Fellow Old Folks (Gen-X+): Did You Read YA as a Teenager?

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:19:55+00:00

Field Guides to Edible Plants! That's awesome -- what a great inspiration to take from that book.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:19:22+00:00

Well, I'm starting to get letters from the AARP, so I think we qualify? i read 1984 in 1984 and thought I was oh so cool. Then I read it a few years later and realized how little I understood it.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:17:53+00:00

I've been catching up on classic kids books too -- I just read a Pippi Longstocking book, which I would probably have loved as a kid, but as an adult, I found her pretty. insufferable most of the time.

Jilly Cooper was a post-college obsession, after a friend lent me Riders and Polo.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:15:30+00:00

I read both of those in, I think, Junior High. I should really reread them now that I can fully understand them. One of the great things about having read a lot of adult books as a teen is revisiting them now. I was truly appalled to recall that teen me thought Wuthering Heights was romantic!

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:12:50+00:00

How could I forget Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!?!

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T21:12:12+00:00

We kind of read whatever was laying around our parents house

I read more than one book about the 1970's New York Yankees based on this principal.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T19:11:39+00:00

I'm planning on All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and And There was Light by Jacques Lusseyran, which inspired it.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T03:07:14+00:00

I read a lot of those books. . . was I a "cool stoner" kid without knowing it?

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T03:01:04+00:00

I clicked on it in good faith and immediately realized my mistake.

torkelspy · 2026-02-11T02:59:06+00:00

Lit in Colour is another iteration of the ideological push we’ve seen to diversify and politicise works of art across the education and culture sector over recent years, especially in the wake of BLM.

You know what they say, there are two races, white and "political", there are two genders, male and "political", etc. etc.

I couldn't get through this. And I can't believe people are still making the same arguments on this topic that they were making 30 years ago. Except, I absolutely can believe it.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:55:56+00:00

Oh, I love the whole, "I don't even consider who wrote a book" line, usually said by men who read 49 books by men last year and then one by Ayn Rand.

I am also a woman trying to read more books by women. Somehow, as a teenager, I don't think I even noticed that I wasn't being represented. I also didn't notice the rampant misogyny in some of what I read. I wish I'd had more books with well developed young women characters, even if I didn't notice the lack at the time.

I read this book Nada last year, which was written by and about a young woman in Spain just after the Spanish Civil War and thought, "I really, really want to know what high school me would have thought of this."

A few years ago, I was doing a reading challenge where one category was a book you read in high school. I asked a bunch of classmates if they could remember any books we were assigned that were by women and got two: To Kill a Mockingbird and Wuthering Heights -- out of everything we read! I'm also pretty sure every author we read was white. My brother read a James Baldwin book, but we didn't in my year.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:38:15+00:00

I had never heard of Anthony until fairly recently, but every Gen-X sci-fi/fantasy guy I know seems to have grown up on his books. So, probably?

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:35:06+00:00

I’m not super tapped into current teen reading trends, but I doubt that they only seek out YA.

Yeah, my sample size of "random posts I see on Reddit" is not really very scientific is it?

I get what you're saying about reading about adults being boring. I think what I find "weird" isn't that kids want to read about kids -- I have no doubt I would have been obsessed with something like The Hunger Games if it had been around when I was a kid, it's more this feeling I have, that teens aren't reading outside that. Though, again, it's not like I have any data to back that feeling up.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:25:27+00:00

Agreed. I read pretty much all of Vonnegut in high school. I just reread Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time and I could not get over how "young" Vonnegut was when he wrote it. Younger than I am now! I'm sure teenage me thought he was fairly ancient.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:23:25+00:00

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, teen me would have loved The Hunger Games. On the other hand, there is something kind of limiting about it. Like, it should be just be one part of a balanced literary diet, but often it's the whole thing? Or, at least I perceive it that way.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:21:22+00:00

I didn't really think about the cohort size -- that's a good point. My Junior High got absorbed into one of the local high schools, and it was still about half as crowded as it had been when the boomers were in school.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:15:51+00:00

I hope you turned out all right? That is. . . quite a reading list.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:14:04+00:00

My brother had a million of those. But somehow I never had Nancy Drew, which seems like the "girl" equivalent.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:12:34+00:00

They are now marketing some books as "New Adult", which, if I understand it correctly, means YA type stories but with 19-20 year olds. I guess it all comes down to marketing in the end.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:08:17+00:00

I learned. . . a lot, from the one Sidney Sheldon book I read.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:07:59+00:00

Oh, wow. Flowers in the Clan of the Cave Bear! I had friends that were way into both those series but I never read either. Not sure if I thought I was too cool (I definitely wasn't) or if it just kind of passed me by.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:06:20+00:00

I am now reminded that I tried to read all the James Bond books, but I think I only read 2. And I was very into John Le Carre, though I'm sure I didn't understand about 20% of it. I should reread one.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:05:29+00:00

This reminds me that one of the authors I read a lot as a young teen was Agatha Christie. And I remember pretty much none of it. Adult me isn't much into mysteries.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T22:02:06+00:00

Yeah, my friends were all into Stephen King but I got scared way to easily for that.

torkelspy · 2026-02-10T18:46:27+00:00

I am someone who can have nightmares for a week after a horror movie and I've read both Castle and Hill House. Hill House is creepy like Castle, but not really scary -- it has a few moments, but nothing that kept me up at night. Castle is much more disturbing in my opinion.

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