I’ve concluded that something about my current hairstyle (actually my current unwieldy growing out stage and attempts not to have it stick out too far or in funny directions) must look French, at least in bad light. I suppose femmes Francais d’un age certain do tend to have shorter hair.
I wasn’t too surprised when several people at the resort in Malaysia asked if I were French; there were hardly any Americans visiting, and the other pale-skinned people there were Dutch, French and Australian. I’ve pretty obviously not Dutch (too small, too dark). White Australians often look British, which I don’t, plus the Aussies there all seemed to be much bigger than I am. So French was a logical guess.
But I got asked if I were French again the other day, this time by a Taiwanese taxi-driver who had no other reason but appearance to make his guess. Odd.
Also,much as I love YA books, I was thinking about it the other day and realized that there’s a lot to be said for adult books – but that we usually classify those wrong. Books often get called “adult” because they have lots of sex, or have a darker tone. That seems to me to be a matter of fiat rather than intrinsic nature – that is, it’s not that young adults don’t like sex or unhappy endings, it’s just that whoever makes the rules doesn’t want them to be reading those.
Then there are books that are really adult by nature; I keep seeing Jane Austen in the YA racks, but I think that’s a good way to turn people off her for life. I’ve encountered any number of people whose reaction to Jane matches my own: I tried to read her in my late teens, didn’t get anywhere, then fell in love with her somewhere in my twenties. Austen demands a certain detachment, and for all the eyerolls and “Whatever“s teens are prone to, I don’t think it’s a characteristic of the age.
(Of course this is the sort of thing that varies; I expect there are plenty of people who loved Emma at 13. But I also suspect those poeple find a lot more in Austen when they reread her at 25 and 45 and 65. I find new things in Pride and Prejudice every single time.)
There are others. Tey is an adult writer, I think, more so than Sayers (I wouldn’t have liked Harriet Vane at 9 as I did Hercule Poirot, but I think I’d have connected with her at 17.) A.S. Byatt is an adult writer, though I confess she bores me (maybe I’m not adult enough). I think Tristram Shandy may be an adult book, but maybe not. I’m not a fan of the genre, but I think at least some of the technothrillers my husband likes may be adult books, not so much for the violence (again, it’s not that younger adults necessarily dislike reading that) as for the politics. Elizabeth Bear is an adult writer; I bet she has few fans under 18. She doesn’t do easy answers.
Terry Pratchett has managed something really nifty: he has adult themes (no easy answers, the detachment he calls “Third Thoughts” inside YA books, in the Tiffany Aching series. (Also in his nominally-adult Discworld books, though I wouldn’t have had trouble swallowing those from age 12 or so. I didn’t, but mostly because I started with his earlier weaker books and only encountered Monstrous Regiment later.) I can’t think of many modern books that would be better to grow up on than A Hat Full of Sky and sequelae, and I’d be predisposed to like and respect anyone who said those were favorite books during her teens.