[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by tompe

Of course. But that does not mean that there is not thrashy fun stuff that is more thrashy and more fun than other trashy fun stuff. So it seems to me that you will probaly find trahsier and funnier stuff among the non-YA books.

It depends on your taste. But YA is just a genre category, not an indicator of quality/non-quality writing or variety/range overall.

Good and bad stuff for it exists in roughly the same proportion as for other categories and a prejudice against YA because it's got teen protagonists and is primarily aimed at younger readers is no more sensible than a prejudice against supernatural horror thrillers because they've got totally unrealistic monsters and are aimed at people looking to be briefly scared by unrealism.

Now, if you think the YA books are dumbing and writing down to you, then maybe there might be a point for not reading the ones which do, but it's just as much as a point as would apply to those hypothetical supernatural horror thrillers which also circle, arrow, and underline for the audience in every chapter the fact that oh noes, the super-creepy super-monster will get everyone in the end, abandon hope, all ye who enter its maw.

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

I think there's a fine gradient between "trashy fun stuff" and popular novels that might not be lit'rary, but still a couple of steps above trash. I'm thinking about Nora Roberts, or Lois Bujold, or Terry Pratchett, or the Sharon Lee/Steve Miller Liaden stuff. It'll never win literary prizes, but I wouldn't call any of it trash.

But Sir Terry Pratchett does in fact have literary prizes (a Carnegie Medal for children's lit, and his OBE is for contributions to British literature). And so does Lois McMaster Bujold, within the fantasy literature field.

In any case, one man's trash is another man's treasure, viz the sci-fi/fantasy ghetto that people just love to sneer at even though some of the best and most societally-impactful works of modern literature are speculative fiction ones (1984, Fahrenheit 451, etc.), and several of the authors producing and getting acclaim for them keep insisting that since it doesn't have rocket ships in it, do you see any rocket ships in it, their precious works are Not!SyFy™.