As I posted last week, starting Monday I declare the entire children/YA portion of the litblogosphere to enjoy a week of posting loud and long about those things that have been driving them crazy in the publishing world. I've already mentioned a few controversies out there that can be discussed further, but if you're still wondering what to write about, consider these subjects:

1. Roger posted last week that he felt branding in YA literature was no different than that in a Judith Kranz novel. (I'm not so sure comparing teen books to Kranz was the best thing to do but I get his point.) He picked up on this from an article in the NYT which wasn't really bashing the idea either, but still it has gotten some folks talking. The thing is, pretty much all of this branding is for wildly expensive things so it's not like teens are drinking "Pepsi" vs "Mountain Dew". Is it okay to toss around big ticket items in a book for 15 year olds? You decide.

2. Building a bit on that discussion, Carlie linked to an article in a parenting site about how teen books were better in the good old days in terms of diversity and attention to class then they are today. This is a touchy subject and I think a lot of people will come down on all sides of it but I do have to say while I'm not looking for a way back machine and would certainly not say teen or kid books were better at any specific time, I also think there are some problems today particularly when it comes to class representation. Feel free to weigh in with your opinions next week.

3. And there's the New Yorker article on "The Battle for Children's Literature". Neil Gaiman pulled out this quote from the famous Katherine White which I think is interesting:

It has always seemed to us that boys and girls who are worth their salt begin at twelve or thirteen to read, with a brilliant indiscrimination, every book they can lay their hands on. In the welter, they manage to read some good ones. A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens; and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as “suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.� Their implication is that everything else is distinctly unsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn’t so simple.

Gaiman then points to his own interview in the current issue of Locus (not online, alas) and paraphrases with this:

I was interviewed in Locus this month (the one with Garth Nix on the cover), and tried to say something very much the same about Young Adult fiction: that young adults (and older kids) should be reading everything, relentlessly. They should be reading outside their comfort zones, because the training wheels have come off, and that's the only way they'll find out where their comfort zones are, reading everything.

And all this kinda leads to the big age-banding controversy that has been going on in the UK and whether MG and YA are real ages and if they mean anything and what constitutes proper literature for teens - as in should a book like the Freedom Writers Diary which is written by and about real life teenagers be banned because it is too graphic for other teens to read?

The head spins from all those possibilities.

4. Finally, the immortal summer reading list. Several bloggers have been talking about dull books put on summer reading lists by out of touch teachers who seem to want to ignore contemporary YA lit in favor of old standbys. I'll one up this and ask how on earth F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway became the dead white male authors of choice for American Lit classes everywhere (along with Faulkner and maybe Tennessee Williams and several other familiar names). Are adult books like these better for teens to read and discuss than contemporary authors they might have more in common with? Are we so afraid that teens might ignore the classics that we feel we have to assign them and force the issue? Would it be okay to leave Hemingway to college classes?

I don't know. I only know I still hate The Great Gatsby and there is a certain American Lit teacher in Florida that I will aways blame for that.

Post away next week. I have a short casual interview with Jenny Davidson on what it is like for an adult author to write for teens and will chime in with some thoughts on class/race etc in contemporary YA books. This is just a big friendly week of discussion folks - just a chance to bounce ideas off each other.