I Reserve The Right To Call You A Lazy Idiot

Few things get my ire up more than the handwringing over the lack of YA book books, or the assumption that ‘the new authors being signed by agents and publishers. Chick lit, romance, paranormal, vampires and urban teenage fantasy. Girl stuff written by women’. There are current YA books being published that have boy appeal, I swear, they aren’t even that hard to find.

I have the easiest tool ever to find them too! Okay, so there was this search engine company founded in 1998, small company but you may have heard of them, GOOGLE? That ringing any bells? If my grandma can figure out how to google, I bet you could as well. And if you can’t google ‘boy books’ you are lazy. Yes, LAZY.

If you don’t know how here are some simple steps:

1. Go to the address bar, that is the thing at the top of your browser, type in http://www.google.com

How To Google, Address Bar, Mozilla

So simple a cave man could do it

2. Once the google website loads, you will see the giant google logo and below it, a box where you can type in a search query, so for this example, I will type in YA Books For Boys. Hit enter after you type query.

Search Query, Google

Now With Drop Down Options!

3. After you hit enter, all the results pop up. Then you click the links that sound the most interesting to you, and there are A LOT to choose from.

The Number Of REsults, google search

That Google is one fast bastard

Some tough love for you: do your research before you pop off at the mouth about the lack of YA books for boys. Assuming the only YA books being printed are for females and of the genres listed above displays incredibly ignorance of the YA genre, and I do reserve the right to mock it like it’s hot, as it’s really not that impossible to find books with boy appeal.

Here is a list of great authors who write books that can appeal to boys:

  • John Green
  • David Levithan
  • Chris Crutcher
  • Francisco X. Stork
  • Marcus Zusak
  • K. Ryer Breese
  • Patrick Ness
  • Walter Dean Myers
  • Sherman Alexie
  • Garth Nix
  • Neil Shusterman
  • Neil Gaiman
  • David Clement-Davies
  • Charles Higson
  • Jonathan Maberry
  • Michael Northrup
  • DM Cornish
  • Jeff Hirsch
  • Nick Lake
  • Matthew Quick
  • Jay Asher
  • Pittacus Lore
  • Suzanne Collins
  • Chelsea Campbell
  • James Dashner
  • Ilysa J. Bick,
  • Carl Hiasson
  • Frank Beddor
  • Rick Yancey
  • John Barnes
  • James Patterson
  • Nancy Farmer
  • Scott Westerfeld
  • Charles de Lint
  • SE Hinton
  • Diana Wynne Jones
  • Jonathan Stroud
  • Steve Kluger
  • Alison Goodman
  • Rae Carson
  • Megan Whalen Turner

But OMG, the amount of work it takes to find these authors, gosh that took me like a whole five minutes of brainstorming. Man, it is just SO rough.

Further, I think that if you aren’t able to find a gender neutral cover, you are LAZY and not trying hard enough. Sure the covers that are turned out in the store typically have a female head/body on them, but look at the ones that only have a spine. Gender neutral covers: Divergent, The Knife Of Never Letting Go, Looking For Alaska, Trapped, Ashes, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part Time Indian, The Thief, The Looking Glass Wars, Rot And Ruin, The Hunger Games, The Book Thief, The Maze Runner, Unwind, Flash Burnout, The Last Summer Of The Death Warriors, Monster, and so on and so fourth…

But, I think if we simply look at this in terms of must find great boy books, or that is a boy book or that is girl book, we lose out on same great stories because of the sex we happen to be. Instead of thinking along these gendered lines  (FYI gender is totally a SOCIAL construct, crazy right?!?!) maybe we should instead look for great books for PEOPLE. Kids, YA is neither a boys club nor is it a girl’s club, but a people club. Sure you might have to leave the best seller section of the store to find more than just Twilight (which FYI some males do like, 2 of my 8th grade males from student teaching and one 12th grade male ENJOYED and admitted to enjoying), but honestly it’s not that hard. And if you are like the majority of people reading this blog, I would assume you know how to shop on the internet, it’s not super hard to find a great YA book on amazon with people appeal.

There are definitely people who have responded to ‘the boy book argument’ much more eloquently than me. Check them out below:

Aja blogging at The Mary Sue

Maureen Johnson

Renay at Subverting The Text

Lady Business

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April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.
About April (Books&Wine)

April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.

Comments

  1. I love it! Especially the (Google is a fat bastard) part. So awesome.

  2. You should have used “Let Me Google This For You.” That’s what I do when I want to be snarky. 😉

  3. Haha! In my job as a librarian, my students want our journal search engines to be as easy as Google, but apparently even Google isn’t even easy enough!

  4. OH MY GOD THAT POST. “Girl stuff written by women.” Well, holy shit, we wouldn’t want boys to have to deal with GIRL STUFF WRITTEN BY WOMEN, that would just be terrible. “Boys and men aren’t a profitable sector!” Ahahahaha, oh my, do you think he’ll notice when his point is sunk by the iceberg of fail he’s sailing into? WOMEN ARE DOMINATING! WHAT DO WE DO. ALERT, ALERT.

    It’s like every tired, whiny point I’ve seen over the last three years where dudes continue to ask the wrong questions and go “lalalalalalala what is sexism?”. This is even better because he’s completely phoning it in. It’s so sad, they can’t even wankbait that well anymore. It’s a little like watching a cat try to get out a tub full of water: hilarious and pitiful.

    I loved your reply, by the way, A+. Also, thank you for linking to me and LB (that post is by Jodie, for the record). <3

  5. LOLing throughout the post. 🙂
    Google? Oh! I think a friend of mine once tried that a few years back…
    Just a random fact, discovered through the xkcd blag (I think) (xkcd is awesome, isn’t it?). There really aren’t as many results as Google claims. Go a dozen or so pages in. The result number drops. Significantly. 😛
    Brilliant post.

  6. I think I’m going to refer to Google as ‘the fast bastard’ from here on out. Great post, well said!

  7. YES! OMG, I was SO annoyed by that stupid post about there not being boy books. Seriously. Lazy doesn’t even begin to describe it. How about ignorant? Inconceivably clueless? STUPID? (yes, I’m bringing out the big words)
    Anyway, GREAT post!

  8. “If my Grandma can figure out how to Google…” LOL Great Post!