21 Feb 2013

all roads lead to YA lit – sex & drugs edition

My effort to watch more movies this year has flipped on a strange bit of radar in my head – my ears perk up for movies that flew under my radar, classics I haven’t watched since I was a child, movies that whatever sort of cult cache that I seem to revere. I listened to an interview with Seth Green – one of my middle school actor crushes (even though I was probably already taller than him at the age of 12) and he mentioned his friendship with Macaulay Culkin, and that the favorite film of his career was Party Monster. It was on Netflix. I watched it. For twenty minutes I was completely put off, then completely engrossed.

The movie is based on a book that is based on the lives of the two protagonists – James St. James and Michael Alig – as they romp around New York in the early 1990s with a gaggle of gender-bending, bizarrely dressed Club Kids behind them. It’s bizarre, it’s graphic, there are many drug overdoses and a few murders. It reminded me of In Cold Blood in the way that I wasn’t quite sure if I was watching a documentary or a fictionalization, or whether James and Michael were protagonists or villains.

Of course, I google the crap out of it once the movie’s over. After some time spent down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, I figured out why the name “James St. James” stuck so clearly in my head:

He wrote a fairly well-received YA book in 2007!

All the roads, they lead to YA. Although to be honest, if you set Freak Show and Disco Bloodbath/Party Monster in front of me, I would probably choose the latter. Blame it on Seth Green.

17 Feb 2013

Caldecott Awards, 2013

Award

This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen

Jon Klassen is a very clever fellow and a talented artist with style that is quite en vogue – spare white backgrounds, simple figures and color schemes, etc. I personally liked the art/aesthetic in I Want My Hat Back better, but I think that’s just because there’s so much BLACK in This Is Not My Hat. It’s jarring. But I am glad to see Klassen get his due. Especially because I am on Team Candlewick.

Honors

Creepy Carrots! by Peter Brown and Aaron Reynolds

I haven’t had a chance to look at this book yet, but I definitely flagged it some time during the Fall as one of those books that I thought was uncommonly weird. I can dig uncommonly weird books getting major awards. I can.

Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger

I love how simple and painterly this book is. A simple concept book that is beautiful and spare. Not even a concept book, really, just a book about green. Green! The concept of green. If you can make a book about green and rock it out, you can get a Caldecott Honor – fine by me.

One Cool Friend by David Small and Toni Buzzeo

Another one I haven’t read yet, but I worked for 2 years at a library in Western Michigan so David Small is a hometown hero. Woohoo!

Extra Yarn by Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett

This one, I like. A lot. And I’m not just saying that because I watched these two young men charm the pants off of a room of librarians. I’m saying that because it’s a book about knitting that is clever and colorful and lovely.

And also, I was one of those librarians.

Sleep Like a Tiger by Pamela Zagarenski and Mary Logue

Alright, I haven’t read this one either. I am bad at reading picturebooks. And also, this one got caught in our library-not-ordering log jam. I will judge a book by it’s cover and say that I would like it. It looks like the kind of art you might rip out of a book and frame to hang on the wall of your trendy child’s nursery.

15 Feb 2013

look out, jackson-town

Tomorrow, I leave for Jackson.

Isn’t it fun when there is a song that describes exactly what you are about to do with your life? Ask me about the time my sister and I took a train to Chicago and played Sufjan Stevens on our speakers, for the benefit of all of our fellow passengers. Actually, you don’t have to ask because that was pretty much it.

Speaking of my sister, my sister called me last night and said, “I wanted to tell you about this book I can’t put down. It’s called Seraphina.”

Speaking of my other sister, she is going to pick me up from the airport tomorrow!

Speaking of my other-other sister, there is probably nothing I love more than looking at her Tumblr.

I miss them. I missed Thanksgiving and Christmas and I haven’t been home since July. I’m going to read some books on the plane. I’m going to pretend like I’m not making a thousand wedding decisions that are currently wiring my jaw shut, or traveling by air, or that my trip isn’t desperately short, or that I’m leaving Peach here with minimal human interaction, or that I didn’t buy my sister a birthday gift yet, or that my review is not done, or that we didn’t do laundry because of the storm so I will be arriving in Michigan slightly smelly and throwing my suitcase directly into the wash.

