Alone and Unobserved

Anyone who has been following the book/author reviews in this blog must wonder at all the children’s/YA fiction I apparently devour. Well, just to set the record straight, I read far more books than I ever write about (I bet a lot of people wouldn’t recognize me if I didn’t have a book in hand) and most of them are written for a supposedly adult audience. So why do I step out of my age group and pick up kids’ books at all? Well, for one thing, books written for younger readers have an inherent consumability that is very appealing–often I can pick a YA novel up at the library and have it and its sequel finished in an hour or so, whereas an adult novel might take me four to six hours of straight reading. Books for younger readers are also more likely to have a whimsical setting or tone, which is nice when I’m choking on a diet of blood-soaked George R. R. Martin novels (a review about him is coming, by the way). Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that children’s and YA fiction, especially fantasy, is useful, but I wouldn’t make a steady diet of it. The real question is, why are a disproportionate number of my reviews about kids’ books?