Student News Daily. New Jersey Library Association / YA Program and Performer Recommendations. Are You Reading YA Lit? You Should Be. Image by Thiru Murugan on Flickr I’m a young adult librarian, but I didn’t read young adult lit when I was a teen myself. I was a precocious reader and desperate to be treated like a grown-up, so I read books for grown-ups because anything else was just too puerile for someone as obviously mature and sophisticated as I. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties, working on my MLS and realizing that I wanted to work with teens, that I discovered there was a huge, glorious world of excellent YA lit that I had completely missed. Now it’s almost all I read. Outside of YA circles, I sometimes find myself having to justify my tastes to others.
I think the reason some grown-ups look down their noses at YA lit is because they haven’t read any of it recently, so they don’t know how good it’s gotten—or how different it is from what they might imagine it to be. YA lit is so much more than a genre I think it’s a lack of exposure to contemporary YA lit that makes adults refer to it as a “genre.” Doctor Who Official on Tumblr. Capitol Couture.