jobs I would not want

Reader, YA division of major publishing house

Generally I think being a reader at a major publishing house would be an incredibly amazing job. You would get a say in what books get published! You'd read the latest and greatest things before they came out and know that you contributed to their publication and success. Your job, all day long, would be to sit and read. And give your opinion!

And who doesn't love having her opinion matter?

So why, you ask, would I want to avoid this particular division? Well, to be honest, it's not exclusively YA (young adult, for all you uncultured swine out there). I'd hate SciFi and probably romance, too. Though romance might be entertaining in its insipidness.

But YA is the genre that brings you such literary masterpieces as the Twilight series. Hundreds of desperate Harry Potter knock-offs. Spin offs of TV shows. Spin offs of TV shows that themselves are based on YA novels.

And that's the shit that's actually getting published.

I have no doubt that the department receives literally thousands of submissions a year written by angstful, maladjusted teenage girls about similarly unpopular (but beautiful!) heroines who in various uninteresting ways defeat the popular (and generic! and stupid!) girls to win the affections of the (horrifically bland!) star of the football team.

Your entire job would be to wade through unyielding piles of adolescent self-importance, either written by people who are basically adolescents themselves or people who are just particularly good at capturing an awkward phase. And after a while even the good YA books would start to make you long for your years of senior discounts, if only because it would symbolize getting further from that horrible time when you honestly believed that you were so. different. And no one could possibly understand you. And every poorly-written book you read (for you career) would serve to remind you that, no, you were just like all the other adolescents lacking the vocabulary to come out on the other side and write an insightful novel about it.

And the good stuff? Those books that you go back and reread to this day because they struck you in the right way at the right time in your life to always mean something? Those books would probably get assigned to your coworker who wisely added a "nothing with vampires" clause to her contract.