[Nyssa]

Originally Posted by Rylon

Thanks for the link. That's good to know.

It would be interesting to know what the average Lexile range for YA novels is. It's interesting that some of the most popular are above average even for adults.

From what I've seen at the school library, the more popular books range between 600 & 900.

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

Thanks for that link it is interesting. Those results either say something very encouraging about the some of books young people are reading, or very discouraging about the average adult novel.

Though the criteria used in computing that score seem excellent for measuring how young people are progressing in their reading level in school (measuring breath of vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure) there are other things that I feel contribute to how adult, or perhaps a better term would be difficult, a book is such as complexity of themes and challenging comprehension, for examples.

confess that of the books mentioned in that rather silly piece in the NYT the only one that I have read is the first Harry Potter book. It was a fun tale that I do not feel embarrassed about enjoying it at the age of 50+, but it is a rather simplistic good versus evil story.

True, and there are other tests used specifically for comprehension, but more along the lines of fact gathering... basically the average standardized reading test.

With reguards to YA books vs adult books, I think that more authors are trying to keep up w/ the kids. My daughter is in third grade and has a reading lexile level of 1019. Although there are many YA novels that are too mature for her, IMO, some authors are bridging the gap between complexity and maturity.