Books

Young Adult Lit

I read a lot of young adult literature even though I’m an adult. Keep in Mind that I also read a lot of adult books and the odd volume strait out of a section far “too young” for me.

I am not ashamed of this!

I never will be, either. Good stuff lies in those sections, some that connects with my youth and some of it that just gives me hope because kids read this stuff.

Tamara Peirce, for example, is amazing. I love tortall and have no plans to leave it anytime soon. I don’t understand why she hasn’t gotten the attention that J. K. Rowlings got for Harry Potter. She has good plots and rounder characters than jk does.

Meg Cabot is another good example. I had a rough time in middle and high school. The kind of time that makes me act crazy during movies like the Breakfast Club that make believe that cliques are good for us even when we’re “all the same”. I felt like Mia a lot back then. Sometimes even in my day to day life. I think it’s healthy for me to find a character that helps me work through all of those negative emotions and find a positive spin for that part of my life.

And finally, a nostalgia author for me. Everyone should read Erickson’s Hank the Cowdog books when they’re 10 or younger, and then revisit them at 30. I want a kid to read these to. They’re incredible fun and beg to be read aloud.

In short: Don’t let a shelf classification keep you from reading anything, ever. Sometimes you don’t want 1000 pages of dancing dragons. Sometimes you only want 100 pages where the dragon dosent turn anybody into a cinder (calling on dragons, perhaps, when you need a break from Martin’s epic A Dance of Dragons). They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but don’t judge it by its page count, either!

Kitsu’s Afternoon “News” – Award winning children’s book on Evolution shunned by US Publishing

Originally reported by Discovery News in their blog on 16 September 2011. That’s right, this one is actually current. But I saw this and felt that it deserved to be covered quickly and not wait around while I worked through a backlog of less pressing issues.

Evolution: How we and all living things came to be (Book by Brian Loxton)

If ever you wonder why US children score so much lower on science related tests, you just have to look at the situation surrounding Mr. Loxton’s book. Normally books about evolution can find publishers pretty easily. A good example is Biologist Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” which was published by Free Press of New York, NY. But American publishers, the same publishers who also published Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” decided that a book on evolution targeted at ages 8-13 was “too hot a topic”. It wasn’t until Canada’s Kids Can Press stepped up and hit the go button on the publication that the book received a Lane Anderson Award nomination and was a finalist for the Silver Birch Award.

How could American publishers decline to publish such a well received work? Since when are book publishers supposed to decide what is and isn’t a controversy? Arn’t they supposed to be selecting books worthy of publication rather than books worthy of publication without causing the lunatic religious left to make a big stink?

Heaven forbid science and pre-teens go together and we start teaching your children to think and examine what they read. Heaven forbid we start to teach them to examine theories and controversies for themselves and expand their brains instead of only teaching them what’s “safe” and “not too hot”.