All right, teenagers: I’m giving you the floor this time.

Like a lot of teens, Leslie Cornaby has a crowded schedule—her days crammed with homework, hobbies, and an array of techno diversions. When she’s not checking e-mail, she’s cruising YouTube or scrolling her iPod to tunes by Pink or Christina Aguilera.

She’s also reading—just for the glorious fun of it—and says, “Most of my friends are readers, too.”

The Shorecrest High School sophomore may not realize it, but she’s enjoying the fruits of one of the most fertile periods in the history of young adult literature.

It’s a time of strong writing and strong sales as readers in the twelve-to-eighteen age group rock the marketplace.

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”

Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

I can’t comment on the quality of current young adult book fare, since I haven’t read a new young adult book in—well, longer than I can remember—but this news is reassuring, especially since studies have been showing a decline in teenage literacy. Maybe these studies just seem worse than they really are.

But the question remains: are today’s young adult books too mature for their audience?

“We really have three young-adult literatures now,” said book critic, author and former library director Michael Cart, who thinks the YA catchall has become outdated.

He favors reserving the “young adult” label for college-age titles, creating a “teen” label for the high school market and maybe cooking up something else for middle schoolers between eleven and fourteen.

Many librarians are cool to the idea for logistical and philosophical reasons, though teens themselves seem interested.

“It would be cumbersome,” said Hayden Bass, a librarian at the Seattle Public Library’s Teen Center. “And I’m a bit leery of telling people what they ought to be reading at their age level.”

Labels, labels, labels; they’re about as useful as a box of matches in outer space. Seriously: does everyone always read at his or her own age level? I sure don’t—John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men could be easily read and understood by a sixth-grader; conversely, not every adult wants to spend time with James Joyce’s Ulysses or Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (which, in this case, the School Library Journal recommends for grades five and up). And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some sixteen-year-old slogging through one or both of those books. (For that matter, I wouldn’t stop anyone, regardless of age, from reading them.)

Maybe we should just dispense with this “reading/age level” bullshit. Most young readers are probably reading above their age level anyway.