So you may have heard about this little thing happening on Wall Street (and in L.A., Boston, Phoenix, San Diego, Chicago, Cincinnati, Berlin, Paris–oh, just read the list here). What you may not know is that the Occupy Wall Street protestors have a library of their own. Reports GalleyCat:

As the Occupy Wall Street protest continues, the activists camped out in New York City have built an impressive library. Thanks to Library Thing, you can now explore the library online and watch it grow.

Currently, the makeshift library counts 390 books.

Well, that was on October 11–the library now stands at nearly 2,000 over 3,000 books. There’s lots of what you might expect from a protest movement: People Vs. Profits II: The United States And the World, by Victor Perlo; Why Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen; and The Communist Manifesto. But there’s lots more too, from The Aeneid to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia to all the Calvin and Hobbes books, including The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. (Although, okay, Calvin and Hobbes may be more attuned to the Occupy movement than we think.)

Several authors have personally come out in support of the Occupy movements, too. On October 19, Naomi Wolf was arrested during a protest in NYC. Author Lemony Snickett offers advice to the 1% in the form of “Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance“:

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald. [...]

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

(Via.) And lots more writers have voiced their support on OccupyWriters.com, offering their reflections on the protests so far. Francine Prose, for instance, had this to say:

In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.

Why are so many writers aligned with the Occupy movement? Maybe it’s just because writers tend to be well in the 99%–haha–but in alll seriousness, I think there’s a deep affinity between writers and protestors. Writers tend to be interested in the plight of the underdogs, in calling out unfairness, in speaking out even if that speech will be futile. What do you think? Why have writers around the world joined the Occupy movement?

Which came first, the moody teen, or the YA fiction that moody teens often gravitate towards? Linda Holmes of NPR responds to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial that criticized YA fiction for being “too dark”:

I’m more intrigued by the aspirational nature of the quaint but sad idea that teenagers, if you don’t give them The Hunger Games, can be effectively surrounded by images of joy and beauty.

While the WSJ piece refers to the YA fiction view of the world as a funhouse mirror, I fear that what’s distorted is the vision of being a teenager that suggests kids don’t know pathologies like suicide or abuse unless they read about them in books.

Do you remember being 15?

For some people, it was a breeze. There are absolutely, positively people who had a very easy time as adolescents, who feel a little guilty about the fact that they didn’t actually find youth all that difficult, and it’s unfair to declare their experiences invalid or uninteresting or inauthentic.

But there are plenty — plenty — of people for whom, if they are honest, it was a time of isolation and bafflement and plain old gutting it out until they got older. And even when it wasn’t miserable, it was often complicated, and a lot of kids who don’t experience abusive dating relationships or self-harm or eating disorders? They already know somebody who does. Surrounding them with books full of joy and beauty is fine, but confining their reading to those things because we are afraid that they cannot tolerate being exposed to the things they are already so often exposed to does them a terrible disservice. It’s difficult to say to a teenager, “We don’t even let you read about anyone who cuts herself; it’s that much of a taboo. But by all means, if you’re cutting yourself, feel free to tell a trusted adult.”

Honestly, the kids who are reading the scary YA fiction — the dark stuff, the creepy stuff, the adventurous and weird and dirty stuff — are the same kids who, if YA fiction weren’t dark and creepy sometimes, would just read dark and creepy books for adults.

When I was a teen, I remember my mother sitting me down for a serious talk about the music I was listening to: she was concerned that it was “too depressing,” that it might be making me angsty. Okay, she had a point; it was pretty angsty stuff (hey, it was the ’90s, the era of bands like Soundgarden and Nirvana, where the anguished wail became an art form). But to my mind, the music expressed what I was already feeling. That was why I listened to it: it spoke to me.

So do young adults need to be shielded from “dark” YA lit? Or does it help them to express what they’re already feeling and convince them—crucially—that they’re not alone? I have to say I’m with Holmes on this one.

***

In Harvard Bookstore, one of my favorite local indie bookstores, there’s a small, unobtrusive sign on the fiction shelf. For books by Bukowski and Kerouac, it says, please ask at the register. I couldn’t figure out why and finally asked one of the staff. “People tend to steal them,” she explained bluntly.

As a horrible goody-two-shoes, the idea of stealing a book had never occurred to me. (And really? Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac? Okay, I do live in Cambridge.) In the New York Times, novelist Margo Rabb investigates the most-stolen books at independent bookstores across the country:

Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter. This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others. Sometimes the staff isn’t sure whether an author is still popular to swipe until they return their books to the main floor. “Amis went out and came right back,” Michael Russo, the manager, told me.

Reasons for stealing range from a rite of passage to “hipness” to good old-fashioned inebriation. And gender seems to play a role, too: Rabb points out that most frequently stolen books tend to have male authors–and male thieves.