Maybe she’s telling on herself. Or maybe she was 20 and majoring in English and really excited to read authors she hadn’t read in junior high because one thing college is good for is trying new things. On that score, the book that was chosen the year the student was on the committee was about racism and restorative…

I think I read total, like 2.5 books of hers in both the Mortal Instruments and the Infernal Devices series as a teen. Eventually I just Could Not with the faux-incest plot and went ‘okay no more of this’.

Oops, I accidentally flagged my own comment, instead of hitting edit. Oh well, I’ll blame it on Jonathan Franzen.

Agreed. She wasn’t whaling on the entire YA genre, or even all the ones targeted at teen girls (which some of them ABSOLUTELY are). She was calling out the crappy ones, of which there will necessarily be many in any artistic subgenre targeted at teenagers. I don’t know anything about Sarah Dessen as a writer, but that…

Baba! How have you been? I think of you often. We don’t see enough of you around these parts

The only thing we know about this particular person, based on one sentence, is that she doesn’t think Dessen’s books are good for a required (not for pleasure!) college reading program. She didn’t say anything broader about YA novels, or about whether any author’s works, Dessen’s included, are “worth reading.”  She…

Me too! It’s just delightful. I can’t believe that in reality he is actually WAY WORSE than I could have ever imagined him to be.

Oh my goddess I am howling with laughter, can barely breathe! 

I feel like he’s the kind of man who goes to therapy just to talk about how attacked he is for his genius and his poor therapist is sitting there listening and thinking ‘well, you’re obviously never going to get anything out of this but your checks still clear, so...’

Funny you bring up Clare, who’s well-known for her (alleged) plagiarism.

That’s the good shit right there.

Lololol, this sub thread about Nicholas Sparks is making my day.

Oh this one is a GEM:

You couldn’t write a caricature of him that’s actually funnier than he is unintentionally. That’s a feat.

Sorry, what I was trying to imply there was that even as fluffy as Perkins’ stuff is, I still think it’s better than Dessen’s.

Wow, what a coincidence, so did I. Unfortunately my professors saw much greater merit in books like say, Northanger Abbey, which was written precisely because Jane Austen was so annoyed by how much ridicule teen girls had to put up with for reading Gothic novels, and Frankenstein, notably written by a teen girl.

I’m partial to, “Asked what he likes in his own genre, Sparks replies: ‘There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.’”

You and Adrastra are both right. The comment hit me as Nelson just trying to say that the books weren’t very good, and the phrasing was unfortunate.

Don’t break your back reaching for those conclusions. “for pleasure” books aren’t something universities are going to assign for mandatory reading. These ‘common’ reading lists are supposed to challenge a young person’s ability to analyze, interpret and draw conclusions on a more complex level than they did in high…

Tracked down the actual thing from The USA Today.