9 posts tagged “ya”
I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.
Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?
Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.
Now that all the hoopla is over, I can get back to my primary passion -- reading kids' books for fun! Awesome! Here's what just came in:
A graphic novel. About going into a volcano. How has no one done this yet? I can't wait to eat this.
Suzanne Collins wrote the Gregor the Overlander series, which I thought was great. This looks pretty decent, although it has the distinct possibility of being derivative. This involves a fight to the death on live TV and I feel like I might have seen that movie before. Also, violence between kids was done to perfection in House of Stairs, what, 30 years ago, so I might be disappointed.
My cover doesn't look like this. Same girl, but looking all surly on a deep grey background,and glaring the other way. Hmm? Also, this guy is a bit too edgy for a middle school library, but I'm keeping his other two and just hoping no parents happen upon them (particularly that "Oval Office" sex scene. Oops).
I'll report back on whether these suck or not in future installments.
When I was young, I always wished I had a cave nearby, a la Tom Sawyer and others. I would retreat to this cave in order to be alone and to do Serious Solitude Thinking. Having no local caverns, I was forced to revert to burying a pen and a notebook in a plastic bag in the woods behind our house, which could be dug up in Solitude Moments should profound thoughts need to be jotted down. But the trees were rather sparse, and you could totally see the Braico's backyard from my fortress, and it just generally sucked way more than a cave would have.
Now, had some of these recent jolly underground books been around, I might not have been so keen on a cave (although you'd think Tom Sawyer would have been a bit cautionary, too).
Leepike Ridge has a fast-moving river that acts all innocuous as it flows past your house and then SPEEDS UP and HEADS UNDERGROUND for a long time before bottoming out in a dank underground pond, complete with bodies from previous spelunkers and treasure-hunters. Naturally, the grouchy son of a possibly-remarrying mom would hop on to a piece of refrigerator foam and accidentally end up there, with no apparent way of ever getting out. Scary, suspenseful and fun, with a great archaeological-mystery, avenge-my-dead-dad subplot. But what a stupid cover, and not the world's greatest title either.
My other recent underground read is the fourth book in the City of Ember series. Right now I'd like to give a shout-out to my stand-up buddy Paul, who actually schlepped all the way to San Jose and then came with me to see the tepidly-reviewed, PG Kid Thriller Flick "City of Ember", based on the first book. The author, Jeanne DuPrau, is local and came to our school last year and made me a Totally Awesome Librarian Hero with the 4th-6th grader set for hooking that up.
The basic premise of the series is that some unspecified apocalypse has forced the remains of humanity underground,
I actually thoroughly enjoyed the movie, although I think it was enhanced for me by the backstory that any movie has to eliminate for time purposes. Maybe because the story was less meaty to begin with, it translated to the screen with greater ease than, say, Harry Potter. Usually I'm afraid to see the movie of books I've loved, because I don't want my mind's view of them tainted, but since this wasn't exactly a life-changer, I was happy with how it turned out.
(But I'm going to continue to keep away from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and another book-turned-movie I won't be seeing is Blindness. Just in case.)
I just want to give some love to the following:
Gary Schmidt. This guy is awesome. Trouble is one of the best books I've read in a long time.
The Twilight series. Okay, so it doesn't really need any love from me, but I just read New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn in the past few days and I'm glad to know it exists out there. The world is slightly better having been introduced to sweet vegetarian vampire love!
LeMans Karting. Feel like a Formula One driver for just a few twenties. Go Lewis!
My Mom's healing hands. And her professional website. Go Mom!
And that's it for this moment ...
Oh, it was like Hanukkah and Purim all wrapped together in a matzah ball at work this week when FIVE HUGE BOXES arrived from Baker & Taylor, my library distributor. Among many other gems, I received Book Four of not one, but TWO reasonably decent fantasy series -- Septimus Heap and Ranger's Apprentice. (I also killed Books 2 and 3 of KUNG FU PRINCESS, which completely lived up to its billing. Slays the demons, gets the cute kung fu boy -- what's not to love?)
