Reading at All Ages

Why can't the protagonist be any age at all?

My husband and I were reading together… I should back up and come at this from an earlier perspective, rather than in media res. One of the activities we enjoy together, and have since we first got to be in the same space after starting our relationship long-distance, is reading together. Not the same book, and not reading bits aloud to one another (very rarely do we do that) but simply sitting and reading in quiet companionship. It’s a comforting and relaxing pastime, and we often do this at meals when it’s just the two of us. If you want to know, and are worried about the romance, we will sometimes hold hands while reading together, because with an eBook you don’t need both hands to read. Anyway, I started off in one direction and then went in another, as I so often do!

He looked up from his book, and asked “Who is Albert Payson Terhune?”

I looked up from my reading of The Jewel House (which is an academic take on the rise of the sciences in Elizabethan England) and blinked at him, orienting my memory. “He wrote dog books? I read a lot of them when I was younger.”

“Oh! He’s the one that wrote Lad, and Lassie.” (he didn’t write Lassie, but the confusion between collie stories is understandable.)

We then reminisced a moment about dog stories we’d read and loved as children and teens. Both of us are fans of Jim Kjelgaard’s books, and I have many fond memories of other dog books, like Rusty: A Cocker Spaniel (which sticks out in my mind as I had a cocker mix when I was nine). I went back to my treatise on early scientists, and it wasn’t until a couple days later that the conversation came back to top-of-mind again. I was setting up sales for an end-of-the-year event that is limited to YA and NA titles, putting a couple of my own books into it, and thinking about the arbitrary (to some extent, at least) boundaries we put on books. We divide things up into ‘books for children’ and those that should be read by adults, and we raise eyebrows at older women who seek out the YA section of the library for their reading material. Now, granted, there are some books that set my teeth on edge when I go back to them as an adult and try to read them again. Most of those are, however, rank twaddle and come across as twee even to a young reader. I tell stories of my struggles as an 11 year-old precocious reader to get admittance to the ‘adult section’ of the library. Many years later, as a librarian, I never once said that to a reader. Nor did I stop the women who descended from the upstairs ‘adult’ books into the newly-created YA room I’d been tasked to set up for the library.

People read all manner of things. My job then and now is to encourage them to read, not to judge what they want to read. Besides which, there are wonderful tales that are relegated to the children’s section (like The Princess and The Goblin, which I read aloud recently for my sister but put up for all to enjoy the story and illustrations I created to go along with my reading).

The boundaries, then, are more for shelving and marketing, just as genres are. They make it easier to put books in buckets and manage them. Children’s books are for up to age 12, and YA are for ages 13-18, NA (New Adult) is for the college-aged set, and after that… It’s a little bit silly. A good book is a good book. I do understand the need to categorize, and how that is useful for readers as well as librarians and booksellers. It gives them a place to start, and in time as their tastes become set, a way to mark what they might like, based on what else they like (this explains the women in their twenties and thirties seeking out YA, for example). It’s good, though, to challenge oneself to read outside genre, and age brackets, and other such arbitrary boundaries, as much as that may be intimidating at first glance. If you worry about budget (and who doesn’t, these days?) your small-town local library may be the place to start (larger library systems can be a little less user-friendly unfortunately) or spring for a month of Kindle Unlimited to try books and authors who are new to you at a very low cost of entry, and feeling free therefore to discard ones that don’t fit. Like trying on shoes!

We section up books according to age of protagonist, and going back and reading The Princess and the Goblin reminded me sharply of how age-related responsibilities had changed in the last century. Curdie, at 12, was as brave and resourceful a hero as was Ilene the princess was at only 8 or 9! I still like to go back to Kjelgaard’s books, like Swamp Cat, for the depiction of a long-lost way of life with doughty young people who succeeded in spite of their difficulties. I find, in my late forties, that my perspectives have changed since I was fourteen, and it’s interesting to encounter the same book with that outlook then and now. I recently began re-reading the Mrs. Pollifax series, which I first read in my teens, and the perspective of a mature woman with empty nest looming before me is wildly different than that of my first reading of the series. I liked it then, and I like it now, just differently. What books do you find enjoyable, no matter the age of the main characters? What books of your childhood are still enjoyable lo, these years later?

(All illustrations created by Cedar Sanderson, rendered with MidJourney)

Oh! If you were wondering, of my books, Vulcan’s Kittens and God’s Wolfling are YA. Running Into Time, The Groundskeeper Tales, and possibly Tanager’s Fledgling would all fall into the NA bucket.