What books are we reading at the moment ?

[citoyen]

Back in the mid-to-late-80s, when I was a callow youth, I was similarly indiscriminate in my reading habits, but nothing could have induced me to read Thomas Hardy. I'm also kind of glad I didn't discover Joyce until I was a bit more grown up. Aged 15, I was mostly into Sue Townsend, Tom Sharpe and John Le Carré, as far as I can recall.

My sister was a big fan of Judy Blume. I read a few of her books myself and mostly liked them, though being a boy I found some aspects of them a bit icky.

Yes, YA is surely nothing more than a marketing term to make stuff saleable that no one would touch with a shitty barge pole otherwise.

[Ruthie]

Ursula le Guinn's Earthsea was aimed at YAs, wasn't it?  And The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which I loved.  I'd gladly read those again tomorrow.  I was reading Hardy, too, and enjoying it, in my teens.

Divergent wasn't even comparable.

[tiermat]

Gave up on REdeployment, and switched to The Girl on the Train Much, much better.

[fuzzy]

Harry Harrison wrote what I think is adult fiction with a slant towards the sort of young adult he wanted to be.

The Stainless Steel Rat books were/ are a great read for proper grown ups but I discovered them as a callow yoof. Deathworld was on the same spectrum.

[andrewc]

I'm currently re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, as a warm up for the sequel Echopraxia.

This is not your typical humans meet aliens first contact story...... the "humans" are not quite baseline and the aliens are very alien indeed.

Now onto Echopraxia......... it has vampires......and zombies........

[redshift]

What did young adults read before young adult fiction was invented?

I think I more or less surfed that wave as it came in:  Tolkien, but not Lewis whose work I disliked.  Alan Garner (obviously) starting with the Weirdstone, the Owl Service and Red Shift - why use a hundred words when one will do (have you read Thursbitch)? That led to things like T W Rolleston's Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race, and Frazer's Golden Bough.  By then I was no longer what could be described as the target market for YA books.

I did once read a couple of USAnian YA fiction books by a chap called Paul Zindel.  'Pardon me, you're stepping on my eyeball' was one of them.  Interesting contrast with British writers and references, but it didn't help the disconnection yawning gulf that separated me from most of my peers.

[TheLurker]

What did young adults read before young adult fiction was invented?

....reading adult literature?

Ummm, think you answered your own q. 

I read pretty much _anything_ I could get my hands on, from Dad's pulp westerns (J. T. Edson anebode?), kids stuff (Victorian to modern),  "thrillers" by the likes of Hammond Innes, "classics" such as c dickens & j austen f'rinstance.  Not forgetting lots and lots and _lots_ of sci-fi, eg Silverberg, Asimov, Heinlein, Budrys. ect ect ect.

I don't think I was unusual, and I suspect that modern young adults, adult? hah! ,  bibliovores are probably doing much the same only now they've got a extra advertising thrown at them.

Anyway the reason I dropped by,  "The Compleet Molesworth" (for the umpteenth time) cheers cheer cheers.

P.S.
Thomas Hardy? Dear God NO!  You're just sitting there watching the light at the end of the tunnel turn into an oncoming train from page 1.

[Karla]

What did young adults read before young adult fiction was invented?

....reading adult literature?

Ummm, think you answered your own q. 

I read pretty much _anything_ I could get my hands on, from Dad's pulp westerns (J. T. Edson anebode?), kids stuff (Victorian to modern),  "thrillers" by the likes of Hammond Innes, "classics" such as c dickens & j austen f'rinstance.  Not forgetting lots and lots and _lots_ of sci-fi, eg Silverberg, Asimov, Heinlein, Budrys. ect ect ect.

They do ECT in The Bell Jar IIRC.  Did you read that too?

Oh, you mean Et Cetera.  Sorry 

(Since I'm in here, I may as well clock in with Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon.  It's too early to tell but I'll probably like the story if I can keep track of all the characters, otherwise I'll resort to basking in phraseology as the geekish prose washes over me.)

[T42]

What did young adults read before young adult fiction was invented?

Whatever we could get our hands on.  Which is a shame, really, since a lot of stuff rolls off at that age. You can't detest Kafka properly until you're grown up.

[Dibdib]

Next up, some more Pratchett I think.

I'm about a quarter of the way through Eric. It's strange reading a book which doesn't take two months to get through!

[citoyen]

You can't detest Kafka properly until you're grown up.

 

Works the other way too - I remember trying to read Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy when I was 14 because my dad had told me it was very funny. I just found it boring and it put me off reading any more Waugh for years. Rediscovered it in my late 20s and found it hilarious.

[Ham]

Some books are better left for different ages. Having discovered books quite early in life, I turned voracious, starting with fairy stories, graduating to myths and legends and pretty much anything on the junior library shelves, a the rate of about four each day. Some well meaning soul mentioned Edgar Allan Poe to me. Not finding it on the shelves or the catalogue I was a little mystified. I presented myself at the counter to see if it could be reserved, I suppose I must have been about 7 or 8 at the time.

The librarian explained that it was in the adult library, but could be reserved. So I did. I only found out years later that she then toddled off to my dad (she knew where he worked), to ask if it was appropriate for me to read. Bastard said yes.

I still remember the emotion of the Poe fuelled dreams.

[perpetual dan]

Reading my anniversary present: "my cool shed" 

[andrewc]

I'm currently re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, as a warm up for the sequel Echopraxia.

This is not your typical humans meet aliens first contact story...... the "humans" are not quite baseline and the aliens are very alien indeed.

Now onto Echopraxia......... it has vampires......and zombies........

Fuck,   Mr Watts doesn't seem to believe in happy endings....

