The Hunger Games, Or How I Remembered I Love Reading

I waited about a week to write this post, because if I had written it moments after I set the third book down, like I wanted to, this post would look a whole lot less like intelligent literary commentary, and whole lot more like EEEEEEEEOMGOMGOMGOMGPEETAMELLARKOMGGG!!!!!  So I waited a bit, dialed down my fangirl, and now I can speak to you like a regular human being who was not raised by wolves or preteens.

Remember this post?  Well I found it. This series reminded me why I love reading, and reassured me that there do exist new books (or rather, authors) that can sweep me away like my old standbys can.  Needless to say, I highly recommend it. (It being The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, beeteedubs. Look it up.)

I could gush on and on about the characters and the story, but I’m trying to spoil as little as I can, and what truly fascinated me was their world.  So if you want everything to be a complete surprise when (WHEN) you read the books, stop reading now, but I promise to keep the plot points to a minimum.

The main character, Katniss Everdeen, lives in Panem’s District 12, in what was formerly called Appalachia in the former United States.  I imagine it’s been about 200 years since the fall of our current society, but it’s never explicitly stated. The characters simply don’t know this kind of information, as anything not directly related to either their district’s given function or glorification of the Capitol is not taught.  The twelve districts are each mandated with a very specific purpose for serving the wealthy, exorbitant citizens of the Capitol.  Starvation is as common in District 12 as plastic surgery is in the Capitol.  Sound familiar?

What struck me most was how vital television is to the everyday lives of the citizens of Panem.  Television crews are a constant presence in the series, but in a much more recognizable way than, say, 1984 or Brave New World.  The Hunger Games are essentially the ultimate reality show in which, as an annual reminder of the Capitol’s might, each district is forced to give one boy and girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to the Capitol to fight to the death, for the viewing pleasure and horror of the citizens of Panem.  If, in the Games, a child proves to be interesting or likable, the viewing audience can sponsor gifts of food or medicine to help keep him or her alive.  If nothing interesting happens over a long period of time, ie. if no one dies in the course of a day or so, the Gamekeepers will create something in the arena to drive the kids together.  It’s grisly, and oh so human.  There is, of course, the constant reminder that everything in this world has actually happened in the realm of human history:  There are currently hundreds of reality shows on the air in which people are hurt, physically and emotionally, for our entertainment.  Ancient Romans made official sport (innumerable modern societies, unofficial sport) of watching conquered peoples, doubtfully any older than the kids in the Hunger Games, battle to the death.  But it is not this world’s relationship with our history that I found the most interesting; it was its relationship to our present.

Even in the ensuing [SPOILER ALERT: but who didn’t see this one coming] revolution, reality TV plays a pivotal role for rebels and the Capitol alike.  The most important battle fought is over the airwaves of the single Capitol-controlled television station, and in the heart of actual battle the main characters are most focused on winning over their viewing audience.  And there continues to be an unwavering viewing audience; in the middle of a civil war, in the middle of chaos, it is a given that people stay tuned in to their televisions.  In an increasingly image-based, privacy-less, information-barraged world in which kids are taught to market themselves from the moment they first set foot on the internet and revolutions are organized via twitter, this message hits home.  If we were to fall into anarchy tomorrow, you better believe the internet would be the last thing to flicker out.  Technology is our crutch and our ticket to freedom, our burden and our boon.

I’ll admit my bias: I have an affinity for young adult lit and social commentary, so this series was essentially written for me. But good luck not getting addicted to these books… and may the odds be ever in your favor.*

*Just read it. You’ll know what I mean, then.

Biblioholic Withdrawals

Here is something sad, and true: it has been almost a year since I truly lost myself in a book.

I'm talking deaf to the world, so absolutely enveloped by the story that I'm actively angry with who or whatever pulls me out of it.  I used to do it all the time, with every book, every shred of paper.  I went through books like a 3-packs-a-day smoker, end to end. Sometimes I can find the old spark when I re-read favorites like the His Dark Materials series or On the Road, those old old friends that I can fall so easily into, like a perfectly broken-in easy chair.  But the last time I picked up a new (to me) book that thrilled me, woke me in ways that only the written word can was at the beginning of this year, and who knows how long before that, which makes for a long and terrible dry spell for a bibliophile.

