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I read a lot when I was young and a big motivating factor for me was the natural progression to reading grown up books and works of literature with more interes
by petercooper 2y ago
I read a lot when I was young and a big motivating factor for me was the natural progression to reading grown up books and works of literature with more interesting plots and subject matter. Nowadays, there seems to be more commercially-driven infantilization of entertainment where comics and books for kids are no longer a stepping stone but an end destination. My teenager only reads manga and comics which can be very deep and cover mature topics (unlike anything I could get my hands on in the 90s) but are still, ultimately, not novels. I haven't decided if this is a good or bad thing - it probably just 'is what it is' and I'm getting old.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoI agree. Looking back at my own reading as a kid, I worked my way through the "age appropriate" material really quickly, in part, because those books simply weren't that interesting. They were more about learning to read. Once I got through those kids books (and I saw them as kids books even when I was a kid), I moved to "adult" books as soon as I could because they are better novels, and I could tell that right away, with more complex stories, better characterization, better prose, different settings, and a real sense of scale and ambition. A lot of it comes down to context: my parents were and remain voracious readers. They read all the time and have strong opinions about books, and I wanted to read what they did and have strong opinions about books in the way that they do. That sensibility was something they taught and which I grew up in. I could just as well see the absence of that having an effect.