The YA Books No Adult Should Read

A thing I compulsively do after I pick up my Kindle, but before I start actually reading anything, is browse through its bookstore. Even though I rarely buy books from Amazon in order to avoid contributing to the downfall of publishing as we know it or whatever, I have made at least a few random purchases, like Eric Schlosser’s Chew on This, which, in the fog of early morning and the kind of gross, glowing wintergreen glaze atop the Kindle’s black-and-white E-Ink pages, seemed like a sequel or an update to Fast Food Nation, which I had never read in its entirety. I was immediately struck not just by how repetitive of Fast Food Nation it seemed, but by how jarringly simple the writing was, so I stopped reading it.

It turns out there was a reason for this: It’s actually a child’s version of Fast Food Nation, and it has sold more than three hundred thousand copies, making it, according to the New York Times, one of the earliest successes in a newish genre, YA non-fiction. This format, in its present form, is largely constructed from re-constituted, infantilized versions of existing non-fiction, like Laura Hillenbrand’s World War II book, Unbroken, but stripped of all its horror.

While it is perfectly fine to produce non-fiction books explicitly designed for children, or even for harried adults who deem themselves too busy to read more complex non-fiction (I guess), what’s startling is that these are fundamentally lesser versions of extant books which are meant not solely for recent human spawn:

Publishers have another potential audience in mind for these books: adults who have embraced children’s fiction and may be too intimidated or busy to read a 900-page nonfiction tome. “Adults are now so used to reading young adult books that there may be some nice crossover,” Ms. Horowitz said.

The recent debate over whether adults should or shouldn’t read YA fiction grew exceedingly tedious, exceedingly quickly, and does anyone even care anymore since the latest trailer for the new Hunger Games movie came out? But the notion of fully grown persons reading modified versions of adult non-fiction books that aren’t just condensed or simplified or shortened (imagine a Vox books imprint!), but have been fully adapted for children, is truly bizarre: These are people willfully shielding themselves from the fullness of bodies of information that already exist, in order to not be bothered by the more grim or gory or complex details of history — which have already been collected and presented in a given work. This is ordering pizza and saying to hold the bread parts; a hamburger but just the bun and some lettuce and ketchup so it’s not even a gluten thing; pornography but without naked bodies or even a hint of sex. As much as one may chafe at the notion of somebody telling someone else to not read something — read YA novels, who cares! — chastising somebody for picking up D Day instead of The Guns at Last Light feels less like than finger-wagging than the performing one’s duty to combat willful ignorance.