So I'm extending my anguish to you in the hopes that you'll help pull me out of this funk. I'll read anything. I'll read everything. Just give me something I can fall into.

Infinite Jest

After a month of reading I finished up Infinite Jest last week. There are a number of reasons people talk about the book, although the most often referenced is it's length - the books is almost 1100 pages long and the last 100 pages are endnotes that range from descriptions of drugs in the main text to extended conversations between main characters.

So yes its really long, but it was also the work of an incredibly intelligent but often troubled human trying to write a modern novel. Not the great American novel, per se, but something that speaks to end the 20th century. It's no coincidence that it's a novel centered around a deadly piece of video entertainment. This book was an attempt to speak to present and near future of the internal and external damage of American life. Placing the book in what was at the time the near future, (the years are now about concurrent with out time, the main year was either 2009 or maybe 2011) was a ballsy move. Not surprisingly, the technological predictions were going to be off, but the work has a boldness that defined what Wallace did in everything he wrote, both fiction and non-fiction.

The book's two main settings are a tennis academy and drug rehab house. And between these we get the two main drives of America: fame (all the academy kids refer to going pro as "The Show") and for excess. But this is not a novel with a simple narrative arc of a person's rise and fall. It's an odd and moving book that wears it's weirdness proudly. There are wheelchair bound Quebecois terrorists, a disturbing string of pet murders, a teenager memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary and Subsidized Time, brought about by a crazy OCD president whose platform for running is Howard Hughes-ian in it's craziness.

Why read this? I'm going to put it boldly - if you've watched The Wire and are looking for the next great piece of art of our times, this is it. It's as immense and sad and beautiful, even thought it's nothing at all like the Wire. But it's a journey worth taking.

A Few of the Better Things I've Read This Year

Since I talked about reading last week, I figured I'd highlight some of things I've read this year that I greatly enjoyed:

Bill Bryson - Notes From A Small Island/In A Sunburned Country
Bryson is one of the best non-fiction writers around and quite possibly the best travel writer on the planet. He bounces from silly to cosmically meditative in a way that is both quirky and utterly human. These books describe his trips in England and Australia respectively and if you've never read his work either one is worth a read. I'd give Sunburned Country a bit of an edge since he wrote such an excellent book about a country that is really, mostly, almost completely empty.

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
It seems like everyone has already read this, but what a fantastic book it is. After the first 100 pages I finally got into the groove and tore through this like few books I've read in a while. Atwood, who's not a sci-fi author manages to describe this bleak near-future, where the need for children has reshaped society into a fascist state, in beautiful prose. And another book that described an imperfect future was ...

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
... this. Another sad and beautiful tale about the near future (or a sort of alternate now) set in a British boarding school but taking on themes at the very core of human life. Word is that the forthcoming movie adaptation will be the greatest thing of all time ever. But before that comes out I recommend giving the novel a read.

John Banville - The Sea / Eclipse
Another author who I read a couple of books by this year. Eclipse, about a troubled former actor returning to his childhood home, was good, but The Sea was amazing. It's another returning-to-the-past novels (I have a feeling based on this two novel subset all his novels may be about returning to old residences and reminiscing) this time about the protagonist dealing with the death of his wife and returning to the vacation town of his childhood. It sounds dry, but for a short book I found it deeply affecting.

Some Thoughts on Reading

When I was a kid, I used to tear through Encyclopedia Brown and Boxcar Children books like it was my job. I was a good little reader. This voracious trend continued more or less through high school. My parents always had a number of books and recommendations and I always had a comfy chair in which to sit.

In college my reading shifted. I was reading more magazines, newspapers and websites. Then I basically forsook fiction for the last few years of college. At the time I felt that real life was just far more interesting that novels or short stories. But after college I got back into reading seriously, and the last few years I've been reading books at a clip much faster than even my younger bookworm days. So for what it's worth, here are a few thoughts on how I've gotten back into reading a lot:

* Set A Reasonable Pace - I usually read 50-60 pages a day. This translates into a whole lot of books over the course of a year, but when you look at it on a daily basis, it's generally not more than 90-120 minutes, which most people can probably carve out of their schedule. Just stop watching those Seinfeld reruns for a few months, or bring your book on the metro or read something with your breakfast. It's not too tough.

