There’s nothing better than a good book, but hating a book? Hating a book so much that you stop people on the street just to tell them about the book and express exactly how much you hated it? That might be a close second.

Reading a novel – subsuming one’s own consciousness into that of an author for hours on end – is an immersive and visceral experience that can result in transcendence and joy, or end in betrayal and rage. As a reader, I prefer the former but also enjoy the latter; both are certainly superior to plodding to the end of a book that is merely unobjectionable.

A recent controversy on “book Twitter” has unleashed an astonishing display of pique by professional authors denigrating an individual reader for the apparent crime of hating a book. The flood of vitriol from these authors, many of whom frequent the New York Times bestseller list, displayed an absurd and dismaying lack of respect for the very people who love books enough to take them seriously – readers who love and hate but above all read with passion.

The reader under attack by Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner and Angie Thomas, among others, was Brooke Nelson, a recent graduate of a small public university in South Dakota. Nelson’s transgression, which Weiner actually compared to the culture of silence in gymnastics that protected serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar, was to speak to a local newspaper about her experience helping to select the college’s “Common Read” – a book the entire student body reads each year. Namely, Nelson said she joined the selection committee because one of the books under consideration was by the young adult (YA) novelist Sarah Dessen.

War of words breaks out after YA novelist’s fans go after critical reader Read more

“She’s fine for teen girls,” Nelson said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.” The former English major went on to express her enthusiasm for Just Mercy, by the American defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, a memoir that tackles racism and unfairness in the criminal justice system. “It was incredible, so that became the book I supported,” Nelson added. “That’s how I sort-of inadvertently joined the Common Read Committee.”

And that’s how I sort-of inadvertently fell in love with Nelson, a young woman whose opinions about books were strong enough that she willingly joined a committee (!) – an act that presumably subjected her to the trials and tribulations of such unbearably awful acts as attending meetings and leaving one’s dorm room. I say this without any irony at all – what a star!

And yet, for this, Nelson was singled out as “mean and cruel” by Dessen and deemed by the YA authors Siobhan Vivian and Dhonielle Clayton to be a “fucking bitch” and a “RAGGEDY ASS fucking bitch”, respectively. (Dessen and several others later apologized). Picoult’s rant was perhaps the most absurd, as the author tried (and failed) to elide the difference between adults of any gender respecting the lives of teenage girls and an individual adult woman expressing a preference not to read books written for teenage girls. “To not speak up about this incident isn’t just demeaning to Sarah,” Picoult wrote. “It’s demeaning to women, period.”

Perhaps what is more demeaning to women is the expectation that to have taste is to lack solidarity. Perhaps what is more demeaning to young women is to pathologize a rite of passage: putting away childish things and indulging in the challenging and complex pleasures of books written for adults, during the very period of their lives that provides the most time and opportunity to do so.

There is something sinister and smarmy about these authors ascribing political incorrectness to a reader’s opinion about a single author, especially when the attack is so patently self-interested. (If you don’t like my friend’s book, you’re an agent of the patriarchy? Please.) To distinguish between young adult fiction and adult fiction is not to denigrate young adults; to dislike an individual author is not to disrespect her entire gender. I love To Kill a Mockingbird with all my heart, but I agree with Flannery O’Connor that it is a book for children. This doesn’t make me a sexist. It makes me an adult who kept reading after Harper Lee taught me to love the experience.

It is because I respect the intelligence and potential of teenage girls that I hope they will eventually look beyond young adult literature and join me in exulting in the wild and unruly realms of adult literature, revisiting our old favorites but not limiting ourselves to their comforts, and loving and hating books with gusto.

As for the authors, I will only add: to write for teenagers is no excuse to act like them.