And I could reply with "Thanks, my online friends made it possible." So since I haven't said it in a while: me and the teens are still extremely grateful for all the books y'all donated to the center and they are still being read regularly 💜

Apropos of books and teens, one of the people who led the workshop about Queerness we did a couple of weeks ago looked at our bookshelf at the center and was flabbergasted that we had so many new releases in different genres by a wide range of authors.

Funnily enough, they don't all love the middle grade books, they also don't all love the stuff they have to read for school, but that's... Kinda the point. Just saying.

Moxy, How To Kill Your Family, This Is Where It Ends, Faust, Divine Rivals, I Was Born For This, Song of Wraiths and Ruin, Oracle Code and My Brilliant Friend. And approximately a gazillion fics on AO3 and Wattpad that I don't even know of.

Anyways, it's just kinda ridiculous to me how they get from an orange tree to raspberry jam in one sentence and then complain about teenagers not reading/thinking about complexities enough. Anyways, my teens are currently reading Percy Jackson, Gender Queer, The Perfume, A Study in Drowning,

Which is not the same thing either. But our categorization system is kinda fucked up, so I'm not surprised we're just happily confounding the two and then mixing it up as we need it for the arguments sake.

The issue with all the adult material they're reading is more that there's nobody talking about it with them. Nobody is working through that with them, because adult books/materials and teenage readers. Also one can love MG books and also read and like more complex material. And also adult books.

Mostly because... Putting aside the question of reading levels, literacy and all the other jazz people threw in there for funsies, the teenagers I know who read? They are reading those things. They just don't read them in the published book formats you're thinking of.

I think the funniest argument I saw over there though was "sixteen is the perfect age to read more challenging material! They should be reading adult books, not middle grade!" Made me laugh a bit, tbh.

But also I find it funny that adults who are apparently not frequently in direct contact with teens and young adults always have the loudest opinions about the youth these days. The platforms and communication channels might change, but the content does not.