know if it is female authors saying they want to write YA or if the publishing industry pushes female authors and protagonists into the YA space, however I suspect the latter happens a lot.
I would suggest trying one of Andre Norton's Witch World books. She was writing about female protagonists in the 60's and 70's. I loved Witch World when I was a kid. You never hear about it anymore. Her books are SciFi and Fantasy.
I like YA the most when I don't know it's labeled as YA. Great video. 😊
I know what you mean!
I'm more inclined to read middle grade than young adult but some of those special edition YA books are so beautiful I'm tempted.
YA, as well as books marketed for even younger readers, are GREAT tools for those who develop literacy in their older years (and those numbers are shocking, btw).
YA is also, to a fairly large extent, a marketing tool by publishers. A story is a story, a book is a book, and what shelf that book is set on and the label on that ahelf doesn't change that fact.
Read whatever you want. When I was a kid, I had full and free access to the entire libraries of every adult in my family - and some of those adults had truly impressive libraries. That's why I'm a well educated person, not because of my schooling. I read some simpler books and some more difficult books, I read fiction and non-fiction, I read the Marquis de Sade (partly, because it was boring) when I was quite young, I read porn and true crime and murder mystery and romance and horror. Then I got taken to used book stores and was handed a basket and told to go pick out what I wanted (God love my granny - she haunted used book stores). That happened quite a bit. Granny never grudged spending $3 or $5 extra in a used book store - and this is back when books there cost A LOT less than they do now. Like when they cost 25 cents or 50 cents. Anyway. My point is, read. Anybody who tells you that you aren't eligible to read a given book when you've reached full adulthood is a fool and they should be ignored. And possibly shunned.
I read all sorts from trash to booker listed. For June on the range last year i read "little house on the prairie" which was really good, one of my reading projects at the mo is reading classic children's books and recently read "Black Beauty" which is perhaps one of the best books from the animals POV and quite shocking even now
That sounds like a fun project! I used to work with someone who was obsessed with Black Beauty. She had hundreds of different editions.
Just remember for our future era (plus or minus the last 50 yrs) … “ If you can read you can learn & if you can’t read it’s harder to learn. “ Growing up, when I really started to read, I read all the Mary Poppins books, many horse books, 99% of the Nancy Drew series, Gone With the Wind in High School & read 3 series of YA starting with Twilight/Harry Potter & The Hunger Games. ( My daughter started with Twilight books because a lot of her friends were reading the Saga. She’d pass her books to me after she read them. She def read Goosebump books during late Elementary & Jr high yrs. Def ppl read whatever you enjoy!! …. Great video, Olly!! Now back to reading, I Let You Go by C. Mackintosh. 👍❤️
I'm 50 and still read YA...in large part because the modern day YA is so much more sophisticated than the Christopher Pike I devoured back in the 80s!
I read some YA, some I really like, some I find too simplistic. Sometimes I find I can't invest in the teen protagonists being almost elderly myself. When I was a teen, YA wasn't a thing, the library had "teen reads" but they didn't interest me, I went from reading kids books to reading adult books with no bridge between. I teach all ages from children to teens to adults and I try to take an interest in what they read, I read Hunger Games and enjoyed it, it reminded me of the Long Walk by Stephen King, which might also be considered YA. I gave up with the Harry Potter series, because I felt the central character Harry had little character development over the first three books (I didn't read any further). I haven't tried Twilight. I really liked V E Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic trilogy (now four books). I don't think we should look down on what anyone else reads, it is great they are reading...if someone prefers Colleen Hoover to Dostoevsky that is not a problem, I'm just happy they are reading. I noticed Harry Potter came in different covers one sort for kids and one for adults.
My favourite series of all time, at the moment is Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward series as it kind of helped me get more into sci-fi as a reader. Of course I loved shows/films like Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who and Space Above and Beyond growing up.
I'm slowly rereading Heinlein's Juveniles. And I'm finding them every bit as entertaining as when I originally read them. Good stuff Olly!