* Mix Things Up - If I find myself reading something more massive and dense (like currently, this), I'll generally be reading one or two lighter things on the side - a collection of short stories, a graphic novel, a biography, etc. Otherwise I find that I'll get bogged down in the big book and that slog won't be very productive. Plus it's really satisfying to finish up two books within a day or two of each other.

* Libraries Are Great - I had not set foot in a non-college library for years by the time I was out of college, but I have gotten back into the habit. You would think libraries would be full of people at all times clamoring for awesome books, but alas they are not. America, please get your act together.

* It's A Book Not A Contract - You don't have to finish everything you start. If you hate a book, put it down for a while and start something else. Or just return it to the library and let it go. There's no harm in not reading something that you hate.

My Books of the Year: 2009

This year I broke the 100 book barrier. I dunno if I'll ever do that again, but suffice it to say, I read a lot this year. More fiction than I've ever read before, more non-fiction than before and certainly way more short stories. Plus a whole lot of magazine articles too.

Below is a list of some of the stuff that I've enjoyed reading this year. Also, see this for my thoughts from the first half of the year.


Yasunari Kawabata - The Master of Go
I know nothing about the game of Go. It's super complicated and I don't think I've seen anyone play it in the states. But this is a fantastic sport book which focuses not just on the plays, but also the drama and machinations surrounding a grandmaster's final match against an aggressive-playing hypochondriac.

Jay McInerney - Story of My Life
One of the cliches of lazy book reviewing is to compare a young character to a Holden Caulfield. It would be lazy for me to call the young female narrator of this novel a coked-out '80s version of Catcher in the Rye, so I won't. But if I did, you'd have a good sense of this book.

Chuck Klosterman - Eating the Dinosaur
Klosterman, along with Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell have become masters of generating zany ideas, and even if the facts don't always back them up they're all highly amusing writers whose work ranges from the serious (Gladwell) to the sports related (Simmons) to the pop culture-y (Klosterman). Klosterman's new book is the of thing that's hard to resist if you've consumed as much must and television as most folks from our generation have.

Julian Barnes - Talking It Over / Nothing to Be Frightened Of
One is a lighthearted novel about a love triangle, the other is lighthearted (sort-of) look at death and religion. Barnes displays his ample cleverness in both.

Alice Munro - The Love of a Good Woman
Andre Dubus - Dancing After Hours
I know a lot of folks don't read short stories. These two are both fantastic writers that would convert anyone to the format.

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
These are three unrelated mysteries that all take place more in the minds of their narrators than the outside world, although they are very much New York books. All three are short, weird and poignant.

George Pelecanos - Drama City
Pelecanos was an executive producer and writer for The Wire, and if you are still unsure of where to go after finishing the Wire (hint hint, Jason) Pelecanos's work has the same gritty feel and excellent development of characters that you get from The Wire.

J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace
Now a major motion picture! This story is as soul crushing and bleak as a Cormac McCarthy novel, but Coetzee uses much more economy of language.

Dash Shaw - Bottomless Belly Button
Jeff Lemire - Essex County
Two graphic novels that are both about as thick as phone books, but both read quickly. The former deals with a grown family coming together after the parents decide to get a divorce. The latter is composed of three semi-connected stories taking place outside of Toronto and tackle timeless topics like childhood innocence, aging, and hockey (which is pretty timeless if you're Canadian).

Read more about people reading more

In this world of crumbling economic everything, convincing anyone to buy anything in physical form is at best difficult and at worst a soul-crushing reminder of why the entire human race it utterly and completely doomed (the same sort of effect when you read the comments thread to any Washington Post political column). But I will make a pitch anyway - more people should be reading literary supplements and book reviews.

Yes, they are a dying breed, the Washington Post's book section was swallowed/merged/smushed with the Sunday Outlook section resulting in something that was neither Outlook nor Book World, but the real book reviews that remain are worth reading. The heavy hitters are the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books (it's a different publication, I swear), the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. They're all leftward slanting (the TLS is less so) but hey, back in the dark ages before the internet, folks used to read up with less disdain for the other side of the aisle.

