Month: October 2012

book lists
05 Oct 2012

let the bodies hit the floor

YA Realism isn’t always “real.” Nor does it need to be “real” because “real” is one of those words that means very little and what little it means is highly subjective. This is bringing back unpleasant memories of cryptic philosophical reading assignments past, but what I’m trying to say is I get that YA books might not seem realistic to me and real-ness is not a particularly unbiased way to judge a piece of literature.

However.

I have observed some trends in contemporary YA realism that seem… um… unlikely. And then when seven other books feature the same unlikely feature, it seems that statistically speaking, the world of YA realism is a world much stranger than ours.

Exhibit A:

There Are Dead Bodies Everywhere, And At Any Time You Or Someone You Love May Chance Upon One

 

I’m sure there are more examples that I’m not thinking of, and this isn’t even including the numerous other books in which characters discover the dead bodies of their family members after some sort of trauma… which is slightly more likely than chancing upon a strange corpse in a public place, but just as traumatic. Actually more traumatic. I need to stop talking about this right now, and please don’t ask me about the time I chanced upon a dead cat on my way to the train because I might still be recovering.

 

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Sum

Paper Towns by John Green

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfeld

 

 

book reviews
03 Oct 2012

Every Day by David Levithan

Every day, for his/her existence, A wakes up in a different body of someone nearby of the same age. For that day, A can access that person’s memories, sleeps in their bed, kisses their girlfriends or boyfriends (or not), and then at midnight, a new life. Each chapter is a day, and each day has more meaning when for the first time, A falls in love and can’t help but use each subsequent day-in-the-life to reach out to Rhiannon.

I have two things to say about David Levithan’s Every Day.

1. I am super-duper excited that this book is Levithan’s long deserved day in the sun, what with full-page Entertainment Weekly reviews and the attention of the mainstream reading community. He has been writing excellent YA for years and is deserving of praise.

I enjoyed Every Day a great deal, especially how effortlessly Levithan creates the worlds of so many varied teenagers in so few pages. However, I think that some of Levithan’s other books explore the nuances of young relationships and love with a bit more subtlety. If you are new to Levithan and looking for more, might I recommend Are We There Yet?, Marly’s Ghost, or my absolute favorite, The Realm of Possibility.

2. So, about that Day 6025.

The short of it (not news for most of you), on Day 6025, A wakes up in the body of an obese teenager. A has never been obese before, never existed in a body of that size, and he reacts with immediate negative, offensive language. This is not a flattering or sensitive portrayal of life that is reality for many, many Americans and young people.

However, I can see the literary purpose of Levithan’s choice to set A against his body – this is a point in the novel when A wants to make a relationship work with Rhiannon, but in this less attractive body, Rhiannon finds it harder to see A inside, to see why it’s worth the effort to date a non-bodied entity. A is scared of this potential hurdle from the get-go – he/she is always A, but he has no control over any given corporeal appearance. And the feeling of being in a body that doesn’t feel the way your body should feel is uncomfortable. I get that.

But I don’t think this excuses the level of vitriol in Levithan’s language. It really was jarring even for me – a generally sympathetic, easy-going reader. I don’t know if it’s the author’s responsibility to make artistic changes in order to please every subset of people, but it seems that this chapter could have been written to the same effect with maybe half of the negative language, without the stereotypical perceptions of overweight people. It sucks that this one chapter has ruined the reading experience for so many.

book awards
02 Oct 2012

BG-HB Awards

At the Boston Globe Horn Book Awards Ceremony, esteemed authors and illustrators give speeches to a full-house of children’s lit aficionados, scholars, publishers, and general supporters. We all marvel over their cleverness and their ability to write delicious teen and children’s books.

The highlights:

The creators of Chuck Close: Face Book knew nothing of children’s literature, but were adorable about it.

Julie Fogliano was seeing a dream come true with And Then It’s Spring; her speech was touching and inspiring.

Mal Peet insulted all Americans but that’s okay because he is a genius and I cannot stop loving Life: An Exploded Diagram.

And Mac Barnett & Jon Klassen were so very young and charming that everybody in the audience died. I am dead right now, actually.

The best part? I showed up alone and there, waiting for me were all the folks that I know and like – former classmates, professors, new coworkers, and some of my dearest friends. My people. Love it.

life maintenance
01 Oct 2012

2012: week thirty-nine

September 23 – September 29

The month has drawn to a close with this week, this week which I have taken to calling September – Week Four, as according to my latest and of course greatest daily-life-plan. Would you care to hear about my latest scheduling/life maintenance scheme? Of course you don’t. Maybe one day I will gather all of these plans, these systems, and publish them in a volume entitled The Rantings of a Mad Woman.

Anyway, part of this current daily-life-plan is intentional focus on 3 aspects of my life for 30 days and letting everything else kind of simmer. For the month of September, I attended to the following:

My Health, because I was drawing ever closer to that “I can’t wear any of my clothes anymore” moment, and also I need to get married in a year and would prefer not to resort to an all-cottage cheese diet to fit into my dress next summer. I also wanted to work towards my two-5k New Year’s Resolution, aka stop running so sporadically.

I also focused on my Happiness this month – a term I use broadly to encompass any sort of emotional/mood/behavior/spiritual issues that I might be having. There is usually something going on. Which is probably requires a stronger course of treatment than “happiness,” and is likely related to why I feel a need to craft elaborate schemes to live my life, but I digress.

And last but not least, Life Maintenance. I moved and started a new job. I thought it would be wise to devote some attention to stuff like “moving,” “unpacking,” “signing up for health insurance,” “buying stuff for my apartment,” and “figuring out what to spend my money/time on.”

So this month, I budgeted and signed papers and filled up notebooks and scheduled. This month I re-read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and while my original opinions still stand, oh, this book just makes me think differently. I learn a lot about learning a lot about myself, and I’ve been babbling about it to people for the entirety of September. I’m on an interminable hold list for Happier at Home.

And in this September – Week Four, I finished Day 14 of Whole30, ran a 5k in the rain without stopping to walk, and one room of my house is moderately decorated, mostly unpacked, and generally habitable.

A good month.

Next up, Career, Creativity, and (gag) Wedding.

Reading:

Listening to:

  • New Avett Brothers
  • New-ish Fleet Foxes
  • Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic”
  • 7,435 podcasts

Watching:

  • Checked out season one of Happy Endings from the library. Here is the problem with checking out season DVDs from the library – you have to watch them REALLY fast. I like this show, but I don’t really like any of the actors. Maybe one. Is that good enough to watch season two? Is this an Arrested Development situation where you are indifferent and confused during season one and then die of amazement and laugh at your past, ignorant self for hating season one? This is a lot of thinking about a television show – I should probably stop this now and use my time on something more productive.
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