Wasn’t Even On My Game
Via everybody!
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Critical Thinking with the Hive Mind
I’m about to start semester the third in the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the fabulous Vermont College of Fine Arts (a program I highly recommend). Anyway, the third semester is when you do your critical thesis and I’m putting together the reading list for the bibliography of mine, attempting to get a headstart on things. What I’d love from you smarty smart peeps, are your recommendations of any and all (good, bad, indifferent) young adult fantasies with strong political overtones.
Nothing’s too obvious to mention, because I’m interested in being as comprehensive as possible and my ability to overlook stuff should never be discounted. And although I’m more focused on relatively current work (last 10-15 years), classics are fine too as I haven’t fully established the scope yet.
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Thursday Hangovers
- Colleen has the lovely recommended reading lists of: Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith.
- Paul Collins has some beautiful silly book covers.
- I have a soft spot for the duct tape bandit.
- The popularity of becoming a pet trainer.
- Buzzwords of 2007.
- Pam McNew’s excellent list of SFF short story recommendations for 2007.
- It’s never too late to give Christopher a birthday cycling gift certificate! Were one so inclined…
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Woe
But when people are holidaysing and real-lifing and I am suddenly in the mood to read Web slapfights there are none to be witnessed, not even relatively recent ones with a couple of people still posting into the void. . .
Or am I missing something? ::she asked hopefully::
Playing Favorites
It’s the end of the year and I’m feeling somewhat listy and I know y’all are flush with gift card moolah so here are my 15 favorite books published in 2007 (for a complete look at what these are culled from you can browse the Reading List 2007 sidebar down and to the right). Note that I’m not saying best, I’m saying favorite. This list was done in a very cursory way, and I know I’ll be kicking myself over stuff not on here that should be . . . and, and, and yet I choose to resist the effort to be completist. I will, however, mark which ones are YA, to ease the finding of them in bookshops.
Dreamquake (Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet), Elizabeth Knox (YA)
Always and And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, Nicola Griffith
Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff
How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand
The Off Season, Catherine Murdock (YA)
The Red Shoe, Ursula Dubosarsky (YA/Middle Grade)
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (YA, etc.)
The Hearts of Horses, Molly Gloss
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron (YA)
Ironside, Holly Black (YA)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick (YA/Middle Grade)
Beige, Cecil Castellucci (YA)
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, Ysabeau Wilce (YA/Middle Grade)
And bonus: My favorite short story is, hands down, Kij Johnson’s "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" from the Coyote Road anthology (YA). You people who can do such things need to start recommending this for awards, stat.
Wednesday Hangovers
- Libraries paying hardball with overdue fines (at ours, it’s a dime a day and you can’t check out anything else if you hit $5 without paying it off).
- The NYT also has a very interesting piece on a growing controversy in anthropological circles over the uber-popular work of Jared Diamond: But the anthropologists had a point. As Einstein put it, explanations should be as simple as possible — but no simpler. Is it realistic to hope, as Dr. Diamond did at the end of “Guns, Germs and Steel,” that “historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs”?
- Eric Ripert helps a housewife throw a dinner party.
- Freemasons: Can’t believe people think they’re weird.
- The fabulous Literaticat dishes out her picks for best YA of the year.
- Greg Frost offers some insight on a way to break through the "dark night of despair" phase of novel writing.
- Terri Windling on wild children, aka feral tykes.
- Maureen on cooking roast potatoes with duck fat, as yummy as her food writing always is.
- Some alums and current students in the MFA program I’m in have started a new craft-oriented group blog called Through the Tollbooth. I’m sure it will be full of immensely good stuff.
- And, in a time-saving experiment, here’s my current shared items on Google Reader:
Update: And the experiment is a failure, cause the links update automatically when you share new stuff. Now if they figure out how to keep permalinks to what was in your shared items at the particular time of posting, we’d be in business.
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Birthday Attacks X-Mas
Happy happy merry merry to Christopher, my favorite person in the world entire, for serious. May this be a very good year.
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So Delightful
For those times when you’ve begun to deal with the code red housework and laundry situation that has arisen from the depths of being away too much and too much busy (the words filth pit have been used, though really it’s more of a mess pit with mounds of cat and dog hair in the corners), I highly recommend an Angel marathon with your brand-new early X-mas pressie box set and the kind of food children eat. And wine.
We’ll do a lot of driving in the next couple of days, to see people we love, and come home to the place we want most to be. Hard to complain about that (even if Emma does keep escape-attempting under the back fence and the revision fairies keep not showing up). I hope y’all have just as happy holidays and every days.
Finally
I’ve been a bit disappointed that the very good reviews for Molly Gloss’s latest thrillingly great novel, The Hearts of Horses, haven’t seemed to recognize the full achievement of the book. I feel it is being marginalized a bit as a Western–which it is–when it’s also deserving of a much broader audience.
In this week’s Washington Post Book World, Ron Charles nails my feelings about this novel in a lovely, insightful review that winds up thus:
That sounds corny, but there isn’t a false move in this poignant novel, which demonstrates as much insight into the hearts of men and women as into the hearts of horses. Books like this are easy to overlook, but there’s someone on your holiday list who will feel blessed by Gloss’s gentle story.
Read the whole review and then seek out this wonderful book.
Great People, Great Article
GQ has a beautiful, haunting article about Cecil Ison–the amazing dad of my great good friend Sunshine (whose mom is exceedingly awesome too, not to mention her husband)–and how the scars of war are always with us:
One day Cecil would make a wind chime from branches collected on his farm, one branch from each type of tree killed in the storm—oak, pawpaw, walnut, pine, apple, maple. He would paint the words i will sing the beauty of trees on one limb. And on another: trees. hummingbirds. honeybees. The forest would regenerate itself, blackberry briars would flourish in the sunlight that poured through the trees, attracting the creatures that feast on them: songbirds, butterflies, and dormice. "The earth is resilient," Cecil would say. "You have your scabies over in this corner, a nice fresh breeze coming through here as a result of the hurricane happening over there, and that’s all part of the earth."
But when the storm first happened, Cecil mourned, and the people who love him saw it as a piece of what broke him. The beginning, or middle, of the end.
(Via said husband.)
Please, please read it and be thankful for what you have and that people like this are in the world and then angry that they have to endure such pain and then back to grateful again because they’re so amazing anyway.
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