So here are a few reasons to subscribe to these fine publications -

* Review Aggregation is Still Worthwhile - To switch tacts a bit, there's a reason why a publication like Pitchfork exists. Most people, even those who really like music, don't have the time to wander the internet endlessly looking for mp3s of the newest, hippest, most Brooklyn-ist bands. It's nice to have 5 competently written reviews in one place five days a week. And this holds for most forms of media that exist in great numbers - reviews are still worthwhile to warn people about the crap and steer people to the gold.
Can we get by without movie reviews? Perhaps. The number of movies showing in national theater chains is pretty limited, and most people know if they want to see Saw IV without reading A.O. Scott's dissertation in the NY Times. But for books and music, there's still way more of both out there than any one person can consume, and so reviews are still valuable.

* Great Writers Read and Write About Other Writers - A regular criticism of the NY Review of Books is that it's just a group of like-minded writers writing about each other. But that's too simplistic - it's valuable because there are a diminishing number of places where one can find the sort of mini-dialogue that comes from a great review.
Many of these reviews also offer up fine jumping off points to broader reflection. While some reviews focus intently on the work at hand, others leap from one book to another in order to present a broader coverage of the topic at hand.

* You Can Get A Lot of Info Even Without Reading the Books Reviewed - Although I get ideas for books to look for from these publications, what's just as valuable to me is that they offer a lot of information on things that I'll probably never read. I don't see myself reading any author's diaries or much ancient history in the near future, but I'll certainly read through and enjoy a review of these things.

* Reflection is a Good Thing - I like blogs, I read blogs, I write for this blog, but there are times when I don't want to read a dozen speedy quips or opinions. A carefully researched piece is still a worthwhile enterprise. I don't know what will happen to newspapers, but magazine style research and review will (hopefully!) always have value.

* Retro is Always in Style - And nothing is more retro than reading words on printed paper, right?

The First Annual Russell Banks Literary Prize

I read a lot these days, and most of it tends to be pretty decent. Some I'll rush through a bit to get over with, but there are really very few books that I finish and think "What the hell is wrong with the person who wrote this?" The last book that provoked that reaction was Continental Drift by Russell Banks.

Mr. Banks has always had a hard on for Hemingway, and is a "man's man." Continental Drift follows the general narrative principles of the movie Crash - bad things happen to good people . . . and bad people . . . and everyone else too. The book tells the story of a poor Caribbean woman and a jaded American man and their parallel paths to warm sunny Florida. Sounds lovely right? Drift is full of murder and death and rape and more rape and men cheating on their wives, and people treating their relatives like shit and people abusing minorities and people abusing white people. Banks really, really dislikes his own characters.

At one point one of the protagonists shoots and kills a man who has come in to rob the liquor store he works at. This provides any number of internal and external aspects to which a good author could dwell upon, but of course Banks focuses on the smell of the dead man's last bodily function. He's that kind of author.

Despite stopping for a stretch midway through reading it, I did finish Drift just to confirm that yes, evil does prevail. But not even interesting evil. Everyone just suffers.

So the next 78 or so books I read afterwards were at the very least tolerable. I read a lot of good stuff, some great stuff, some eh stuff. And then I got to Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting. The story of an sorta-upper-middle-class Indian family, the first two thirds of the book revolve around the eldest daughter and her parents, who by retirement function as a joint entity. The petty bitterness goes on ... and on ... and on. The family gets tricked out two dowries for the daughter who is clumsy, hopeless and good-natured. But because she never escapes the house she goes through life as a full-grown child, and that's how the parents treat her up to the very end. Any opportunities for her outside of marriage are squashed and yet its not that her parents are that controlling. If she had any drive she could have found away out, but she never does.

Midway through the novel the parents are out of their house for a while and the daughter finds the key to open the closet where the phone resides (yes, the phone is in a locked closet) and makes a call. After using it once and forgetting to re-lock it she is chastised like a four-year old for wasting money. (And this is a family with servants!)

The last third is devoted to the younger brother, the family's golden boy who is worked like a dog so that he can get a scholarship and study in America, which he does. When he gets there he spends his entire part of the book avoiding all other human life (including fellow Indians) like the plague. Most of the action revolves around a summer he spends boarding with an American family. They're all so one-dimensional I can some them up in a word each - sister:bulimia, brothers:jogging, dad:meat, mom:epic naivete (okay, she gets two words).

The low point of the book is the brother explaining his sister's condition in a phrase that's never been used by anyone in the US ever: "Yeah, and [she's] sicking it up -- sicking it up!" I had to stop reading for a minute. I admit, sick is a great term for vomit used regularly by the British but good lord, Desai teaches writing in the US! Out of the 3 or 4 sentences the brother gets in the book one of them is so tone def to American English it's questionable what Desai (or her editor) was thinking.

