Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and the author of "The Magicians" and "The Magician King."

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

We're not young adults ourselves. We're the old kind. But funnily enough, our adult young-adult book group has gotten so popular with adults that we've actually been turning people away — we've already spun off two other young-adult book groups because we ran out of room. All three groups get together for a party every year at Christmas. True story.

A lot of adult literary fiction is very focused on style: dense, lyrical, descriptive prose.

So what do regular adults see in young adult fiction? It's a different experience from reading, for example, literary fiction. Not better or worse, just different. The writing is different: young adult novels tend to emphasize strong voices and clear, clean descriptive prose, whereas a lot of literary fiction is very focused on style: dense, lyrical, descriptive prose, larded with tons of carefully observed detail, which calls attention to its own virtuosity rather than ushering the reader to the next paragraph with a minimum of fuss. That kind of writing can be marvelous, but sometimes you're just not in the mood for it.

Likewise, while young adult novels are very focused on storytelling, a lot of literary fiction explores ways to take narrative apart, to fragment it and subvert it and make it non-linear. Again, this can be extremely rewarding — I've read "Ulysses" twice, and "Mrs. Dalloway" at least five times, and I'll read them again — but it demands a lot of work from the reader, too.

And yes, young adult novels tend to be about young adults, and teenager-y things that most adults have long since put away. But statistically speaking, most adults were young adults at some point in their lives, and some of us are still processing that experience. Young adult novels can be as powerful as anything out there. Read John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars," about teenagers with cancer. I did, and I'll be surprised if I have a more wrenching, emotional reading experience this year.

Bottom line, there's one thing that young adult novels rarely are, and that's boring. They're built to grab your attention and hold it. And I'm not as young as I once was. At my age, I don't have time to be bored.