reads like  teen spirit  an ode to young adult fiction  by Yee-Fan Sun | 1 2 3

Take a look next to my bed, and you’ll always find a stack of books, each with a bookmark tucked partway through the volume, all at varying stages of being read or re-read. At any given moment, there’ll be a Contemporary Great (serious stuff, brainy stuff, the sort that all the critics are currently waxing rhapsodic over), a  Classic Great (same as above, only old), generally an Overrated Classic (one of those books I bought ages ago, because everyone told me how phenomenal it was, only four years later and I still can’t force myself to read it all the way through, though I valiantly continue to torture myself to the finish because I’m bewildered by how all those smart people could be so wrong), maybe some non-fiction as well.  Right now, for instance, there’s Don DeLillo’s White Noise (overrated), buried beneath J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (classic) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (contemporary), all sitting atop a fat, weighty textbook on evolutionary biology (this last, my attempt to get a clue about what it is that that my grad student boy actually does with his non-hanging-out-with-me time). These are my Real Books, the ones I’ll tell my friends I’m reading should dinner party conversations veer towards the literary.

But sharing that night-table space with all that certified, snob-approved Literature, there’ll always be a thin, pocket-sized paperback book hiding near the back, its spine gently broken, the corners worn down, cover faded, the pages beginning to wiggle loose. There’ll generally be a teenage girl illustrated on the cover, or sometimes a boy, looking serious, and thoughtful, and earnest. These books will probably never be discussed in a college English lecture, or over-analyzed in a term paper; many are so long-forgotten that they’re out of print and impossible to find at most bookstores. But truth be told, they’re the books I love best, the ones I find myself turning to when I’m a little blue and looking for comfort in a good, familiar read. They’re my young adult books, those slim little paperbacks you’d find tucked away at the back of the bookstore, on the edge of the children’s section, if you ever ventured that far from where the literature meant for grown-ups like yourself generally lives, that is.

mosey along this way for more!

---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home .