The Septimus Heap series is a strange breed ... deeply loved by kids, fun to read, but just not that compelling. I open them only because I have to, then I really enjoy myself while reading them, but then I'm completely underwhelmed as soon as I close the book again. Queste was no different. All the characters have little tics or "things" that I guess stand in for character development -- like, she's cluttered! That's her thing! She's the cluttered one! -- but you don't really care that much what happens to most of them or feel like their actions are real. The Puppet
Ranger's Apprentice is all about the well-placed Ominous Tone and Mood. It just doesn't let up.This series I think is better encountered when you can read them all in rapid succession -- there are some intricate plot lines and foreshadowing that I've just forgotten in the previous books. But a good adventure!
(I am reading this at the exact same time as my neighbor, who is going into fourth grade in the fall and is a smoking fast reader -- I recommended probably 40 books to him at the beginning of the summer and he's killed, oh, half? maybe more? Actually, I think he finished The Battle for Skandia and is re-reading the series. You know, to give me a chance to catch up.)
But by far the most impressive read this week was Sunrise over Fallujah, by Walter Dean Myers, who is a formidable author with much less formidable subject matter than Iraq. It's YA fiction that reads with the same compelling first-person-memoir feel as Jarhead, but without the English-major, I'll-be-a-writer-someday self-consciousness. It felt real -- like an 18-year-old kid tossed in over his head, trying to be tough, liking some of it, hating more of it, and fearing what he's becoming, not to mention gradually growing to believe that those in charge are not necessarily the good guys, at least not all the time. Another book I'm going to press on every kid I see. Well, maybe not my neighbor. Not quite yet.
Here are two slightly divergent views of America. In Why We Buy (which should more accurately be titled How We Buy, since there is almost nothing on the the yawning abyss of soul-crushing emptiness inside that impels us Beyond Bed and Bath with credit cards aloft) takes us on the journey of Paco the Erstwhile Anthropologist, who spins his ethnographic credentials into a lucrative consulting business telling Target where it should locate its Ladies' Unmentionables. Sample tip from Dr. Paco to retailers: Your shoppers only have two hands! Make sure that shopping baskets are always available to them -- throughout the store -- so that Impulse Shopping can take place once two items are already selected! Also, if your grocery store has a Starbucks, make sure your carts have cupholders!
I valued this book because it enabled me to more educatedly thwart the merchandisers' attempt to seduce me with their colorful, touchable, and well-fonted product. Get thee behind me, merchandisers! I also think it sounds like too much fun to be one of the researchers at this firm, spying -- um, gathering data on unsuspecting shoppers as they are jostled from behind in the handbag section and as they squat to retrieve their herbal remedies. Like Papua New Guinea, but air-conditioned!
Humanity has been take onver by a parasitic (but gentle and peaceful) race known on this planet as "souls." One such soul is implanted into a human, but the human's consciousness does not go gently, which results in a kind of one-body-two-minds situation. Adventure and romance ensue.
This was a great, fun read, but what rescues it from being complete beach trash, to me, is the horror these peaceful parasites feel at humanity's casual and constant violence towards enemies and friends alike. They chose this planet to occupy specifically because they saw it being destroyed by human greed and hatred, and saw our wonderfully evolved human bodies (so many senses! so much emotion!) going to such waste. There are a few very funny scenes dealing with this -- one where a human tells a "soul" that the humans knew they were here when all the criminals and junkies started showing up at police stations and emergency rooms to turn themselves in and all the news shows just covered uplifting human-interest stories. Another great scene is where two humans in hiding are watching a basketball game, where two competitors stand next to the ball saying, "Take it, I'm the one that knocked it out of bounds." Ha HA!
This was nevertheless a very quick and interesting read, following (go figure) the six days in October when the stock market loses more than 25% of its value. Fascinating how the stock market worked then, how trades were conducted and recorded (oy, the paperwork! all the poor clerks pulling all-nighters during this crash!), all the collusion, and how the bankers tried (unsuccessfully) to prop up the market by marching in to the exchange and placing large buy orders in a commanding voice for over the asking price (so low tech!).
My own copy lacks the humiliating "Wall Street Journal Book for Children" so prominently placed. So it's cool; I can read it on the train.
Or at least read like less of an asshole. It's like a drinking problem. I neglect my family, neglect my housework, feel kinda sick and hung over afterwards, and don't have much to show for it except a slightly perverse personal pleasure. Maybe it's more like excessive masturbation than alcoholism, I don't know. (I don't have either of those problems. At least, I don't think.) However, I do hope to blog more! We'll see.
Winter break started on Dec 22nd and I got some awesome books from the library before it went all holiday-hours.