None of that. Happy trip fun times! Sisters! Mommy! Daddy! Corgis! Vacation days! Plane books! I’m thinking Aristotle, Dante, and Brene Brown.

14 Feb 2013

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman

As I think more about The Books That People Really Love, I keep thinking about fantasy. [Insert a few witty sentences about how I don’t really read fantasy here]. Not liking fantasy never felt like a strange thing until, of all places, grad school. My program was a haven for lovers of Tamora Pearce, Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Donna Jo Napoli – of Twilight, even, and of course, Harry Potter.

When I have that conversation about favorite books with my classmates, the titles they hold onto are those that reliably took them from here to another world.

Reading Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina, I started to get it. The cover was the first step – you don’t see line art on YA books much anymore, even fantasies, much less landscapes. This is a book that has a place, a place you can see on the cover, that you will visit when you read.

This was not a book that I read easily. The prose is dense, sentences that you can tell were “crafted” and not just written. The plot is political and interpersonal, and with a large cast of characters with eccentric names, it was sometimes hard to follow. There are stories going on inside of an aristocracy, outside of an aristocracy, and an entire plotline that exists inside of Seraphina’s head – until maybe it doesn’t.

But the characters, especially Seraphina, were compelling, making me want to learn more about this strange place, about their lifestyles and politics. In Goredd, dragons and humans coexist, but only due to a tentative treaty that many believe should be revoked. Dragons are the arguably superior beings, gifted with more intellect, logic, and special skills, including the ability to take human form. Humans allow some dragons to live among them, but only if they wear a bell around their neck or contribute to society in some meaningful way. The political plots focus on these tensions between dragon and human, which have very obvious parallels to race and cultural relations in our world today; Hartman implies these connections with an expert’s subtle hand.

The personal plots focus on Seraphina, a half-dragon, half-human living as a human in a world where neither dragon nor human even acknowledge the biological possibility of such miscegenation. She’s undercover, but her combination of dragon and human skills make her a superb musician, so she gets a job in the castle and slowly gets involved with dragon-human politics.

Every time I picked up the book, I would read a few pages and feel a little internal sigh, a little “urgh,” a little “what’s going on in the Internet right now?”

But if I read for a minute or two more, then I was just in the book. Not really aware of the reading process, necessarily, not flipping pages because you’re impatient for a plot’s ending, not reading because the reading’s easy.

I just went somewhere else. And that, I think, is something you don’t easily forget.

13 Feb 2013

words we live by

“Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies.

It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to.”

Austin Kleon – Steal Like an Artist

11 Feb 2013

blizzard of ’13

I moved to Boston in late 2009. Since then, some kind of apocalypse has been slowly afoot.

In just over three years, we have seen and survived…

  • An earthquake
  • Some tornadoes
  • Hurricane Irene
  • Hurricane Sandy
  • A flu epidemic
  • A blizzard that has a name but I can’t express to you how much I hate that naming non-Hurricane storms is like a thing now

Snow doesn’t scare me. I’m from Michigan. Snow just irritates me. I respond to this irritation by ignoring it completely, like a kid who’s acting up.

Work closed for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which is just ridiculously unheard of and should have been a tip-off that this snow would not be ignored.

I sent The Boy to the store for weekend provisions, but didn’t bother to give him a list, assuming that by Sunday we would be back to our regularly scheduled grocery shopping. He came back with 50 Types of Carbs, of course, so we ate through two bags of pita chips and a loaf of bread while the snow fell and fell and fell and fell…

Somebody in this apartment was a rockstar and went out yesterday for protein and vegetables and dish-washing liquid, and also shoveled the steps and the sidewalk so I didn’t have to wade through 2 ft of irritating snow trying to get to work this morning.

Somebody else in this apartment stayed entirely sedentary for the long weekend and therefore did an impressive amount of reading.

