Young adult novels such as The Hunger Games and Twilight can appeal to older readers

It's not that mysterious. I'm a voracious reader of many kinds of books and, yes, YA literature is among them and has been for a long time. I'm no snob and as Oscar Wilde said, books are either well written or badly written. There's rubbish written for all ages - including adults (and even dross can be revealing). Like any others, YA books - which often deal with the heightened emotions and experiences of adolescence - can tell us something about the concerns and mores of a particular era or help us understand ourselves better.

Sherman Alexei's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian's author and main character, like me, have hydrocephalus: while I'm not desperate for "representation" it is interesting to read a book about someone else's experience of the condition. Nostalgia, or wondering what might have been, is another factor. And let's not discount the value of entertainment, being taken into other worlds. The worst thing a book, like a film, can be is boring.

YA lit can be controversial. There are frequent discussions about what books are suitable, or not, for schools and young minds generally, especially in the US where the American Library Association has a Banned Books Week highlighting books - many are classics - challenged in schools, often for spurious reasons (like swearing).

What constitutes "young adult" literature might be open to question. Many books originally intended for adults, like J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and John Knowles' A Separate Peace seem largely to have been consigned to the YA ghetto and the classroom. But many books are obviously intended for and marketed to adolescents.

While at university I combed library shelves in search of books I had read about (finding old YA books is getting ever harder). Among them were two early American novels with central gay characters, John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (which deals, somewhat gingerly, with the relationship between two boys) and Sandra Scoppettone's Trying Hard to Hear You (girl loves conflictedly gay boy who dies in a car crash). While very dated, they provide an interesting time capsule of the attitudes and culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are still coming-out novels - unsurprising in an era where being gay, lesbian or otherwise different is less stigmatised but still tricky. However, there's generally a more matter-of-fact attitude in LGBTQIA+ books now. John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Becky Abertalli's Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda (filmed as Love, Simon) and author Alex Dunkin's Coming Out Catholic are three that effectively combine personal drama with humour, heart and hope.

The early gay-themed books were examples of "problem novels", on hard subjects including suicide, pregnancy and drugs. The Outsiders by S.E.Hinton (written when she was herself a teenager and published in 1967), dealing with gang wars and social class, ended up on many a school curriculum but managed to stay popular anyway.

In some of the older problem novels there was a sincere attempt to address things teenagers might be going through as well as tell an engaging story. Other times a heavily didactic purpose was obvious, as in Go Ask Alice (1971). Ostensibly the anonymous "diary" of a teenage girl who falls into a sordid world of drugs and sex, it turned out to be fiction by its "editor", Beatrice Sparks, who "edited" other, less enduring cautionary tales. Bafflingly, Go Ask Alice is still in print and still often labelled non-fiction.

Robert Cormier was one of my favourites, a writer who was not afraid to be dark and provocative, just the thing for angsty, cynical, depressed teenagers. His books included the narratively complicated I Am The Cheese and The Chocolate War, a story of manipulation and violence in a Catholic school. They might seem too grim, almost nihilistic, but are compelling and thought-provoking. M.E. Kerr had a much lighter touch but still dealt with substantial subjects such as AIDS and family secrets.

Australia, of course, has long had a thriving children's and YA literary culture with authors including Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi), John Marsden (his disturbing Letters from the Inside is a personal favourite) and Gillian Rubinstein (Space Demons) among many others.

I've found a lot of British YA fiction a bit glum compared to US and Australian work, but Alan Garner's fantasy The Owl Service is one I really like. Sue Townsend's early Adrian Mole diaries were funny and touching but in adulthood Adrian seemed annoying and pitiful rather than sympathetic.

Recently, there was a stoush in the US between YA author Sarah Dessen and a university graduate who was on a board to choose a Common Read book for new students. The latter opposed selecting a Dessen novel for reasons of literary merit. Maybe there remains a stigma to the "YA" label. But, interestingly, many popular books nowadays are in the so-called "kidult" sphere. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books had broad appeal and the "Twihard" devotees of Stephenie Meyers' Twilight series included (mostly female) adults. Ernest Cline's Ready Player One had a teenage protagonist and was in the wish-fulfilling, pandering sphere of many YA dystopian novels: a heroic young person is smarter, more capable and more moral than his or her elders who screwed everything up (see The Hunger Games et al).

Whether - and why - younger people are "reading up" (getting into weighty themes early) or older ones are "reading down" (and thus immature) is debatable but the crossover shows books' appeal needn't be limited by labels.

And that's a good thing.

Canberra Times