PS/SS 16 & 17 - shipping - kidlit - Divination - ADMIN re: OT

[Heather Moore]

No: HPFGUIDX 29543

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Amy Z" <aiz24 at h...> wrote:

  With 
> deference to Heather, most of the books on that list get pegged as 
> "young adult."  Who reads Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace after 
> American Lit class?
> 

  Ahhh, fellow traveller... your words have great wisdom, and yet...

  The books I named are found shelved in the *General Fiction* section of the bookstore, and not banished to the "Young Adult Fiction" ghetto. So regardless of when people typically rad thse titles, the tradition (and thus the perception) of publishers, marketers, merchants and readers, is that these are not in fact young adult novels by nature, even if young adults tend to have to read them.

And we have his whole Harry Potter controversy precisely *because* several "standard" novelists were pitching a fit because their own books were getting outclassed by novels which are, in fact, published, marketed, shelved, and sought within the Children's section - you know, that brightly-colored, trashy neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks. And lo did the New York Times Neighborhood Association, giving in to pressure, decide to move the undesirables into the Childrens' Bestseller Public Housing Project. And the Harry Potter series were Bestsellers no more, but merely qualified *Childrens' Bestsellers.*  (Which is rather like saying, "Hey, you're pretty cool -- for a Jew, I mean." "Jew," like "Children's Lit," is not *properly* used as weapon/label, but some people persist in doing so.) 

It's all about *perception,* and how we are guided as  community by labels and categories.