We’re still coming of age: a newfound love for the books we once loved
Story by Anne Lima, Photos by Leila Figueroa
Editor’s Note: Once you’re done reading this story, check out its companion photo series here.
For a lot of college students, the most reading they’re trying to get through is comprehending scholarly articles from the last five years or analyzing just enough excerpts from a textbook to reach word count for a research paper.
As children, reading used to be a fun, adventurous world. There were the annual Scholastic Book Fairs with Harry Potter and Dr. Seuss characters on bookmarks, not to mention a free book of choice.
Now it’s become a chore.
The time and patience we had as kids waned as we got busier, having to become adults. Fast forward years later and everyone is trying to regain the lost reading abilities of understanding, analyzing and reflecting on the content at hand.
However, there’s growing hope for those who wish to revisit that love for the vast world of literature.
Young Adult (YA) literature has become a market within the book world over the last 50 years, and progressed into becoming a booming phenomenon within the last 20.
These books, whose target audience and main characters are usually between 12-to-18-years-old and rarely seen on high school English reading lists, are being consumed and appreciated for their insight on life by those in their late teens to their 30s.
“There’s this relatability that we all are going through in our different coming of ages that even now in my 30s, there are other things that I’m thinking of. I’m coming of age in different ways that are still very relatable in a teenage sense,” said Sara Wigglesworth, 30, a book buyer for Green Apple Books store located on Clement Street for the last two and a half years.
Adults still aren’t over the “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” series. They still cry over Augustus Waters’ boyish charm in “The Fault in Our Stars.” They’re craving more of these stories even as they’ve outgrown the target audience they’re intended for.
A 2012 study by Bowker Market Research indicates that 55% of YA readers are adults 18 and older.
San Francisco State University Assistant Professor Nick Sousanis is head of the new Comics Studies minor in the School of Humanities & Liberal Studies. Sousanis has been teaching an introductory course to the study of comics called Comics & Culture for the last three years and has his students reading the graphic novel “Robot Dreams” by Sara Varon.
Sousanis’ reading curriculum features a variety of novels that are particularly aimed at children and adolescents. Sousanis started reading “Robot Dreams” with his daughter when she was three. He says that it has made a good impression on his students who “would pick it up and couldn’t put it down.”
“As they told me this term, ‘it’s the kind of book you’d look at from a distance and say that doesn’t belong in a college course,’ but then after reading it and discussing it, they are blown away by the depth of experience inside and how much thought it prompted,” Sousanis said.
He says that’s not the only one — “American Born Chinese” by Gene Yang is often taught in junior high and high school alongside works like the “March” trilogy, Rep. John Lewis’s memoir in the comics medium.
Sousanis says that many of the works he puts into course studies deal with larger issues, from immigration to race to identity to health, while providing well-rounded, complex characters and storylines to explore these themes. A book that’s continuously been debated, challenged and even banned from some school libraries since its release in 1967 is “The Outsiders” written by S.E. Hinton that she started writing when she was 15 years old. Hinton uses a rivalry between teenage gangs to unpack the division and tension between both groups that’s rooted in their socioeconomic status.
“You pick up things you hadn’t the first time around and then it makes you look at the book in a new way. I think students all like these readings and then are surprised at how much they are getting out of them,” Sousanis said.
Science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s books have trailblazed conversations about Afrofuturism. Her most notable work, “Parable of the Sower,” showcases the main character, a black, teenage girl whose dystopian world is plagued with climate change and continuous issues surrounding race, gender and religion that center around the interconnectedness of our environment and its inhabitants.
“There’s a lot of activism within the YA authorship. We’re having a non-binary person as the main character. There’s a book coming out soon where the main character has had AIDS since birth. We’re getting queer characters, a book on Black Lives Matter (i.e. “The Hate You Give”) — it’s so awesome to have and I don’t necessarily see all this represented in adult books. It’s not as prevalent,” Wigglesworth said.
Now there are stories of black people and brown folks, Asian people, indigenous communities, immigrants, differently-abled people, queer and non-binary characters and so on as the leads of these narratives during their teen years. Readers can look beyond the default of the white, straight, cisgender male and female and the cliche love story. The visibility and voices all coming from authors with diverse stories to provide for this vast audience that makes up YA.
“The genre totally changed. There’s more material, more variation from when I was actually a young adult,” said Abe Williams, a merchandise buyer at Green Apple Books. “Now you have all these sub-genres. There’s diversity becoming a big thing in it all and so now you’re getting all these queer books that are featuring gender fluidity. All these different aspects are being explored and it’s not just a genre. I’m like learning to read reiterated life lessons,” Williams said.
Williams started reading YA novels at 21 and even ran a young adult book blog for roughly two years.
“I thought I was so smart when I was a kid — reading Ernest Hemingway and all these adult books, and then I become an adult and start reading like romance to young adult books,” Williams said.
He says that this shift in the wide mature content the YA genre has to offer its readers recently is in part due to publishers starting to realize that people under 18 “actually have a mind” and that there’s a positive message and self-teaching moment being conveyed when showing kids of a certain age things to help in accepting aspects of their identity.
“Like if a kid wants to wear a dress then let him do his thing and that’s where the stories are opening up about topics like that. That’s what I recommend to librarians that come from middle and high schools looking for books for their students,” Williams said.
What many of us feel left out of or question about ourselves, we’re finally seeing it and resonating with through characters like 15-year-old Afro-Latinx Xiomara from Harlem in “The Poet X” by Elizabeth Acevedo or a romance between two Muslim teens, Adam and Zayneb,
who meet during a Spring Break trip in “Love from A to Z” by S. K. Ali.
Not only do YA books ignite a resurgence of youthful spirit and interest for reading again, they’re a contributing benefit to our wellness. X