2 very good books.  Recommended.  You can download Blindsight for free from the authors website http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Edit: Now I've finished it I can read the reviews.  From Locus: "Peter Watts is some precisely engineered hybrid of Lucius Shepard and Gregory Benford, lyrical yet hard-edged, purveyor of sleek surfaces and also the ethical and spiritual contents inside.'

It's nearly 3 decades since I read Life During Wartime & The Jaguar Hunter 

[citoyen]

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - Stieg Larsson

Kind of compelling, but also kind of tedious. I'm glad there aren't any more in the series after this one. Not quite halfway through it but so far it feels more like an extended postscript to the second book than a novel in its own right.

The average page count of the last four books I've read including this one is over 600. I really need to read something shorter next, for the sake of my sanity.

[tiermat]

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee.

Very very well written, from a first person perspective. Story of a near-future USA where the Americans appear to have pretty much all died out or left and the Chinese have taken over.

[T42]

You can't detest Kafka properly until you're grown up.

 

Works the other way too - I remember trying to read Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy when I was 14 because my dad had told me it was very funny. I just found it boring and it put me off reading any more Waugh for years. Rediscovered it in my late 20s and found it hilarious.

Wonderful. "It was done by an effort" still comes out (so to speak) in our conversations occasionally.

The Loved One was filmed with Robert Morley in the 60s. Must dig that up some time.

[ian]

I did finish The Bone Clocks the other week and even though I read it under the influence of Citoyen's evil mind control, I did quite enjoy it. You'll be pleased to know I'm not going to do any more of those that David Mitchell jokes (not getting a rise there, but I got you a while back with Lionel Shriver, which is always a dead cert to get a 'he's a she' correction).

I did try Annihilation which was mentioned up-thread, as it sounded kind of eerie but I gave up about 30% in on the grounds that it seemed to be pages of glassy description and a character I just didn't care about, whose interactions were just odd. My eyes kept sliding to the bottom of each page. Once I start skimming, it's probably time to move onto something else.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

I did once read a couple of USAnian YA fiction books by a chap called Paul Zindel.  'Pardon me, you're stepping on my eyeball' was one of them.  Interesting contrast with British writers and references, but it didn't help the disconnection yawning gulf that separated me from most of my peers.

Oh, me too. I'd forgotten those completely.

I read Judy Blume, Stephen King, Tolkien, some of the Sweet Valley series and another similar series I forget the name of, lots of Dennis Wheatley, and whatever else I could get from the library. We did some of the Kevin and Sadie books at school. There have always been Young Adult books, they just used to label the shelves as 12-16.

[Kim]

The Bible.  Much-anticipated 20 years overdue Moore's-Law-compliant third edition.  Looking good so far.

(This is probably a good time to bag a cheap copy of the Second Edition if you've ever found yourself needing to design a circuit and don't already own one.)

[TheLurker]

The Bible.  Much-anticipated 20 years overdue Moore's-Law-compliant third edition.  Looking good so far.

(This is probably a good time to bag a cheap copy of the Second Edition if you've ever found yourself needing to design a circuit and don't already own one.)

Goodness.  That's _still_ being published!?  I blew the dust off my '84 copy the other day and had a flick through it and wondered whether or not to keep it.  It went back on the shelf.  You never know....

[Kim]

The Bible.  Much-anticipated 20 years overdue Moore's-Law-compliant third edition.  Looking good so far.

(This is probably a good time to bag a cheap copy of the Second Edition if you've ever found yourself needing to design a circuit and don't already own one.)

Goodness.  That's _still_ being published!?  I blew the dust off my '84 copy the other day and had a flick through it and wondered whether or not to keep it.  It went back on the shelf.  You never know....

Oh yes.  It has a cult following on account of being full of distilled practical wisdom, rather than the usual collection of impressive looking maths that might come up in the exam that you tend to find in most general electronics textbooks.

I borrowed the second (1989) edition from one of the lab techs when I was in the sixth form, and read vast swathes of it after I'd swatted up on whatever it was I needed for the project I was doing.  It's fantastically readable.

The third edition brings it up to date with all that's changed in microcontrollers, FETs, serial busses, power supply design, etc in the last 25 years.  More than justifies the shelf space.  (Indeed, there's so much *different* material, that I'll be hanging on to the second edition for the foreseeable future.  You never know.)

The preface strongly implies that they're not planning on writing another one, if that wasn't obvious enough from the binary exponential nature of the publishing dates

[perpetual dan]

The Bible.  Much-anticipated 20 years overdue Moore's-Law-compliant third edition.  Looking good so far.

(This is probably a good time to bag a cheap copy of the Second Edition if you've ever found yourself needing to design a circuit and don't already own one.)

Goodness.  That's _still_ being published!?  I blew the dust off my '84 copy the other day and had a flick through it and wondered whether or not to keep it.  It went back on the shelf.  You never know....

I still have my copy. Don't do much electronics these days, but you never know...

[Deano]

What exactly is the deal with teen young adult fiction? No this isn't stand up, I'm genuinely a bit confused, because it's everywhere. What did young adults read before young adult fiction was invented? How did they survive before we manufactured a genre that didn't solely feature them?

As an young teenager in the early 1980s I very much enjoyed the 'young adult' fiction of Bernard Ashley (Terry on the Fence and Break in the Sun were two favourites) and Joan Lingard's Kevin and Sadie books. Not that new.

I really enjoyed Robert Westall in the eighties. The Machine Gunners was on the telly, and our primary school teacher was from Tyneside so could do the right accents when he read it to us.

It was clearly aimed at a young audience, and I went on to Fathom Five, Scarecrows. I'm sure I have a copy of Futuretrack 5 somewhere, that was a fabulous dystopian novel.

[pcolbeck]

Life - Keith Richards

Gotta love Keef and this is lucid, sharp, funny and entertaining.