For grownups, I took in: Foreskin's Lament, Shalom Auslander; How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman; True Notebooks, by Mark Salzman, and Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen, who is loved by me more and more with every passing day.
Foreskin's Lament was notable for its absolutely hilarious voice, this deadpan, I'm-so-mad-at-you-God, arrested-development author who has apparently been all over NPR all the time and yet I've not managed to hear him but once. (That damn Linda Hunt seems to be introducing City Arts and Lecture every single dingle second, however. Make some room, bitch!) Anyway, Shalom takes great umbrage when his deeply Orthodox friends and family describe him (treyf-eating, electricity-using) as notreligious instead of not observant. On Shabbat, he walks fifteen miles to Madison Square Garden to watch the Rangers lose a Stanley Cup game, eats a hot dog as a big fuck-you to God afterwards, but guarantees that God will make them win the Cup just to piss him off more. Pair with God Is Not Great for a rollicking romp through the many ways religion can deform you!
I don't think True Notebooks, wherein Mark Salzman teaches a writing class to kids
Plus it was really funny in parts. Delinquent kids can lay down some freestyle rap!
For the teen crowd, I took in 13 Reasons Why, by Jay Asher and
UNWIND is my next new favorite sci-fi tech dystopia after FEED, which will always be my first tech-dystopia love. After the internecine Heartland War, between the pro-choice and pro-life factions, the Bill of Life gets written into the Constitution, protecting life from conception until age 13. From 13 to 18, parents can then choose to retroactively "abort" their children -- you know, bad grades, too much sass talk, send 'em back -- and have them "unwound", harvesting every ounce of them for use in other people. The pro-lifers accept this because technically, the Unwinds are still alive -- just in a "divided state." A little bit After The First Death, a little bit House of the Scorpion. Very suspenseful!
Lastly, for the middle grades, I enjoyed The name of this book is secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch. (Damn! He stole the world's best nom de plume. It saddens me in the way I was saddened when I was about 12, watching the early days of MTV, when I realized that I could never be in a girl metal band, because the band name VIXEN had already been taken.) Also worthwhile was Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale, although I grow weary of the many well-developed kingdoms of the various fantasy novels, each with their currencies and economies and hierarchical deities and gender expectations ...Can we all just agree that from here on out, all fantasy novels will take place in Tortall, or Prydain, or Damar, or WHEREVER JUST PICK A PLACE ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODDESS OR TRICKSTER OR SO HELP ME YOU GET THE POINT. Atlases could be published. We could all move on.
Wait, one more. I was shocked, SHOCKED to find a children's book by George Saunders (!!) in my library, namely, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I thought Civilwarland in Bad Decline was pretty much genius and to think there was this little illustrated George Saunders story nestled on my shelves the whole time, prepared to be foisted on the unsuspecting minds of third graders. I'm SO glad school is back in session!
Here are the words my little toddler can already read:
Mama Dad Ainsley Bama FedEx Up Hot Cold
Can Gappers of Frip be far behind?
This one was actually pretty good; Robin McKinley is a great writer and this didn't read like the outline for a novel, as so many YA novels seem to. Enough dirty talk to keep the teenagers from bolting, enough action to keep the pages turning ... and then, BAM! The C-word! Ah hell.
I am very liberal when it comes to collection development in all facets, as long as I can defend its literary merits in some way, and I suppose that nasty ol' word is not much worse than all the other cuss words I just turn a blind eye to in other books. (Feed broke my swearing cherry, I guess, and it's just so awesome in all respects despite being riddled with cusses that now when I'm on the fence about anything, I wind up keeping it and saying, well, the language is no worse than Feed. It's a slippery slope.)
But on the heels of that ridiculous debate about the Newbery Award-winning Higher Power of Lucky and its scrotum-bitten dog, I feel a wee bit abashed. Luckily, to date the only "challenge" I've received involved the lovely children's book Colors of Israel, which used a tractor removing an unclaimed backpack/terrorist threat to illustrate "yellow." Whoops. Well, one person's scary dream-maker is another's safety lesson. Sorry, not going to put a warning label on it. Preview what you read to your five-year-old. And hey, if he can't read, you can MAKE UP WHAT IT SAYS!
So, the current list is apparently:
- Scrotum
- Cunt
- Backpack
- TBA
- TBA
- TBA
- TBA
