Young adult fiction is filling a long-ignored reading gap for teenagers navigating identity, relationships and growing up. The copies are rising and so are book sales.
Jurors say this year's English shortlist promises journeys that transcend borders & centuries, while the Hindi shortlist weaves together themes of perseverance, survival & hope.
Chinese intelligence, self-delusion in digital age, and populism captured the attention of ThePrint's columnists this year. Here are some of their recommended titles.
China patiently invested capital, skill and technology in coal gasification. Unlike it, we won’t move from words to action. As crude prices decline, we lose interest.
India’s teens need to focus on mathematics and statistics. The future will belong to the country which has the best maths/stats talent. Be it DS, ML or AI, the foundation is maths and stats.
If India aspires to be a superpower, our teens must devote themselves wholeheartedly to maths/stats.
Our performance at the Maths and Physics Olympiads is quite pathetic.
One can only hope that teens will not waste their time on idiotic fiction.
Saddened to see the ‘book collection’ image spanning Colleen Hoover, manga, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a copious excess of self-help, most of which is really feel-good Western pseudoscience of questionable quality anyway (too many flaws to enumerate in a comment, but to name a few, creating unrealistic hopes, ignoring personal context that professional help would consider, action addiction, and the elephant in the room is reductionist Western science that does not work).
Also, the self-help books (including some of the ones pictured) promote Western, individualistic ideologies – personal success over family duty, immediate gratification over patience, relentless self-optimisation even if it means superficial and less genuine social behaviours.
All of that said, I do understand there is a serious gap between supply and demand. Our kids go for these options because 1. they’re deemed ‘cool’ and ‘in vogue’, so there is an obvious fear of missing out (FOMO) if you don’t gobble up this culture. We can blame Westernised education or Anglicised colonial hangovers. But equally, 2. we fail somewhere in making our own culture accessible to young readers in a style and form they appreciate, and also in marketing it as ‘cool’.
A contrast could be drawn here with Japan and Korea, both non-Western countries who have succeeded in marketing their culture as cool and fashionable, not just to their youth but the the world (without ignoring its toxic shades, I will point to the global existence of e.g. the ‘BTS Army’ and ‘Japanophiles’ / ‘weebs’ as evidence of the world admiring, sometimes to a toxic extreme, East Asian culture exports). In more serious domains, the respect accorded to ‘Japanese management’ is nothing but the country making a name for a facet rooted in its indigenous philosophy, knowledge tradition, and culture in a field (management) that is almost wholly dominated by Western (especially American) models.
India’s teens need to focus on mathematics and statistics. The future will belong to the country which has the best maths/stats talent. Be it DS, ML or AI, the foundation is maths and stats.
If India aspires to be a superpower, our teens must devote themselves wholeheartedly to maths/stats.
Our performance at the Maths and Physics Olympiads is quite pathetic.
One can only hope that teens will not waste their time on idiotic fiction.
Saddened to see the ‘book collection’ image spanning Colleen Hoover, manga, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a copious excess of self-help, most of which is really feel-good Western pseudoscience of questionable quality anyway (too many flaws to enumerate in a comment, but to name a few, creating unrealistic hopes, ignoring personal context that professional help would consider, action addiction, and the elephant in the room is reductionist Western science that does not work).
Also, the self-help books (including some of the ones pictured) promote Western, individualistic ideologies – personal success over family duty, immediate gratification over patience, relentless self-optimisation even if it means superficial and less genuine social behaviours.
All of that said, I do understand there is a serious gap between supply and demand. Our kids go for these options because 1. they’re deemed ‘cool’ and ‘in vogue’, so there is an obvious fear of missing out (FOMO) if you don’t gobble up this culture. We can blame Westernised education or Anglicised colonial hangovers. But equally, 2. we fail somewhere in making our own culture accessible to young readers in a style and form they appreciate, and also in marketing it as ‘cool’.
A contrast could be drawn here with Japan and Korea, both non-Western countries who have succeeded in marketing their culture as cool and fashionable, not just to their youth but the the world (without ignoring its toxic shades, I will point to the global existence of e.g. the ‘BTS Army’ and ‘Japanophiles’ / ‘weebs’ as evidence of the world admiring, sometimes to a toxic extreme, East Asian culture exports). In more serious domains, the respect accorded to ‘Japanese management’ is nothing but the country making a name for a facet rooted in its indigenous philosophy, knowledge tradition, and culture in a field (management) that is almost wholly dominated by Western (especially American) models.
Teens are wasting their time on fiction instead of learning and practising mathematics.