Talking about books

Since I'm on sabbatical this year I don't talk about books as much as usual. I write about them, and I talk them up when I get a chance, but I always feel as if folks are humoring me just a little bit. (I do go on...)

But today I got to talk about the Twilight books with ten seventh graders who are big fans. (Well, nine of them are; the tenth was there to keep them honest.) These were smart, funny, articulate kids. They know at some level that there are better books than Twilight, but they love the feeling of giving themselves up to a book and just wallowing for a while. They love the action, the fantasy, the mystery--but also, I think, they love the predictability. They know Bella will whine, and Edward will let her, and Jacob will smolder, and Alice will be just perfect, and that's what they want.

There's a comfort to predictability, and smart girls are not above that comfort. But they were impatient with Bella, and troubled at the idea of giving up her humanity for Edward (at least one said she wouldn't change her name for a man, so why should Bella give up even more?). One called the books "anti-feminist," though others thought Bella's effort to establish herself on equal footing with Edward was admirable--if, perhaps, impossible.

They all loved Edward. When their teacher and I expressed a mild partiality for Jacob, not one agreed with us. They love Edward's perfection. Some compared him to Ashley Wilkes, though, wondering if he was "too perfect," or "perfect, but wrong for her." At least one had gone on to read Wuthering Heights after encountering the references to it in Eclipse. None had ever seen Buffy, or read Dracula (though some might, now that I've suggested it). None professed any particular interest in vampires.

I was fascinated by our conversation, which had lots of "likes" scattered throughout (they kept count on each other!), and occasional squealing, and plenty of in-jokes. The one who had pushed Twilight on the others denied ever crying about it, though the others teased her. One girl had read the series five times (!), but claimed that she found the characters slightly flat. All knew the date the next book will be out, and the movie date, too.

I think I'll go back and talk to them about books again. It's good to hear what kids are thinking about books, and good to know there's a new generation of readers coming up. I can't wait to get them in my own classes in a few years.

I miss this, too

I think I shifted my academic focus to children's literature in part because it put me back in that state of abandonment that reading had once been for me, but that graduate school had killed. In this I share something with Andrew Martino, whose piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscription required) I mentioned some time ago. I also share something with Michelle Slatalla, then, who sees in her daughters that kind of reading that she, too, has now left behind: "they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else," she writes, and I remember it. I've been there again recently, in books like the Twilight series (yes, even as I criticized them, they took me away--ok, except the last, which didn't), or Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (so much better than Twilight et al that I hesitate to mention them in the same sentence) or any number of fantastic YA books I've read lately. But right now I'm in the midst of a spate of professional reading, and while the books are truly engrossing, educational, well-written, and all that, I find myself infinitely interruptable--indeed, seeking interruption!--as I read my way through them. I'm eating my peas, not my dessert, and I'm just a tiny bit resentful, even though I do, really, quite like peas.

Back to it.

Critics Say Newbery-Winning Books Are Too Challenging for Young Readers - washingtonpost.com

Critics Say Newbery-Winning Books Are Too Challenging for Young Readers - washingtonpost.com: "'I can't help but believe that thousands, even millions, more children would grow up reading if the Newbery committee aimed to spotlight books that are deep and beautiful and irresistible to kids,' said Lucy Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University's Teachers College and a professor of children's literature."*

OK, that's the money quote, and I think it's already (rightly) been ridiculed. As if one award is single-handedly preventing kids from becoming readers? In a culture where reading is not valued, where celebrity children's books and TV tie-ins dominate bookstore shelves (how many children have Madonna, Jenna Bush, and Jeff Foxworthy turned off reading?), how can the Newbery be keeping millions of children from becoming readers? It just doesn't make sense.

On the next page some actual teen readers get their say--briefly--and they note that one thing that dampens their enthusiasm for reading is having it assigned. While this annoys me, I think it may also have some truth, and of course there's an overlap between assigned reading and the Newbery, though it's by no means the only criterion teachers and curriculum developers use.

This semester some of my students spent a few hours working with middle school students at an innovative private middle school for girls. The girls they worked with have almost no specific assigned reading; rather, they are assigned a number of hours of reading a week. They write journal entries and book reviews, and they discuss the books with each other and with their teacher; they are thoughtful about their reading choices, and many of them challenge themselves with books like Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Life of Pi (though, yes, others spent many hours last year working their way through the Twilight series). In a larger school the logistics of such a program might be daunting, but it clearly works: the girls read a lot, and they're articulate about their reading choices.