When I was a kid I watched an animated adaptation of Red Planet, and I loved it! So I went to the library and couldn't find and checked another Heinlein novel... and that was written for adults, and it was certainly eye opening.
I just finished a fun YA horror series that contains The Girl From The Well and The Suffering by Rin Chupeco. They were far too scray for teenage me, but very fun and enjoyable for adult me! And I know so many of my friend growing up would have loved them.
I have read YA books but not on purpose. The books were about libraries or some situation that drew me in to the story. I would accidently find those books by using a search bot that would line me up with books that I might be interested in and it turns out I loved them. Of course there are the middle school books that I have always read and continue to read even now along with my adult books. Books like GooseBumps, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, Power Boys, even Tom Swift. I love reading! I do feel funny in public reading these books, even a little embarrassed when my wife sees me reading these. I try to read "real adult books" around my wife and in public. I am 68 years old and yet I still love these books. Probably because they are lacking the sex and adult themes that I can do without. I detest foul language. I do like cozy mysteries and they pretty much use the same guidelines. I enjoyed watching your video saying pretty much how I feel. I didn't realize so many other adult readers are reading YA and middle school stories. Thanks for posting.
Great video as always! I started reading YA again so my niece and I could nerd out about books. The Monster Street series by J.H. Reynolds is a favorite of ours. Very Goosebumps esq and fun!
I just started reading my first Mary Downing Hahn book because I recently finished Blindness by José Saramago and Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan and they were both A LOT to take and I need something cozy. I think YA can make for a great palate cleanser.
That being said, some of my favourite YA novels like Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and The Female of the Species by Mindy MicGinnis are quite the opposite of cozy.
I really like House of Salt and Sorrows and Small Favors by Erin A. Craig and the Wayward Children series by Seanan Mcguire!
I don't care what other people are reading, but I find it difficult - and a bit daunting - to find good books that aren't generic (YA) fantasy books, there are just so, so many... I'm mostly going for classics for that reason, but I always have so lighter entertainment on the go - at the same time or right after.
I read some of the Witcher books and just got tired of the medieval, magical fantasy world... now I can't seem find anything else.
As a young teenager I loved reading YA books from Christopher Pike of The Last Vampire. It was Pike books got me into reading horror.
I don’t really understand when or why the YA designation happened. Most of my life books were just books and everyone read them all.
I'm in my late 30s, I love YA! Especially queer coming of age YA, I never got to read that stuff when I was a kid 💛
Absolutely still read Goosebumps. Both from nostalgia of the ones i read when i was young and the ones i missed. Ps im in my very early 40s.
There is a lot of good ya stuff around and its not all fun and fluff too, there can be some brutal scenes in there ! Mark Lawrence and Barry Lyga are good examples..
Oh my stars, let's just be thankful people are READING. And that's not me complaining about "kids these days", I love movies and TV and games and all that but there are so many benefits specifically from reading that I think we should all try to get some in. It helps to calm us, can make us happy (or provides catharsis depending on what you're into lol), develops our imaginations and uses important parts of our brains together in novel ways, it CAN be inexpensive (if you can avoid those 99p books on Amazon 😉) it's portable, can make us feel less lonely, the list goes on and on. The biggest benefit to me personally has been as a way to help manage my ADHD, now as well as when I was a kid. I'm a bit older and if you grew up in that generation, you KNOW there was no such thing as ADHD in girls back then lol. We just have different symptoms and I did well in school so I went undiagnosed for years and that caused me a lot of distress and heartache. Books were my friends, let my imagination wander in a positive way, made me feel just a little less weird. And for YEARS as an adult, before my diagnosis and as I was first learning to navigate it in a new way, it was impossible to read - I'd read a sentence 5 times and still not know what it said and give up. As I learned strategies to manage it in other ways, I was able to settle enough to start trying to read again and it's been so good for me as an older adult. I could focus for longer and longer (don't get me wrong, it's still not great but so much better) and my mind is less of a mess overall. I've learned so much and it's made me feel better about myself. So yeah, who cares what you read, just read.