Fasting, Feasting was nominated for a Booker prize, arguably the most well-regarded book prize in the world. Baffling. Instead I choose to give Desai the first Annual Russell Banks Literary Prize for Character Abuse. Congrats!

Edgy Post-Modern Writers with Three Names

There was no way I was gonna start with Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's masterwork/clusterfuck/paperweight, so I checked out his first novel The Broom of the System from the library instead. It's under 500 pages, which makes it novella in comparison, and indeed it actually read quite fast. Before this I struggled my way through The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, a book that's quite a bit more R rated than the movie (par for the Ellis course).

This is all to say that after reading these books I'm done with Ellis for a long while. On the other hand I'll probably pick up a book of Wallace's non-fiction the next chance I get. In a funny way these two writers seem to compare a bit of Shepard Farley and Jeff Koons who I wrote about not long ago. Ellis, like Koons is an enigma of an artist. Both seem to have this real indifference to other human life, although Ellis's boarders on hatred. None of the characters in The Rules of Attraction or Less Than Zero (which I had read last year) have any redeeming qualities. Money makes you numb. Youth makes you numb. LA makes you numb. New England makes you numb. Listening to a Talking Heads album will not make you un-numb. Everyone is numb, and so they have sex a lot, because young people have sex. His work gets a bit numbing after a while, and this is without even reading American Psycho.

Wallace, like Farley is a maximalist. I can't stretch the metaphor much beyond that, except to say that both can fit lays upon layers with a real deft-ness. The Broom of the System switches styles, every few pages or so. At times the character Rick Vigorous is narrating, but most of the novel is dialogue without any added explanation of who is speaking. That said, after reading a page or so, it becomes clear who is conversing. He also weaves in a number of short stories for good measure. All of this adds up to a sort of philosophical mystery novel. Solving the mystery is less important that asking why, and Wallace uses the entire novel to question and pontificate. This is without a doubt a boys novel, with a silly randomness that sits somewhere between Vonnegut and Pynchon. I can see why Wallace developed such a passionate following, he had a humility and humor that certainly remind me of Vonnegut's best work.

Halfway through the Year Part 1: Books

The last few years I've been on a reading tear. There's so much I haven't read, so I've been all over the place reading. Looking at what I read the first half of the year, I'm actually pretty happy by how balanced it has been. I've been slowly working through old issues of Granta and McSweeny's and it's been nice to read such a wide variety of shorter fiction and non-fiction. For the rest of my reading I've actually found a good balance between novels and non-fiction books. I've read a few more novels than not, but the fiction has tended to be a bit shorter.

Here are some things I liked thus far:

E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime
A wonderful elegant, effortless novel. The novel weaves a nameless family through a host of early 20th century celebrities. The novel runs through with a head of steam. And yes, it's the novel that begat the movie and the musical.

Paul Auster - City of Glass
Jean Echenoz - I'm Gone
Luis Fernando Verissimo - The Club of Angels
The very different deconstructed mystery novels, all three of which deal with the nature of identity. City of Glass was especially trippy, as the main character spends much of novel masquerading as Paul Auster until he winds up meeting with . . . Paul Auster.


E.B. White - The Essays of E.B. White
E.B. White is like the world's best uncle. He's not an edgy bugger but he's a deeply decent human being, and a warm funny writer. And it's hard not to love the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web.

George Pelecanos - Drama City
Pelecano's is the most well known crime author, or for really novelist, from DC and his novels have the verbal feel of a Wire episode (for which he has written and produced). His dialogue is absolutely spot on, and his endless DC name dropping is, to me, delightful.

Yannick Murphy - Here They Come
Written an adult novel in the voice of a youth voice is very tough. And much like Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, this takes a long series of unrelated observations and moments and strings together a beautiful novel.

Creationism's Ugly Twin Brother, Art

There are spoilers in here, and one ungentlemanly word. Just be ready.

I've recently fallen into a string of gritty, realistic, DEPRESSING AS HELL movies and books and so far, have not been able to wind my way away from their grip. Possibly, and I'm just guessing here, because they are EVERYWHERE. And the fact that something has to make you feel terrible in order for it to be good modern art any more isn't even my point here, though it is a pretty good point.