So what’s next, nature? Any volcanoes in New Hampshire that might erupt? A tsunami? Acid rain? If I move, will a black cloud of disaster follow me to my new location?

09 Feb 2013

Newbery Awards, 2013

Award

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Animal stories. Never been a big fan. Well, I did read the Rats of NIMH a few years ago, which was pretty awesome, and there is always Charlotte’s Web. But on the whole, even as a child, they never really thrilled me. I’m a realism girl through and through.

However, there was a bit of critical buzz around The One and Only Ivan these past few months, I and I’ll admit – I was a bit intrigued. A caged gorilla narrator who likes to think about art? I could dig it.

 

Honors

Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz

Well, well, well, Ms. Schlitz. Two out of your last three books have earned Newbery nods. I liked Good Masters, Sweet Ladies well enough, but wasn’t quite sure what to make of it – I don’t read a lot of collections of dramatic shorts, especially those set in medieval England. I have heard that Splendors and Glooms is complex, long, and maybe not quite accessible to younger readers. But I’ve also heard on good authority that the writing is lovely and the effort rewarding.

Bomb: The Race to Build – and Steal – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin

What can I say about Bomb that I haven’t already said?

Bomb certainly cleaned up this year. Newbery Honor, Sibert Award, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Award, National Book Award Nominee – could life be any sweeter for Mr. Sheinkin? We shortlisted Bomb for the Cybil’s MG/YA Nonfiction Award, so maybe next week will be yet another honor for a completely deserving book.

As always – three cheers for nonfiction in the major awards mix!!

Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage

Not super-suprised this book got a Newbery Honor, but let’s be honest, were we super-suprised by any of the above? Well, I mean, if you’d asked me in the 6th grade if I thought the author of Animorphs would win a Newbery Award, I would probably not have believed you, but there you have it.

Three Times Lucky, however, has a plucky heroine, a dynamic setting, a cast of interesting townsfolk, and a murder mystery, which makes for a crowd + critic pleasing read. Personally, I love reading books set in the South, so I might give it a read.

 

08 Feb 2013

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

I am still working on Project Five Romances, if you can call reading five measly books a project. I read the Jennifer Smith, the Sarah Dessen, the Stephanie Perkins, and then hit a bottleneck of Waiting for Library Reserves to Come In. So I charged up my borrowed Nook and started reading my first Netgalley ARC – Eleanor & Park. Call it Project Six Romances.

Eleanor and Park are students at the same high school. Park is a Korean-American living in a white-bread Nebraska town, but he’s known everyone in the neighborhood and school forever so he’s got his own social agenda, even if he doesn’t quite fit in. Eleanor, on the other hand, is the new girl, and nothing about her fits in – her body, her crazy red hair, her thrift-store-because-that’s-all-she-can-afford wardrobe, how she shares a room with her four siblings and how her mom let her new husband kick Eleanor out of the house for a year. She’s “Fat Slut.” She’s “Big Red.” She’s the girl whose street clothes get flushed in the toilet during gym class, who couldn’t blend in no matter how hard she tries. Home sucks. School sucks. The only tolerable portion of the day is when she reads comic books over Park’s shoulder when they sit together on the bus.

And then they fall in love.

Oh, they fall in love.

I don’t even want to make this Romance #6 because it’s so different than the kind of romance I was going for when picking the first five. No offense to the contemporary light YA romance, but all five of the selected titles adhere to a rough pattern, a bit of a formula. Reader meets girl. Girl has problems. Girl meets boy. Problems complicate boy. Girl solves problems. Girl gets boy. It’s a formula I like, but it could not be further from Eleanor & Park. Eleanor is a girl with problems, but they are problems too big for any teenager to “solve” on her own, with or without the help of a boy. Park wants to help, but Eleanor won’t let him all the way in, and even when she does he can’t help her either.

They fall in love anyway.

