What interests teenage boys? You’re smirking, but this is a question that occupies many of us in the field of young people’s literature. It’s well-documented that girls are reading more than boys, a statistic of increasing concern.

I write books for children under the pen name Lemony Snicket, and I’ve noticed that when I go to Lemony Snicket events, the crowds are about evenly split between boys and girls. But I also write young adult books, and if more than one boy shows up at one of my teen book club events, it’s notable, if not a miracle. Something happens once a young man hits puberty.

Of course, we already know that something happens when someone hits puberty. When I think of the zippy, blundering changes in my body and brain at that age, it’s a wonder I read at all. But I did. I was a ravenous reader, fed regularly from my local library, where my librarian escorted me, at 12, out of the children’s section to the adult section and wished me luck.

There was less official “Young Adult Literature” back then, and free from the surveillance of people who might have guided me toward appropriate material, I just read what looked good to me. I was a pretentious teenager — by high school I ran with a crowd that tried to get into bars by ordering cocktails we read about in P. G. Wodehouse — and it came as no surprise to anyone who knew me at 16, sipping espresso and reading “The Flowers of Evil,” that I ended up spending my adulthood making up stories about orphans named Baudelaire.