At the end of the semester I ask my (college) children's lit students to write a research paper. One option for that paper is for them to revisit a book they loved as a child. I haven't worked out the statistics (hey, I'm an English professor, remember?), but my sense from doing this for many years is that the students split their choices fairly evenly between books assigned for school (books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, Catcher in the Rye) and books they picked up for pleasure (this year, Redwall, The Phantom Tollbooth, and James and the Giant Peach, for example). I guess I'll have to start keeping records on the awards won by the books they choose. In the meantime, I'm really not going to worry about the Newbery award. Those librarians know their business.


*MotherReader takes the piece on here, with a hilarious list of fake controversies.

(Young) Adult Literature

Whenever I teach YA literature in my children's lit course (which I do, because there is no YA lit course and I want to cover it somehow) someone objects that the book is not "appropriate" for kids. So then we get in a big discussion of how we define appropriate, and how we think about audience, and usually at some point someone realizes that, hey, the students sitting in the classroom are actually the intended audience for the book. Or they were, a year or so ago, when they were in high school. The category of "child" or "youth," that is, is very broad--though, of course, the category of "adult" is even broader.

Until now, though, I've had a hard time defining "young adult" for my students. We can talk a bit about age ranges and subject matter and such, but that doesn't always get us very far. So a recent panel discussion on "What Makes a YA a YA," sponsored by Publisher's Weekly caught my eye. I particularly liked Sherman Alexie's comments about condescension:

“I thought I’d been condescended to because I’m an Indian,” he said. “That was nothing compared to the condescension I get because I’ve written a YA novel.” He said that fellow writers have also accused him of chasing a lucrative market. “Because I’ve written a book about a 16-year-old,” he said, “that means I’m a capitalistic whore.”

(All the YA authors in the room now explode in laughter, since they've all gotten so rich off their hypocritical work. Not!)

I also resonated with these comments about the difference between YA and literature for "adults":

Writing for teens involves a stripped-down technique, Alexie said. “You tend to write more like Hemingway than Faulkner. More like Emily Dickinson than T.S. Eliot. It’s not a matter of more complex thoughts, but the number of adverbs and adjectives. In the adult world, the number of adverbs and adjectives* can be confused with great writing.” Martin put it another way: “Teen books are like adult books, without all the bullshit.”

Of course there's fabulous stripped-down writing for adults (even beyond Hemingway and Dickinson), but I have to say, I have been reading some "adult" novels by perfectly fine writers lately, and I keep getting really impatient with the literary effects (for want of a better word) they seem to be striving for. Every so often they just seem to want to remind me that they are writers, you know, real writers, so there are forced analogies or obscure metaphors or heavily symbolic objects littering up my pages. These are not bad books, but I find myself thinking, "get to the point!"**

Thanks to J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends for the link.

*Hmm, has Alexie read what people say about J.K. Rowling's use of adverbs?
**As Madeline L'Engle taught me, comparisons are odious, and YA books can be great without their greatness casting adult books into shadow. But when I read this and thought of the books I'd been reading lately (ok, not Twilight, in this case!), it resonated. That is all.

Getting out

Can this be? I just added the first movie to my viewing list since we came back from France in July. There have been movies I wanted to see, certainly--and I have gotten out of the house every now and then--but the movies somehow just aren't happening.

Oh, I lied. Or, more likely, repressed. We did take a bunch of kids to see Star Wars: the Clone Wars for Nick's birthday, which I somehow forgot to list. (And, well, I slept through the middle of it, so maybe it doesn't count?) OK, so one movie since the third week of July. What have I been doing instead?

The reading list isn't much better. I did get a bunch of ARCs and read some of them at the end of the summer, but since school started in August it's been all re-reading, all the time. This weekend it's the Twilight series, since I have an idea for a talk--and an abstract due on Tuesday. But otherwise I'm re-reading for classes. And that's all fine--I don't teach things I don't like--but it still cuts into the time available for new books.

So, to recap: I don't get out much, and from August to May I don't take in much that's new, either. But it was fun to go out last night and laugh at the silliness of Get Smart.

Persepolis

Do you sometimes worry that a movie can't live up to a book you love? How many times have you been disappointed? My first time was with, of all things, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I'd loved the book (by Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame). It was funny and smart and rude (the car had buttons that lit up and said, "Push Me, Stupid!"). The family wasn't gorgeous. There was no "Truly Scrumptious" (though that is a Bond-ish name, isn't it?). The whole thing wasn't just a dream. The movie was an utter disappointment, so great that I have actually never seen it again.

