Building our literary canon

I began reading serious novels, written for adults, when I was about twelve years old. The Hardy Boys gave way to The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor, a sophisticated novel of Boston politics and Irish family loyalties. When I finished the book and felt the weight of it in my hand, I knew that my life had changed forever. I had access to the secrets of the adult world at my fingertips.

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

When reading The Art of X-Ray Reading several months ago I would have known Roy Peter Clark and I were of the same generation even if I had not previously seen him in person. So many of the books that shaped his youth also shaped mine. "Each of us finds our own literary canon," Robert Morgan writes in Remarkable Reads, and that canon begins forming in our youth. It may even stop forming in our youth. Those books we read before we are 25 may be the ones we hold most dear for the rest of our lives.

As it happened, I never read a Hardy Boys mystery, nor did I ever read The Last Hurrah, although I acquired a copy in my youth and held onto it for many years before realizing I would never read it. What I identified with in Clark's statement above was the age at which he suddenly switched from kids' books to adult books. That was about the age I started riding my bike to our village library, some three miles away, and heading straight for the "new books" shelves. That's where I would go every couple of weeks, never even glancing at the children's section.

I don't recall the first the first adult book I read, although I do remember that John Updike's Pigeon Feathers and Jack Finney's Assault on a Queen were two of the earliest books I took home. Unlike Clark, apparently, science fiction served for me as a bridge to adult reading. Among the first sci-fi novels I read was Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun. Books by John Steinbeck also introduced me, as they did so many others of my era, to more grown-up fiction.

When Clark and I were growing up, there were no large young adult sections in either bookstores or libraries. There were books, usually accepted classics, that teens were encouraged to read. These included works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, etc. But few books were actually being written specifically for teens.

Today, of course, there are scads of young adult books. When I walk into a Barnes and Noble, these books seem to dominate the store. They are everywhere, not just in the young adult section. Sometimes I even buy one, such as The Book Thief.

Are the presence of so many young adult books a plus or a minus for young readers? I don't know. They do seem to draw young readers into bookstores, giving them lots of stories about people their age that they enjoy reading. I just hope such books do not delay young readers' entry into serious literature and what Clark terms "the secrets of the adult world." Or their literary canons could one day be much different than that shared by Roy Peter Clark and me.