But who will think of the children?!?!

[barbarienne]

Article in the WSJ that started the kerfuffle, found via sartorias and burger_eater.

The tl;dr summary: Oh woe, books aimed at teens these days are full of horrific violence, darkness, and human spiritual ugliness.(I'll give credit to Meghan Gurdon, the article-writer, for focusing on the violence rather than the sex. It's always rather bothered me that people will

Comments

[la_marquise_de_]

I always think of The Diary of Anne Frank, which I was encouraged to read at about age 10. Is there anything more distressing than the introduction and notes laying out what happened to Anne and Margo? And, as you say, school insisted on Of Mice and Men, and Wuthering Heights and all sorts of other very adult material.

[barbarienne]

Gah, I completely forgot about Anne Frank, which I also read in adolescence. My sister remembers being brought to the auditorium in grammar school to watch a film about the Holocaust, which completely traumatized her.

[renakuzar]

You beat me by two years, I didn't start until 10, however at 10 it was straight to Heinlein, Asimov, Anderson and Simak. Their prose was such a joy to read, full of hope, joy, exploration and just enough sex.

[barbarienne]

I may not actually have been eight. :-) I was young, though, when I went to the grown-up section; definitely no older than ten.

[barbarienne]

I forgot Titus Andronicus! Rape, mutilation, lots of death, more rape and mutilation... It's chock full of this stuff, much of it explicit. We covered it when I was 17.

Yeah to the observation that even real-world badness is a foreign/fantasy reality when it's so alien to one's personal experience. It wasn't traumatizing, it didn't open any old wounds; it just showed me what other people might be experiencing, and that was valuable.