And yet I keep going to see movies made from books. Some work, some don't; some improve on the book, some are just interesting interpretations. Sometimes I can forgive major departures from the novel; sometimes I can't. Sometimes the casting is so right, or so wrong, that it colors your reading of the novel forever. (A tween girl I know is already worried about the casting for the upcoming Twilight movie...)

Persepolis works. And now you can read Caroline's great column about it, too.

Children's Lit Book Group

This month I read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books and write about vampire love in my Literary Mama column: "Vampire stories are . . .perfect for teenagers. Vampires stay out all night, scare the respectable citizens, take crazy risks, and live, seemingly, forever." You can read more about the books, and my take on vampires, here.

Fantasy Series (and standalones) for kids/YA

I'm giving a talk later this morning to families here for Parents' Weekend, and as a takeaway I made a list of books I like to recommend. These are almost all fantasy, almost all for pre-teen and up, almost all series. They are all also books I've read and therefore can recommend with some confidence--which is why, for example, Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan isn't on the list even though Nick tells me it should be. I really want to read it, but just haven't yet. Also missing from the list are my "usual suspects": Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. That's because they're in the talk.

So here's the list:

Some Terrific (Mostly Fantasy) Books for Kids and Young Adults

A highly idiosyncratic and partial list of books you may have missed, for people who’ve exhausted the Harry Potter and Twilight series

Most of these books are appropriate for kids 10 and up; starred books might be better for 12 or 13 and up.

*Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy. Most book-loving teens have already discovered this devastating dystopian fantasy, starring a fierce teenaged hunter, Katniss Everdeen.

Sarah Beth Durst, Into the Wild and Out of the Wild: fairy tale characters enter our world with devastating, but often comic, results.

Cornelia Funke, the Inkheart series: in a world where stories can become real, readers and writers become dangerous and powerful. See also her unrelated The Thief Lord, in which a pair of orphans must make a new life for themselves in a magical Venice.

Neil Gaiman, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, *Stardust, Odd and the Frost Giants. Gaiman’s books are infused with a sense of the magical and the mythic; these standalone novels are all influenced by fairy tales and earlier literature, but bring new life to them. Coraline terrifies even my college students, but lots of younger kids adore it. The Graveyard Book has one of the scariest opening chapters I’ve ever read, but most readers are comforted by what follows

Frances Hardinge, Fly By Night: a book-loving girl teams up with a con man in a tightly controlled culture of folk deities and mysterious conspiracies. See also Hardinge’s The Lost Conspiracy, an unrelated tale of a magical realm where “the Lost” travel outside their bodies to keep the peace.

Diana Wynne Jones, The Chronicles of Chrestomanci: six novels all set in the same multiverse; not a sequential series but a loosely linked chronicle of the rules of magic in many different worlds. See also Howl’s Moving Castle, Fire and Ice, and other standalone fantasies.

*Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness trilogy: math may be magic and there is a mysterious portal between Sydney, Australia and New York City; Larbalestier’s Liar and How to Ditch Your Fairy are also terrific, and quite different—Liar is darker, for older kids, while How to Ditch Your Fairy is a fairly light-hearted exploration of a high school for athletes where some kids have personal fairies.

Kenneth Oppel, Airborn, Skybreaker, and Starclimber: adventures in the air and outer space in an alternate-history version of Victorian England.

James A. Owen, The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica: a five-book series about a map of imaginary places that turns out to be real; C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other literary figures are characters in this adventure series.

Terry Pratchett, The Bromeliad Trilogy, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the Tiffany Aching books. Pratchett’s books are always funny and often very literary in their references; the Tiffany Aching books include the always-hilarious Nac Mac Feegle, a band of tiny but immensely fierce warriors, while the Bromeliad trilogy deals with a race of people who live in the spaces between floors in a large department store. The Amazing Maurice retells the Pied Piper story, with a surprising twist. See also Nation, a novel of exploration and attempted conquest in an alternate version of Victorian England and the Pacific.

Philip Reeve, Larklight series: Victorians in space.

*Michael Scott, The Alchemyst series: a twin brother & sister team up with figures from history and myth to combat mythic evil staging a return to power.

Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me: last year’s Newbery award winning book; time travel, A Wrinkle in Time, and New York City in the late 1970s.

Jonathan Stroud, The Bartimaeus Trilogy: alternate history and magic combined with a smart, snarky djinn; this series will get kids reading—and enjoying!—footnotes. A fourth book is apparently due out this fall.

Laini Taylor, Dreamdark series: so far there are only two of these novels set among fairy creatures who must reweave the fraying tapestry of the world; a third is anticipated.

*Megan Whalen Turner, Attolia series: theft, conspiracy, murder, romance, and intrigue in a Greek-inspired magical realm.