orangedragonfly: Welcome! And thanks so much for buying my book. I hope you like it.

You’re definitely not the only one. The vast majority of what I read is YA and most of it is amazing. Like the Jaclyn Moriartiy I’m reading right now. She’s hilarious. One of the funniest books I’ve read in years. I pass ‘em along to my mum, too.

Yup, no one know what all kids want, or all Australians, or all girls called Samantha, or all anyones. Generalisations blow!

anyway, i just wanted to add my two cents. i’m 27 years old, and i read *a lot*. i’ve been a reader pretty much forever..when i was a kid i got in trouble a lot for reading in bed with a flashlight when i was supposed to be asleep. anyway, now i’m an “adult”…and almost always i find myself reading ya books. why? because they’re almost always *better*. good stories, good writing…just my opinion, of course. and i’m not the only one. i share my books with my mom!

and if i could add my own rant: i despise when adults make generalized declarations about “what kids want.” especially because half the time you find out it’s an adult who has no connection with kids whatsoever. i worked at a camp for a few summers after college and was disgusted to learn that 15 of 20 of the board members–the people making decisions about how the camp should be run–had *never* been to camp!! i don’t get it…

so, newspapers are less relevant because they’re bottom-line driven? perhaps it’s because journalists are fantastically incompetent. indeed, every time i see an article about anything i have any expertise in, this incompetence is glaring.

it took me 3 minutes of googling to find this.

and btw, the new potter book was only 4% of the total children’s books, so don’t go telling me it’s all rowling.

My new thesis: “The LA Times needs to be more selective with its slush pile.”

Sherwood: Oh, yeah, the article’s total dreck, but sometimes the shooting of the fishies in the barrels is just fun.

Jennifer: Oops. I was johnny-come-lately, wasn’t I? Sorry!

Jenny D: But it’s fun! I haven’t had a good cathartic rant in ages. [inhales. exhales. thumps chest] I feel so much better!

I am so unsurprised. That quote makes no sense at all in the article.

Rather randomly, I heard John Carroll (the eminent newspaper guy quoted near the end of the piece) give a talk a few weeks ago that was probably more or less the same as the one described here. And it is RIDICULOUSLY irresponsible to just import his point about corporate ownership to book publishers; his point is something quite different, which has to do with what happens to reporting (particularly to staff, as the paper’s most expensive resource) in the current age in which not just corporations but massive mutual funds hold large tranches of shares of newspaper-owning groups. He is concerned about the changing role of reporting in a free society (i.e. no longer the old-school model of a Kentucky newspaper keeping a loss-making bureau in a mine town to keep the mine-owners up to the mark), and for this writer to just invoke the point breezily as if it’s exactly the same thing is careless to say the least!

And the wholesale sniffery about packaging is ridiculous. No, risible. Yes, risible. Ha ha Mr. Packager-Writers-Are-All-the-Same. You try using risible in a sentence.

But, yes, that position is vastly preferable to Wolf’s idea that books should be good for you. Gag.

I’m quite happy with my moral fibre also.

i’m getting so sick of the people who piss and moan about the quality of children’s books today, decaying moral fibre, blah blah blah. particularly because most of them HAVEN’T READ SAID BOOKS. and it’s not like anyone would go “ohh, i think the dreadful standard of modern contemporary literature is decaying our moral fibre”. okay, so maybe they would. but not nearly as many people would take them seriously. i read an awful lot of books for teens. and my moral fibre is just fine, thank you.

however, having said that, this comment from him:
“young readers, more than any others, want to be transported and shown not just other lives but whole worlds utterly different from their own” is i think an interesting rebuttal to the naomi wolfs of this world…

food for thought.