I have had less than stellar reading experiences with YA authors and their debut adult novels. I don’t read YA, not a snob thing, I just don't care for the "vibe" as they say.
A buddy of mine, in his fifties, ADD and a reformed meth head, told me what he was reading and listening to--it was YA on both ends. If you know about addicts, they tend to be trapped in the age they entered the drug world.
Oh wow, that's very interesting
For years, I've been saying a good YA book is good for all ages!
I rarely read YA but I do read a far amount of middle-grade books.
I don’t read a lot of YA, but a few years ago I read Pulp by Robin Talley, about two young lesbians in different eras - one the 1950s, the other present day - experiencing pulp gay fiction, and it was brilliant. A genuinely gripping and well-structured story, even though (or especially because) it’s aimed at YAs.
It makes sense to me because teens are only a small percentage of society, whereas adults could be anyone 18+. So there’s just so many more people in their late teens, 20s and 30s than there are people who are 12-17.
Purely from a mathematical point of you that makes a lot of sense!
I watch almost exclusively cartoons. I'm 46. Lol
What's your favorite?
My fav is Ender's Game.
That’s a great book
I started reading YA and just never really stopped. I actually don’t really pay much attention to the age demographics of books anymore, like I understand that a middle grade is a middle grade and a YA is a YA and an Adult is an Adult but but that won’t stop me from picking them up without fear to read. Especially since I think now it’s much more common to have books that are on the border between kids/YA and Adult such as ‘The Darker Shades of Magic’ series by V.E Schwab.
It's also the other way around. I read "Do Androids dream of electric sheep?" when i was 8 years(in 1969) - didn't understand too much of it, but i liked the ending. This way the movie disappointed me a bit. Just 3 weeks before i finished "UBIK". It was fun again. "Do androids..." led me to SF and to Ballard, Lem, Strugatzki, Frederic Brown. These guys almost never disappoint.
I don't read it out of snobbishness, but because most of it is fantasy and horror, which the vast majority of is average.
Great video and totally agree. One of my favorite books/trilogies of the past few years is the Illuminae books by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Not only very good, but the presentation is great. It is written as a mix of transcripts from security cameras, text messages, computer readouts and other “gathered” files to tell what happened. Great stuff.
Fedling guilty. I'm in my 40s and still read ya. I prefer books for adults but reading ya books sometimes out of curiousity and that I sometimes get books from publishers since I run a book blog. But stay away from tiktok books since I don't use tiktok and those books has been a miss for me.
Churchill used to watch Marx Brothers movies to relax.
I typically prefer more challenging reads but without my YA and middle grade, I wouldn't be able to decompress between the classics. I find YA and middle grade essential to my reading rotations. I really love that feeling of reading something in one sitting.
I wonder how many of those that read YA read it because they are easier to read and faster paced.
Been getting a vicarious kick out of seeing you enjoy the Goosebumps books.
They’re so much fun
I'm a retired librarian, and I read YA because it tends to be less objectionable than a lot of adult fiction. Unfortunately, these days the language and situations in YA are often just as bad as in adult novels.
I enjoy these books too. The language is sad
YA is trash. Even my kids don’t read it. I mean, read what you dig, but don’t pretend like it’s War and Peace.
I DNFed War and Peace. 😂
You’re totally wrong unless your kids are in the genius category. IMO! 🤔🤔 But - to each their on.
There are people out there who think War and Peace is trash. It doesn't make one person right and the other wrong. As mentioned in the video, everyone should read what they enjoy...not what others tell them they should enjoy.
I would argue that you and your kids just haven’t found the right YA novel to get into.
Do you read or collect comics and graphic novels? Plenty of those would be considered YA now.
@@amberlimbaugh Amen