My true point came to me as I closed my most recent literary venture, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, and gaped into empty space for about ten minutes. Because that's how that book made me feel.

No other phrase describes it better than "a total fucking bummer."

The book spans around twenty-five years and between the four narrators there is not one light or happy moment. Not one joke, not one smile, not even a metaphor with a hint of positivity. The best thing that happens in the whole book is when one of the characters has a massive heart attack and the two families are awkwardly brought together. Even the character who supposedly has a happy, stable life can't focus on it long enough to narrate anything but gloom. No one reacts, no one lashes out, no one does ANYTHING but sit and wallow. For Twenty. Five. Years.

And that sucks, because it could have been such an engaging, moving, involved story. But it's not. Because it's so depressing I could only see the words in monotone. Grey. Fog.

And then it just ends. There is something like closure, definitely a mark in all their lives to signify that THIS PART OF YOUR LIFE IS OVER.

But the point at which the story ended really could have been the point at which it began, because THAT was engaging. The part where the families come together and have to face 25 years of separation: the boy has to meet and get to know his twin sister with Downs Syndrome, and the mother has to come to terms with the fact that the baby she thought died was actually shuttled away in the night because it was the 1960s and her doctor husband had personal issues. Now that is interesting. So much more interesting than 25 years of everyone being depressed for the same reason and doing nothing about it.

Stories need verbs. What is the point of telling a story, especially a fictional story, if it has no drive? How can the readers take anything away with them when the characters have no arc, no growth? How could a writer bring characters into the world who are stagnant, drowning, and leave them there? What right do we as creators have to put more people in the world who are powerless in their own lives and make the choice (because, at least in this story, they all make that choice) to continue living that way? And then what right have we to expect others to eat that story, chew it up and swallow it, and keep it down?

It just seems hateful.

Gore Vidal, Sassy

In my recent reading I've finished a couple of essay collections - Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon and At Home by Gore Vidal. Chabon's collection is a mix of reflections and endorsements of some underloved fiction - comics, sci-fi etc. Vidal also lavishes a lot of love on authors he feels are underappreciated, and a lot of the content for both comes from the New York Review of Books, which just shows what a consistently excellent publication it's been over the decades.

But Chabon is, as he admits, a nice Jew whereas Gore is a verbose queer ex-pat has no fear of calling it as he sees it. He is merciless with the intellectual midgets at the time of writing (the'80s) and especially Reagan, who is referred to throughout as the acting president. One thing that really struck me was the final piece (well two pieces technically) where Vidal takes down the anal-retentive history critics, or scholar squirrels as he calls them, who nitpicked his novels Lincoln. His main points is basically -- Duh it's a novel, if a character seems ignorant or incorrect it's because this is a historical novel and character in a novel can't see the future and don't always have omnipotence. But it refreshing as a blogger to see someone do a long-form takedown, just as it's just refreshing as a critic to see someone write reviews with so much passion.

I'll leave you though with something a bit shorter if not sweeter, a confrontational little interview with him from last year. There's no doubt taht Vidal will be full of sass to the very end.

Read a Mother****ing Book

At St. John the Evangelist School, every student has to participate in the Accelerated Reader program. If you're not familiar, Accelerated Reader assigns a grade level and a number of points to each novel in a school's library. After reading a book, students take a computerized quiz on what they've read and, depending on the number of questions they get right, are awarded points for reading the book. Each grade was expected to earn a certain number of points per trimester, thereby ensuring that every student read and absorbed at least some material each year.

If you're anything like me, though, you've never really put much stock in the "grade levels" 

assigned to books. The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy were considered a 6th grade reading level, and yet, they reside on the book lists of college courses around the country (if not the world). Therein lies the subject of this post: Young Adult (or Adolescent) Literature.

Young Adult literature is typically defined as literature written specifically for the audience of readers aged 12-18, with themes that are pertinent to that age group. It also happens to be my favorite type of literature to read. At 23 years old, I find that the 'adult' part of Young Adult holds as much sway over me now as it did when I was 13. I've become used to the weird looks I get when I answer that age-old question, "What are you reading?" My response is usually followed by, "Isn't that book for little kids?"

