See, my copies of Grimm's and Andersen were NOT watered down, my mom bought them from the Sci-Fi book club.
But reality's been pretty dark for a long time. I was a teenager in the Eighties, and what was popular when I was in high school was V.C. Andrews. And what I was made to read in high school wasn't Grimm's or L.M. Montgomery, those were for /children/. (Although, yes, the point of a great deal of that were for consequences. And Anne mostly didn't have dire ones. She had to be grateful to someone she didn't like, she didn't get to talk to her friend for a while, and she had to have her hair cut off. Not very dire.)
These are teenagers. When I was a teenager, in school, I had to read the 'classics'. All of my first semester of American Lit seemed to be about adultery, and for World Lit, I can tell you, Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley aren't exactly light-hearted. Or the Brontes.
Although, your point about wanting to read about people entirely unlike you does explain the current YA trend of people dealing with the supernatural. Vampires are popular, and werewolves, and witchcraft. But by the same token, these things have been popular for a long time. Which is why I think that article is crap. Any teenager who reads a book and then tries to reenact it has bigger problems than that they read dark literature, and blaming teenage behavior on the books they read is like saying that J.D. Salinger is responsible for any murderer who ever fixated on that godawful "Catcher in the Rye."
(I do apologize if I'm terribly abrasive about this, it's just that I /resent/ the implications that teenagers should dumb down their reading levels to make adults more comfortable.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-06-08 07:27 pm (UTC)But reality's been pretty dark for a long time. I was a teenager in the Eighties, and what was popular when I was in high school was V.C. Andrews. And what I was made to read in high school wasn't Grimm's or L.M. Montgomery, those were for /children/. (Although, yes, the point of a great deal of that were for consequences. And Anne mostly didn't have dire ones. She had to be grateful to someone she didn't like, she didn't get to talk to her friend for a while, and she had to have her hair cut off. Not very dire.)
These are teenagers. When I was a teenager, in school, I had to read the 'classics'. All of my first semester of American Lit seemed to be about adultery, and for World Lit, I can tell you, Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley aren't exactly light-hearted. Or the Brontes.
Although, your point about wanting to read about people entirely unlike you does explain the current YA trend of people dealing with the supernatural. Vampires are popular, and werewolves, and witchcraft. But by the same token, these things have been popular for a long time. Which is why I think that article is crap. Any teenager who reads a book and then tries to reenact it has bigger problems than that they read dark literature, and blaming teenage behavior on the books they read is like saying that J.D. Salinger is responsible for any murderer who ever fixated on that godawful "Catcher in the Rye."
(I do apologize if I'm terribly abrasive about this, it's just that I /resent/ the implications that teenagers should dumb down their reading levels to make adults more comfortable.)