Published: September 1st, 2012
Cart's Top 200 Adult Books For Young Adults: Two Decades In Reviews
By: Michael Cart
American Library Association
ISBN-13: 9780838911587
Put together with insight and obvious affection, Cart's guide spotlights hundreds of great books for a hard-to-satisfy audience.
Review
So, let me just go ahead and admit it: I am a complete and total moron, who apparently can't read book titles. Ummm...yeah, I totally thought this was his list of the best YOUNG ADULT books from the last two decades!!! Totally missed the whole, ADULT BOOKS for Young Adults part of the title!
I had read a book of Cart's before, a history of the Young Adult genre, and found it interesting enough. I thought to myself, hey, why the hell not read what basically amounts to a mini-textbook?
That said, his list of books was all the boring, bestseller crap everyone tells you to read all the time. I didn't see anything on there that wasn't un-interesting to me personally, or straight off a high school's required reading list! Also, what a douchebag (I know he's older than dirt, as he states his first professional library gig was in 1967, but still! How out of touch can you be, especially when being the "authority" on young adult literature?!)! This is a direct quote from his introduction:
"I didn't regret saying goodbye to these early teen books, though I never dismissed them as being baby books, as some teenagers have over the years. On the other hand I certainly didn't regard them as having much literary merit or posing any particular challenge to high school-age readers. So where to turn to find the constituents of my new collection? The answer was simple: I turned to adult books."
FUCK YOU, MICHAEL CART. FUCK YOU FOR JUDGING ME (and my fellow readers) AND SAYING YOUNG ADULT BOOKS ARE FLUFF/WITHOUT ANY SUBSTANCE. JUST...URGH!!!!! Perpetuating stereotypes and generalizations FTW, people.
VERDICT: 0.5/5 Stars (Only because this might be useful to librarians looking for adult books to recommend to teens - if they haven't read them all in school already, as most of these are required reading titles I recognize, etc.)
*No money or favors were exchanged for this review. This book is now available in stores, online, or maybe even at your local library.*
I read it wrong too!! I was ohhh I wonder what the list of YA books are going to be :( Yeah nevermind. That guy sounds terrible. And who wants to read a list of books that are already on a million other lists????
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