Beyond Selidor

The YA twitter essay was good too but I was kind of nonplussed at the idea that "adults reading kids' books started with Twilight" -- that was so she could hook it up with Twitter, but I think that really began on a large scale with Harry Potter, and some books later labeled "YA" (Little Women, Jane Eyre, other classics) have always been popular, and in the UK and other countries there wasn't that strict division between YA and "adult" books the US made for marketing purposes. I think before the early 2000s it would've been seen as a bit weird for an adult to read a YA book, unless it was by an author who wrote adult novels, like Le Guin. ANECDATA but I knew more adults who read Harry Potter and Hunger Games than Twilight, altho of course a lot of older women readers picked up the non-magical non-high school fanfic that got published.