I discovered Philip Roth when I was Emmett's age. Not only did it amaze me by being so dirty, the other language felt like language I recognized. Roth characters are just folks, you know, more Yiddish-inflected than mine, but that was a big fuckin'deal. And, strangely enough. excellent preparation for the Anthony Weiner scandal...Weiner's a Roth character. Except if he were, photographing it would shrink it, or steal its soul or something, so in the press conferences, he'd apologize for something he no longer really has. "Goodbye Columbus" is erudite enough to study in school, I'd guess.(Portnoy's my favorite, too, but the school board would freak.)

Pornoy is OK I guess, as long as I don't have to shake hands with him.

I read Goodbye Columbus in 10th grade and it put me off Philip Roth for life. So sexist, and too recent to get a "historical" pass for same.

Yeah, TB. Nowadays, I bet he'd be all about hand sanitizer, but point taken. I don't know...maybe 1958 seemed long enough to be pass-worthy when I was fourteen, or maybe, like with Ian Fleming, I found myself identifying with the males? I haven't read it in some time.

Wouldn't shaking his hand be...well, like shaking the hand like tons of guys (and girls...), but eating organ meats he cooked be a bit dodgier? My memory of the book is severely patchy.

I have a categorisation question that I figure goes here, since it's not my writing.

I have a friend who writes YA (I know, who doesn't?) Her first book is 16 and over, she'd recommend, and her second she says is appropriate for a ten year old to read (even though the characters are older). Does YA formally span that wide an age range? And if so, is it still more helpful than confusing?

Harry Potter. The first 3 books I could easily recommend for age 8 to adult. Right around book 4, I think the books started gearing older with the 5th and 6th books a bit hard to take for younger children.

10 year olds are "middle grades" for books now, I think.

And ita !, kids have such a wide range of maturity levels when it comes to books, the recommendations are a guideline, not a hard-and-fast rule. At 7, I was reading about 60% very adult books, and 40% YA.

So those recs...parents and teachers take them with a grain of salt.

YA books that are considered, for lack of a better word, "clean," might get a "ten and up" recommendation. For instance, Kiersten White writes books with a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old protagonist, but there's no swearing, nothing more than kissing, and nothing really gritty (or real, to be perfectly honest) about the books. So those might get a "ten and up" label.

Otherwise, like Jesse said, anything from eight to twelve is considered "middle grade," but like Strix pointed out the recs are really loose, and vary by publisher, and era, etc.

When I wrote the first Big Empty book, it was post-apocalyptic, with teens orphaned and alone all over the place, and one of them (she was fifteen, I think) pregnant, and Penguin called that "ten and up". So you never know.

John Scalzi's blog today asks for recommendations for new books. There's a lot of books recommended; nice to see Code Name: Verity is one of them.

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