What I found most droll about this trick on the subway was spotting the type of book most frequently hidden from the casual eye (though not my prying one): young adult fiction. Harry Potter and its epic, dueling wand battles in a Les Misérables dust jacket. Twilight wiling away vampiric, romantic hours encased in War and Peace. And so on and so forth. Maybe the reads were irresistible, but the scrupulous readers sure as hell weren’t willing to let others know they had succumbed to the call of adolescent fiction—as if it would make them some sort of pariah if caught.

I sympathize most with the authors. Even those best-selling few whose stories engage readers of all ages are rarely considered to have written real literature; most regard their work merely as fanciful tales for angst-ridden, acne-plagued, guitar-playing, too-much-makeup-wearing youths and childish adults.

Here’s a secret for those of you who, despite the notoriety and oft-maligned reputation of young adult fiction, wish to join its ranks: realize that you are not only writing for the juvenile and pockmarked. Assume that your writing must encompass the emotional, mental, and intellectual depth, the intricate and multilayered psyches, of a broad range of ages. Know this, and you are far ahead of those who see such books in simplistic, shallow, and purely one-dimensional terms. Said people include critics of the New Yorker, as demonstrated in this recent roundtable discussion of Kathe Koja’s Headlong (much thanks to Nathan Bransford’s blog for providing the link).

After reading it, though, I think that [teenagers should reconsider reading the book]. It was far more subtle and experimental than I expected, and Lily is a complete character, with all of the obsessions that come with being a teen-ager, but also—and here’s where the book diverges from 2-D portraits of teens—an often touching sensitivity, and, amazingly for a main character, a very realistic insensitivity and self-obsession. A potentially boring heads-tails vision of morality is mercifully absent, and the book isn’t sanctimonious, much. And the plot was unpredictable. I don’t know that I’ll be reading a lot of Y.A. in the future, but I don’t feel that I wasted my time.

Well, it’s good to know your time wasn’t wasted. I’ll admit I always found the New Yorker entertaining but somewhat pretentious, and this only serves to reinforce my bias. As if a book cannot be approached with an open mind because it is (ostensibly) written for someone who is not yet old enough to have earned a college degree, or had a forty-hour workweek, or gotten married. These critics seem to forget the vast range of experience behind such books—the authors themselves—who have carefully woven their own taste of the “real world” into a novel that, despite the fact it may feature a fifteen-year-old girl as protagonist, can be as powerful and moving as any of Victor Hugo or Leo Tolstoy.

Last year, the New York Times had the distinction of beating Bob Woodward to the punch with a premature feature on his State of Denial, courtesy of a gun-jumping bookseller. In fact, embargo breaking is something of a NYT specialty: They did the same thing with Woodward’s previous book. And with the Carly Fiorina memoir–despite a deal between Newsweek and Penguin for exclusive rights to the story. (And then the NYT did the unforgivable, publishing Harry Potter spoilers.)

Although Penguin says it forces any retailers it finds selling books early to remove them from shelves, procuring high-profile books before release date doesn’t seem too difficult. No word on whether the nameless booksellers sell embargoed material out of ignorance or desperation for sales of any kind.

Greenspan’s 544-page memoir/economic commentary is currently Amazon.com’s top seller.

+Greenspan on 60 Minutes
+Greenspan at BEA
+NYT review

Rowling herself pleaded with readers to keep plot developments hush-hush, and Scholastic asks that early recipients hide the illicit packages. Uh-huh. Reports indicate that most early copies are safely stowed in padlocked sock drawers across the nation, but at least one spoilsport uploaded photos of the whole thing to Gaia Online.

Diehard Pottermaniacs are advised to stay indoors, avoiding all forms of media, earplugs firmly in place, until tentatively heading to their local big-box bookstores for the magic moment tomorrow night.