You'd be surprised, though, the depth in these books that you didn't notice when you were younger, and the extent to which "adolescent" themes still apply to us old people. Plus, they're usually quick reads that are wicked engaging. I got back into YA lit when I took a course in it the summer after sophomore year of high school at Western MD college (before it was McDaniel), and since then, I haven't been able to stop reading it. It usually gets a bad rap among adults, though, as worthless kid stuff (see above re: reactions). So I'm going to start giving brief reviews of the YA books that I read throughout the year, hoping that I'll convert a few Gentlemanly readers.

In the meantime, go ahead, grab that favorite book from your early teen years and give it another read. I bet that you find hidden depths in it that you couldn't notice when you were younger, because you didn't yet have the life experience, but that resonate with you now.

Don't have a favorite? Here's a starting point: The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton, 1967) is 

considered the first true YA novel, and the genre has exploded in the past 40 years. Give it a try. Or check out Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (not to be confused with the more juvenile The Chocolate Touch). Guys, there's Chris Crusher, and girls, Judy Blume, though I find most YA lit crosses gender lines easily. Into sci-fi? I finally got around to reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card a few months ago, and it really is as good as everyone says. My heart almost stopped when I read the big reveal. Fantasy buff? Try Stardust or Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I could go on, but I won't.

I'm currently reading Eragon, the first book in the Inheritance trilogy by Christopher Paolini, so that will be my first official review, coming soon. But...

... I know the comment has to be coming, so I'm going to get this out of the way first thing: the Twilight series. Yes, I've read them. Yes, I saw the movie. Yes, I want to get the DVD. And yes, I think it's creepy that a bunch of middle-aged women are now obsessed with Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner (he's SIXTEEN, for crying out loud!). 

That being said, I'll be the first to admit that the books are pretty bad. The writing style is juvenile, grammatically they leave much to be desired, and their message to young women is borderline deplorable. (Gee, I wish I could meet a guy who fixates on me to the point that he creeps into my bedroom to watch me sleep without permission and kidnaps me when I want to visit my guy friends!) If you read Twilight looking to get anything intellectually stimulating out of it, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I'm not going to lie, though - as far as brain candy goes, it's an EXTREMELY entertaining story. I couldn't wait to find out what happened next, and so I was willing to overlook its many many (MANY) transgressions.

If you're looking for a romantic beach read of the supernatural variety, give Twilight a go, but for your sake and mine, don't think too much.

And if you don't immediately get the title of this post, go here: Read a Book by D'Mite

My Year in Review - Reading

Before I get into what I read this year, a few other things I enjoyed this year:

Favorite Art Exhibit Off the Top of My Head - Jeff Koons in Chicago. I don't think everything he does is genius, but a lot of it is and this was an engaging exhibit. His large scale pieces are wonderful.
Favorite Museum of the Year - Saatchi Gallery in London. I really like the new location a lot. There was something about the flow of the galleries that I really liked. The openness lent itself to a variety of mediums and while I thought the current exhibit of contemporary Chinese art was alright, I thought everything flowed very well. Really the antithesis of the Tate Modern, which I've always felt has been laid out horribly.

Podcast Listening this Year:
This American Life - Still the best thing on the radio, even with less new episodes there were still some wonderful ones, especially the very timely ones on the economy and the election.
Radio Lab - I don't listen to it as much as I should, but one of the most engaging shows around.
All Songs Considered - Bob Boilen is a good bit hipper than Nic Harcourt, which is nice, although he still has his old dude moments. This is still a great podcast and a nice chance to hear new stuff now that I don't have an endless stream to review from WMUC. Their show on the 80s was especially amusing.
Sound Opinions - This features the two music critics for the two Chicago papers. Their interview format is occasionally more brown nosing than actual conversation, but they're unafraid to talk about things very mainstream to very obscure.

Magazines I read or didn't read this year:

Stuff I read pretty religiously:
New York Review of Books
Believer

A Magazine I should have read more regularly than I did:
Wire

Quarterly or Bi-Anually Stuff That I will read more of as time permits:
McSweeny's
n+1
Granta

Stuff I Just Started Subscribing To:
Atlantic
Harper's

Stuff I borrow from my parents and read more than some of the stuff that I actually subscribe to:
New Yorker
Economist

And the books I read by the numbers:
58 Books Read
7 Graphic Novels
31 Books from the Library
4 Issues of Granta (Yes these are books)
12 Non-Fiction Books (that were also non-Graphic Novels)
39 New Authors I hadn't read before