And that it why I liked this book so damn much – because when you are a teenager and you fall in love, it’s rarely easy. You feel victimized by adults with power, by your peers. You can’t say what you want, what you are feeling; communication breaks down suddenly and with consequence. You know in your heart of hearts that you aren’t going to be together forever, even if you want to, really really badly.

But you fall in love anyway.

This book reminded me much of Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch, but with a closer, more intimate narrative. Like Wes and June, Eleanor and Park get alternating chapters, and while Eleanor is the true protagonist, I believe, it was all about Park for me. He was just the sweetest boy trying to fit in and stand out, to follow the crowd and follow his heart, to find out what it means to him to be a man.

I didn’t cry, I didn’t swoon, I didn’t rush through the last pages in anticipation that The Boy and The Girl would finally end up together. It’s not that kind of romance.

But I loved it anyway.

07 Feb 2013

your personal canon

If you are my friend – or even just an acquaintance – I would like to read your favorite book.

Or at least a book that you really, really liked. I know it’s hard to pick favorites. I want to read a book that changed your life. Or maybe not changed your life, exactly, but clicked something on in your brain, turned a switch, changed some small aspect of the way you view the world.

This is an introvert’s way of getting to know someone without having to actually, you know, speak. But it’s not just because I want to get to know you. I mean, you’re a nice, interesting person, I probably do want to get to know you. But I’m selfish. I want to find books that I’ve never heard of that are amazing. I want to change my own life. I want to add to my personal canon.

I imagine that everyone has their own criteria that must be met in order for a book to enter into the upper echelons of their psyche. For me, I hold onto fiction authors whose talent is steady and enduring, that keep writing and rarely disappoint. I give great respect to books that I found as a young person and read and read and read until the words have worked their way into my subconscious. I revere works of fiction that speak to some higher truth regarding how we humans interact with one another, how we love each other. I love nonfiction that incites a sudden and severe change in the course of my daily actions – the way I eat or move my body or spend my days or speak to other people. Some of these books I read once and that’s enough; one experience will stay with me forever. Others pop up cyclically, every six months, every year. Some I pick up when I’m in a certain place in my life, a time of unrest, when I need reminding of something or need comfort. Most, I read and read and read again, because I am a re-reader.

This is why I tend to write about the same books and authors over and over again. My canon is part of me, my life, and how I judge and read other books. I can practice being objective, yes… but to what extent, ultimately?

And anyway, I love these authors, these books. I love re-reading them.  I love writing about them. I read every book hoping that I can add another to the bookshelves of my soul, or whatever. I’m going to think about these books until I die, and I’m going to write about them until they stop changing my life.

So if you ever add a book to your own canon, let me know; I want to read it.

 

05 Feb 2013

hello, iPhone

I just wanted to tell you that after years of smack-talking smartphones, after managing to get a library job without one, after throwing away my iPad, I finally got an iPhone.

I saved my pennies to buy the 5 instead of the 4. I found some extra money in the budget to accommodate the larger phone bill. I applied all of my subtle (or not-so-subtle) persuasion skills to present the idea favorably to the person who brings home the other 50% of the family bacon.

And there you have it. I am now part of the 21st century. And I got a surprise 18% off my bill for working at the library. Heck yes!!

So far, I enjoy…

  • Watching Netflix, since my laptop’s external speakers haven’t worked in many months
  • Creating little schedules in Google Calendar that buzz my phone when it’s time to switch tasks
  • Using Reminders to do my grocery list instead of Post-it notes, which I am inclined to lose
  • Paying for my coffee with the Starbucks scanner, since I lost my golden Starbucks card
  • Taking pictures of the insides of books using Evernote instead of copying down quotes

My favorite apps are Goodreads, Sudoku and Sleep Cycle. I may be addicted to Sleep Cycle. I don’t know if it works, or if I am just excited every morning to wake up and look at my sleep charts. But I fell asleep last night listening to the sound of rain falling on a car roof, so who cares?

Oh, also: Instagram. If you want to see 100 pictures of my cat a day, follow me! Here is one shot for free:

Don’t worry. Plenty more where that came from.