A Library-Fueled Post

I have been chased all over West Bend, looking for a place to sit, knit, and write. I came into town to run some errands, went to the library to pick up some books (about knitting) and then headed to a coffee shop for a pleasant even of knitting, writing, and knitting while writing. (This is my favorite way to write. Type a bit, sit back, knit until the perfect next sentence comes to me. Repeat.) I settled in, only to find out they were closing in five minutes. I woefully packed up and headed over to the yarn store. They had closed an hour ago. Come on, West Bend, us hard-working 8-5ers need a place to hang out too! So, lacking knowledge of any other coffee shops, and lacking willingness to buy another mug of tea that I didn’t want just for the privilege of being in one, I have once again taken refuge in my usual spot, the library. (I snuck in so they wouldn’t recognize me entering the library twice in one hour.) I am now camped out in the back, in the young adult section, which ironically or sadly seems to be the least populated place in the building.

I am back here because I like to watch teenagers. Call me a creepy creeper if you like, but I find them fascinating. I was such a self-conscious teen, embarrassed by everything from my parents to the books I read to my hair, so I like to see teens like this, and wish that I could assure them that they will someday feel comfortable in their own skin. I am also interested in those teens who seem to have it all together, perfect hair, makeup and clothes by the age of twelve, because I know that they probably feel just as fractured inside as the embarrassed kids. I spent so much of my life being made to feel small by these little fashion models that I enjoy being able to be around them and not feel intimidated. They just seem so young, silly, and precious in a way.

I am also back here because I love young adult fiction, and I like to see what kids are reading these days. A random selection of the books placed out for easy perusal leaves me unimpressed: a book about a teenage girl who somehow finds her way into the body of the most popular girl at school, another about a boy who befriends and then becomes the target on a bully, and a fantasy novel that seems extremely unextraordinary. Where is the Rosemary Sutcliff, the Megan Whalen Turner, and the Dianna Wynne Jones that I grew up on? Sometimes I want to become a librarian just I can keep crap out of the YA section.

I don’t understand why teens are expected to like books about messed up teens. For me, in the past and in the present, reading is about story. It is about creating another world, (or recreating the world of the past, as my love of historical fiction can testify,) it is about discovering interesting characters full of depth who inhabit this world, and, most importantly, reading is about good writing. I like almost any genre, as long as the writing is good.

In contrast, I find books about and for modern teens to almost always been depressing, if not outright boring. The books that pop into my mind are “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which I read in college, and “Alice, I think,” which I read recently at the suggestion of (you guessed it!) a teen. They are both about kids who are about 15-16 who go about their lives being angsty and depressed, experimenting with drugs, sex and alcohol, and generally embodying the adolescent stereotype.

Who in the world wants to read about this? I know that some kids like to read books with characters who are like themselves, but really, if you were going through any of the things that the kids in these books were going through, would you really want to spend your time off from your angsty life reading about someone else’s angsty life?

I admit to never having felt like a torment teen. When I read books like this, instead of feeling comforted that someone understood me, I thought “oh, am I supposed to be feeling this? What am I missing?” These books in fact gave me permission and encouragement to be unhappy as a teenager, since, obviously, everyone else was doing it. Reading depressing books like this now just makes me feel fed up. Did the authors not work through their teenage years with enough oomph that they now need to write about them to fulfill their dark depressed destiny? And why are the libraries filled with terrible books like this?

It’s enough to make me want to have kids, just so I can read to them all the books that my own mother spent hours reading to me as a kid: Jane Eyre, Warrior Scarlet, the Enchanted Forrest Chronicles, Eagle of the Ninth, The Chronicles of Narnia, Great Expectations, and dozens of others I have forgotten yet will never forget. I want to deluge kids with books filled with intriguing stories, complex characters, and beautiful worlds. I want them to see books, not as an escape from the world, but yet not as another way to trudge angrily through it. I want them to see reading as another way to enjoy and experience the world they are in, so that they will never, ever, stop reading.