About time. Vaguely embarrassing for humanity that books for children were so strongly dominating adult reading. https://nathanbransford.com/blog/2023/03/why-are-ya-sales-declining-this-week-in-books

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Boss (searching scan reports): I see books about a Frodo are very popular?

Flunkey: Those are for 14-15 year-olds. There are ones about a Harry Potter for 12 year-olds and ones by an Ayn Rand for 8 year-olds that are even more popular.

Boss: Ok, abort contact mission. Broadcast “dumb planet” on subether relays.

Aliens arrive, are hanging out in orbit, ship cloaked, wondering whether to engage.

Alien flunkey: Captain, this entire planet suffers from arrested development.

Alien boss: Surely can’t be that bad? They live to 80-100, no?

Flunkey: Half their leaders base their leadership on fantasies for 13-year-olds.

CEO at Google • co-founder & rectangle mover at /icebreaker • icbk.me/j4ck.fc • /swagcaster • DJ sixsix

Writer ✍️ | Creepy stories: unnerv.ing 👁️ | Essays: paragraph.xyz/@driftless ⚡️

I think it’s worse. Most never leave high school behind as their arrested development stage and can only really identify with coming-of-age protagonists.

Also why origin stories are the most popular kind superhero story and franchises keep getting rebooted.

My impression is that this is due to the average reading comprehension for US adults sitting around 9th-10th grade level.

Thus YA prose is more comfortable for many adults to read.

Most readers of “young adult” fiction are in fact much older

I’m confused how you get that YA books took up market share from adult readers. Seems like a relatively straightforward news that “teens aren’t reading books as much”?

Thank you for your service and sacrifice. Feels like everyone hates me when I cast these kinds of culturally disillusioning sentiments.
🫡

A lot of people want to chalk it up to nostalgia and I think if the major reason one likes something is attributable to nostalgic comfort, something has gone  wrong.