Assignment 7

This dystopian flowchart is just down my alley -- It will help me choose more books.. I have  read a lot of the more notable dystopian works. I have tried to read quite a few more of them but many are poorly written, improbable or contain worlds which just bore me to death and I do not continue. The other day I was scanning the new Y fiction and noticed that probably a good half of it was either dystopian, paranormal romance  or paranormal fiction. (Privately, I think this is an unfortunate trend -- People can profit from reading about real world problems and solutions as well -- of how all age groups can contribute to a less dystopian world. But it is the market right now.)  So far, for me, aside from the Hunger Games, the best dystopian reads have been Shusterman's Unwind series, Divergent series by Veronica Roth, and the Shipbreaker series by Bacigalupi. I have not enjoyed any of the strange "world without love" or arranged marriage series such as Matched, Wither or Delirium. I have also just finished the 5th Wave which received excellent reviews but, for me , was just meh -- I am just not that invested in the characters. 


I have a lot of reservations about New Adult as a distinct category -- I have read a little of it and it is basically just  poorly written fiction about young adults. People 18-24 are fully capable of reading and comprehending any books that older adults read -- they can also  appreciate and criticize and learn from these books -- Books are our extensions into worlds, ideas, emotions, solutions, etc, which we have not yet nor may  ever experience. New Adult fiction does not provide this very special leap into the unknown--it does not particulary inspire deep thought nor does it broaden our experiences and open new worlds. There is nothing wrong with New Adult books, but there is nothing particularly special that I can see about them either--As reads they are usually well below a young adult reader's capabilities, but all of us read below our levels at times. I guess carving out a category for them is a good marketing technique and is a good way for authors and publishers to make extra money.It is possible to write absolutely brilliant young adult books-- but, I think, by definition, the New Adult category is just too poorly defined and  written to order to ever produce absolutely inspirational literature, full of new experiences and ideas to ponder. It falls more into the genre of Romance or cozy Mystery or not so good fiction. (btw,in response to the last paragraph of this article,  I do not think that John Green's novels should go anywhere near 50 shades or NA fiction -- I mean he is an excellent writer,  his dialog is stunning , his characters are superbly defined; nor do I think that NA fiction should be thrown into the same dump as 50 which is rather shoddily written erotica. Throw all the poorly written erotica together with the paranormal romance. All this being said about NA, it is a perfectly legitimate genre to write and read -- kind of like first chapter books for adults.

An excellent book is an excellent book no matter for whom it is written. So why shouldn't adult readers want to read excellent young adult fiction which is full of imagination and ideas? It is great escape reading , big concepts are usually simplified, characters less complex and subtle and ,very often, the best of these books transcend  young adult cliches -- eg the last volume of the Hunger Games, the whole Harry Potter series, the first volume of Shipbreaker. So we have books that overlap  age categories -- it has always been true. Dickens can be read by young and old alike, as can Milne , or Mark Twain or C.S. Lewis, or Roald Dahl.