> instead of anything else or in addition to everything else. In the last week, I've read a great young adult book as well as a Sartre novel. I consider my lif

> instead of anything else or in addition to everything else. In the last week, I've read a great young adult book as well as a Sartre novel. I consider my life enriched by both. There's this awful snobbery around young adult books, but I often find they tell the best stories. I think Philip Pullman says it best: “There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it; cultured adults, on the other hand, those limp and jaded creatures who think it more important to seem sophisticated than to admit to simplicity, find it harder both to write and to read novels that don't come with a prophylactic garnish of irony.”