Alice - good point - I voted in the initial "form the list of 100", and while I don't never listen to NPR, I don't listen to them very often outside of their classical music stations.

Arthur - I thought it was that Friends Don't Let Friends Read Martin Or Jordan? ;-)

@Kyra and Arthur: I do wonder, though, what proportion of voters in these polls are actually NPR listeners. It looks like they get linked around a fair bit (as Ibmiller says), and I suspect they briefly bring in the sci-fi/fantasy/YA/whatever fans who vote without ever listening to NPR's programming.

(Full disclosure: I came across the poll via other blogs and barely listen to NPR myself. *g*)

Then I'm sure you're one of the listeners NPR were thinking of when they wrote that description. :)

Though if it turns out you've been binging on R.A. Salvatore omnibuses when nobody's looking an intervention may be necessary. Friends don't let friends do Drizzt.

But NPR hosts Pop Culture Happy Hour which is one of my favourite podcasts....

Last year's debacle.

So, according to NPR listeners Furies of Calderon, the Drizzt novels, Terry Goodkind's fascistic rants, the Belgariad, the Kingkiller Chronicles, The Wheel of Time, the Riftwar Cycle and the Shannara series are all better than The Book of the New Sun.

Meanwhile on this page where they brag about how their audience is "a growing group of well-informed, publically involved, socially aware, highly educated individuals".

Either they are going to have to change that description or ask the Drizzt fans to kindly cease listening. Anyone who's that "well-informed" should be aware of better material, anyone who's "socially aware" ought to know you don't bring out your Drow-fancying in polite company.

It's interesting how we've all look at the list and identified different entries as being nuts.

I'm flabbergasted that they included Dune, which I think is more concrete evidence for the "they just waved through everything which showed up with a bildungsroman attached" theory.

On the plus side On The Jellicoe Road is on the list. Sigh. Oh how I love that book.

At the other end of the scale, I think some of the books (like The Hobbit) are clearly children's books, not young adult ones.

That list...is pretty much full of garbage. Some good stuff, but clearly the result of the same kind of poll that got us that horrible list of 100 books you should read according to BBC polls (which included the Narnia books twice, and probably only by sheer fluke didn't have all three LotR books plus the series listed). Arg. And the results of this poll are probably going to be on facebook memes among my friends for the next five years, since I think they've finally all finished that other poll.

Plus, their "clarifying" post was just bizzare - no consistency shown, and I believe actually ulterior motives definitely peeking out. (Paranoid, yes, I am.)

Which is my point, this is a list compiled by adults looking back at adolescence rather than a list which actually reflects the priorities of the supposed intended audience of YA.

The thing is, I don't think "has a teenage protagonist" or "is a bildungsroman" are automatically or necessarily the same as being for/about young adults... I mean The Catcher in the Rye is about a teenager who experiences a period of psychological growth or whatever that paves for the way for adulthood BUT it's not remotely a book for or about teenagers. It's for and about adults - looking back, with, honestly, slightly distasteful amounts of nostalgia and a slightly fetishistic attitude to the 'innocence' of adolescence.

I mean, it's sort of the equivalent to saying Lolita is a book for teenagers because the eponymous heroine starts out as a child but experiences a period of personal growth and development through her relationship with a much older dude...

I mean when I was growing up, all this was grass... ahem ... when I was growing up there really wasn't a YA genre like there is today. You read books about mice, then you read that one Judy Blume about how wanking is okay, and then you read adult books because that was all there was.

The first three Earthsea books do have a coming of age angle to them - Ged in Wizard, Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan, Arren in The Farthest Shore - and I guess you could argue that if a book's viewpoint character is going through adolescence or a similar coming of age experience during the course of the book then it qualifies as YA. I suppose that's also why LOTR is included since the hobbits in it evolve from sheltered manchildren to grown-ass men able to get shit sorted out.

I dunno whether my own reading development was odd but the books which meant most to me as a teenager and which I remember as being most significant to my development as a reader were never stuff pitched at a teenage market, it was grown-up shit with the sort of content that'd get parents complaining if the school promoted it to us. I didn't want some adult's vague recollections of what it was like to be my age, I knew all I wanted to know about that first-hand, I wanted to read stuff for adults because I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of school and get on with being grown-up.

Which I guess is the other problem with such a poll, if they're going for the "stuff which may arguably be about being a teenager" angle: actual young adults and former young adults are going to interpret all of this stuff very differently because once you've ceased to be a young adult you tend to end up with a very different perspective on those years than you had when you were going through them.

I've read about half of those... I don't think they've properly articulated to themselves what they mean by YA fiction, I mean whether it's a specific and discrete genre or whether they mean "books vaguely arguably about being a teenage if you squint or maybe books you read when you were a teenager". I mean Earthsea is just straight down the line fantasy, right? And as for The Catcher in the Rye - I have only one thing to say to that being included and it's LOL.

I know, right? I know it's been compiled from readers' suggestions, but I feel like the judges could have done a better job at editing the list to be honest-to-God YA/teen fiction.

That's *really* odd, being as it is a mix of absolute classics, utter tat, and stuff that is clearly *not remotely teen fiction in any way*.

I swear, one day I'm going to see the Lord of the Rings on a list of all time great cookery books.

NPR has a poll up to find the 100 Best Ever Teen Novels. Candidates include a bunch of Ferretbrain-reviewed books, some even positively!

You get 10 votes, and so far I have a shortlist of... 23. Oh dear.

(There are a lot of books on there that I love but wouldn't necessarily consider YA, so excluding those from my vote will probably help.)

But the SS are the only men who are HARD ENOUGH to stand up to the alien menace!

Tom Kratman already filled "horrendously fascistic" sff niche and Theo went for banal Christian fantasy instead, probably.

I learned about Mr. Kratman yesterday. I kind of wish I didn't know he existed. Or, more accurately, I wish I didn't know that Baen was publishing stuff where the Waffen-SS are the heroes.

In any case, the book appears to be...exactly what I expected it to be. Which is aggressively mediocre.

Personally I was expecting "horrendously fascistic", given that he's a WorldNetDaily creature.

It looks like someone did take the time to mock Vox Day's The War in Heaven.

I'm not really a fan of "sporking" because the "sporkers" usually just natter on, and this one has plenty of nattering too, but it is at least moderately entertaining nattering and the "I'm a better writer than this person" is kept to a minimum (though still appears from time to time).

Yikes, my standards for Livejournal criticism has gotten exceedingly low.

In any case, the book appears to be...exactly what I expected it to be. Which is aggressively mediocre.

Hey, that's not true! Sometimes games are so bug-ridden and incompetently executed that they are completely unplayable, and even if they weren't you wouldn't want to.

Those get a 7/10.

Okay, I'll be captain Obvious and say what everyone knows: Videogame journalism is inherently broken because video game journalists are paid by the video game companies to review their video games.

Hence why, on a scale of 1/10, all games either get an 8 or 9, depending on how big the company that made them is.

I would submit that most of the games-are-art dickheads are fans of artgames more than they are critics of artgames though. ;)

I dunno, I think video game journalism might be significantly improved if we blocked all of the games-are-art dickheads.