And in no particular order my favorite books I've read this year:
John Irving - A Prayer for Owen Meany
Coramac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food
Jonathan Letham - Motherless Brooklyn
Zadie Smith - White Teeth
Alison Bechdel - Fun Home
Kazuo Ishiguro - When We Were Orphans
John Updike - Rabbit, Run
Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma
Roddy Doyle - A Star Called Henry/Oh Play That Thing

Random Thoughts

Another in my series of things that needs to bite the dust with this recession - Buying diamonds at all holidays. Much like Christmas Lexuses, this seems to be a case of advertisers trying graft something onto a holiday. You have Valentine's Day, you evil evil conflict diamond selling war criminals. Please stop trying to corrupt Christmas. Other people are already doing a fine job of that.

...

I've been pondering William Kristof v. Thomas Friedman. I know that Kristof is better, and not just because he travels the world freeing child slaves, but I haven't quite pinned it down yet. Maybe it's just different styles, I will return to this at some point.

...

Also, I just read Deep Economy by Bill McKibben and Girlfriend in A Coma by Douglas Coupland back to back. It was an unexpectedly brilliant choice. I don't think in my life I've ever paired a non-fiction and fiction book so elegantly, and it was completely by accident. Read both of these books.

Judging Books By Their Cover

The music director's office at any college station is, even in the most well-maintained situations, overstuffed with cds of all genres and aesthetic qualities. As a music director for a few years, I got a good sense pretty quickly of how to filter through the glut of music. Easiest was when I noticed a band or label that I had already heard of, but even as my knowledge expanded this only covered a percentage. Next were distribution services who either provided a one-sheet or stickers on their cds with RIYL i.e. Recommended if you like __ . Many times this was off the mark (Radiohead meets Sigur Ros meets Flaming Lips) but at least it got you in the ballpark. And then there were plenty of cds where I had none of these hints. And I judged these by their cover, regularly. This worked pretty well. If I hold up a dozen cds I bet you can get in the ball park of the genre for nine or ten of them. If had a big red font dripping blood and is mostly black with some sort of mythical creature on it - that's gonna be metal. If it's super austere with minimal liner notes, its probably techno. And if there's a cheap looking picture of a band of scruffy looking dudes, its probably going in the sell pile.

Really the same things goes for books. When I walk into a bookstore or a library and see all the fiction jumbled together - Victor Hugo in the same section as Danielle Steele, it's pretty essential to start mentally seperating what looks interesting from what I will avoid. Even from the spine it's very easy to pick out chick-lit. And Penguin has always had the right idea with the orange spine. It's simple, it jumps out and the batting average of Penguin books is higher than any other publisher.

Books I Didn't Read This Year

. . . or more accurately books I didn't finish this year. Somehow this year I was able to greatly dial down the amount of (non-sports) tv I watched (I have watched enough Scrubs for a lifetime) and read a lot more than I ever have. But while I have read a lot more than any year in the past, a number of books went unfinished for one reason or another. These are all the books that I actually started and have not finished:


Love in the Time Of Cholera
This was simply a case of running out of renewals for this at the library, as it was the last in a stack of books I had checked out at the time. I have tried to dial down the number of books I have checked out, but it is never easy. That said, the stretch I read did not quite grab me as much as I would have hoped. I still will give this a second chance at some point, probably.
Chances of Finishing it Someday: 55%

Norwegian Wood (Or maybe something else by Haruki Murakami)
I think it was Norwegian Wood, it could have been something else by him. Either way, this was a similar situation as above, I just ran out of time. I like Murakami a lot though.
Chances of Finishing it Someday: 70%


The (Really Dull) Adventures of Augie March
Oh God, I got halfway though and I just couldn't continue. The protagonist had nothing compelling going for him and Bellows had a gift for strangling a sentence. I gave it my best, but this was quite unenjoyable.
Chances of Finishing it Someday: 15%


The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007
One of those writing collections where you can read in bits, and that was my situation. I read a chunk of it and then other things come up and I haven't gotten back to this yet.
Chances of Finishing it Someday: 60%


Global Capitalism: Its Fall And Rise in the 20th Century
I still have this in the currently reading and have gotten through a lot of the "gold standard era" pile but a number of books have snuck by it for the time being. It's really quite interesting and I will finish it at some point.
Chances of Finishing it Someday: 75%