Ratings for Books?

KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems [1]” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium, I would argue: To me, sexual language is more subjective than sexual images are. At least those on TV. And how would such a rating system work? I, for one, would far rather the preteens and teens I know read a graphic sex scene, sensitively rendered, in a book whose values seemed humanist and complex, than have them read a PG version of such a scene in a trashy “teen” book about high school cliques.

As you point out, reading about a “manpole” is very different than seeing it—reading is, in our world, private, not public. It gives you time to process and think. Then again, the dialogue in the book Buchsbaum mentions, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, sounds kinda … terrible. I've got it: Don’t rate books, just stop publishing trashy YA dramas and hand teenagers real literature instead. Or do I just sound like a literary reactionary—a kind of “Lit,”per Gore—when I say that?