Books of 2009

My reading taste is idiosyncratic. I am always surprised when other people like the same books I do. But after booktalking it for more than four years, I finally persuaded a student to check out Dodie Smith's masterful I Capture the Castle this week

... I hesitate to say, "of 2009," because of course you read things that weren't published this year, and how much richer I find writing about reading (Nick Hornby's Believer columns spring to mind) when a whole and full reading life is shared rather than just mock Printz or some pub-date obsessed cult of the ARC. That being said, I have read more recent things than probably ever before. These are some of my favorites:

Recent YA

Liar by Justine Larbalestier (2009) For almost two hundred pages, I thought I was reading this rather gritty realistic piece of fiction, and then it shifted to something else entirely. Really fresh.

Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd (2009) This book capture suburbia better than any I can remember, and the bittersweetness of the romance only adds to the overall melancholy tone. Perfect teen angst.

Skeleton Creek  by Patrick Carman (2009) I know a few readers didn't like the genre-shifting, but I loved the way the video integrated with the text. An entirely new experience.

Geektastic: stories from the nerd herd  by Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci (2009) Obligatory short story pick. Black and Castelucci are only two of the all-star YA stable penning pieces of ever variety of geek-dom, from theater geeks to comic-cons to academic teams. Interspersed with comics, too.

Some older books

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1991) I can't believe this book existed for so long without me knowing about it. It is the past and the future, simultaneously. I predict I can hand-sell it to a dozen boys post-Guy Ritchie incarnation of Sherlock Holmes.

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer (1999) I found a reference to the book when watching an episode of television series online. Sawyer's novel is set among particle physicists working on the large hadron collider at CERN, and the flashforward effect described is entirely different, it's great fun.

Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden (1995) Marsden's seven-book series charts the revolt of rather ordinary Australian teens after their country is invaded. The action sequences are fun, and Marsden's characters and their attachments original.

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (2006) In this novel and its companion, The Dead and the Gone, the moon is knocked much closer to the earth's orbit, disrupting tides, electricity, transportation, and blocking out the sun. Grim but enthralling. A third one comes out in 2010.

Frankly, I Expect No Less

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger (2009) When I try to tell someone what anything by Niffenegger is about, I start babbling like an idiot. It is about many things, none of which sound like they go together but somehow do is this amazing, dazzling, creative mass.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (2009) A book about fandom, but also love, loss, and aging. The first few pages depressed me profoundly enough for me to assent to the break-up of the fictional long-term relationship, proof if needed that Hornby's powers of persuasion are considerable. I would buy anything Hornby writes, he hasn't disappointed me yet.

Anglophilia

Class by Jane Beaton (2008) A just-slightly-updated look at boarding school life, told through an endearing ensemble cast with students and teachers all keeping their own secrets.

Bad Housekeeping by Sue Limb (1995) Some naughty stories by the author of the Girl, 15 books. Like a smaller press, more intellectual version of I Don't Know How She Does It.

The Bride of Lowther Fell: A romance by Margaret Forster (1980) My knowledge of Forster was limited to Lady's Maid before this year, when I read most of her stuff. The memoirs are especially good, but this tale -- a modern and intellectual young woman moving her truculent nephew into the Lake district among menacing neighbors -- is an effective thriller.

London: the biography by Peter Ackroyd (2000) Obligatory nonfiction pick, more than nine hundred pages on the Kindle for iPhone, mostly read in the city. My favorite chapter was the one about the evolution of the tube, which listed the now-closed stops your hurtle past underground.

Is realistic YA fiction just too sad?

  

I love to recommend books to teens. But I've been having a tough time moving much of the excellent recent YA fiction. I've been listening to the words teens use to describe realistic fiction and "problem novels" like Jumping Off Swings and Speak. Depressing. Sad. I actually tried to persuade a group of girls that Speak was a landmark work, "important," thus deserving props, if not affection. When you try to persuade readers after-the-fact of a book's worth, something is wrong.

While I have never been a fan of adult misery memoirs, the YA novels are gritty and realistic might just be "too much like life" for my readers. In the words of Women's Studies survey courses everywhere, I come at books from a position of privilege, both age and income related.  I like to peek into the lives of teens when I read, while my teens might want to read for diversion from their own realitites. Something for reviewers and prize juries everywhere to bear in mind, and quite possibly the reason full-fledged fantasy and its analogs in the genres, like the Simon Pulse imprint, are so popular at my school.

YA in the real world

I read children's books. I say this confessionally, because I am so accustomed to being the only fully grown-up person around reading this stuff. So it is slightly surreal to attend the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents , in a ballroom ranked with hundreds of other people who get my literary allusions, arrayed to receive the more than sixty authors who spoke for as little as five minutes. But it was another YA author event in Philadelphia that literally shifted my perspective on what it is these people are doing.

Children's Book World in Haverford hosted a benefit signing for the Philadelphia Free Library last Sunday. Like the best indie book store experiences, CBW requires a cognitive shift to a place where bookstores contained books you actually wanted to buy. And last week you could have a conversation, immediately afterwards, with the author, in an environment devoid of the press and grab of the exhibit floor. And these were the authors: Laurie Halse Anderson, T.A. Barron, Sarah Dessen, Steven Kluger, Justine Larbalestier, David Levithan, Lauren Myracle, Scott Westerfeld, and Jacqueline Woodson. Wow, huh? (Westerfeld & Myracle above) But seeing these rather august individuals compelled to mill about with their readers make me think there is something to the industry quite apart from writing.

Perhaps its because of NaNoWriMo , and the extremely workmanlike advice I have seen distributed over the course of the month, but I began to see the process of working at this sort of writing for young people as distinct from sitting in a garret, waiting on the muse. It is more like content creation, crafting tools which will engage young people and push them forward on a path to full literacy and democratic participation. And we are like wholesalers for this work, connecting it with the end consumers, quite apart from any sense of literary merit. And I began to wonder about readership of YA outside of institutional settings, and how my own fangirl enthusiasm can help serve my students when I am too star-struck to attempt conversation. Meanwhile, the close proximity to these amazing authors will give me something to sigh about while shelving.

Prediction: As chain bookstores stock an increasingly limited range of materials, professional development opportunities connecting school librarians with noteworthy fiction will be more important than ever.

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Technorati wants me to insert the code XSGUY2E7CEUH on this site to verify ownership. Still upset about someone stealing my wendyontheweb.com url when I forgot it wasn't set up to auto-renew. Will keep you posted.

From deep within the 11th Circuit

My Google News alert started popping up yesterday morning. The Supreme Court was not going to hear the ACLU's case surrounding the removal of Vamos a Cuba from Miami-area school libraries. I am no legal scholar, but that refusal leaves the ruling -- that individuals can call for the removal of material they personally deem factually inaccurate from school library collections -- standing in the 11th Circuit Court, which includes Alabama and Georgia as well as Florida.

I don't even want to get into the claims on the part of the self-described former political prisoner who lodged the complaint against a picture book. I went to Cuba in 2004 and have pictures of Cuban children laughing and smiling, much like those pictures on the cover. But that is a story for another day.

Until yesterday,  I had been confident in my laboratory for intellectual freedom, as Justice Brennan described it, feeling that Board of Education of Island Trees versus Pico had once and for all established that school boards should not bow to community pressure to remove "objectionable" materials from the shelves. So the high court allowing this decision to stand chills me to the marrow, for the same reason I have never wanted our library's catalog online for home access. I want to preserve our students' right to intellectual freedom, which means preserving their ability to a receive diversity of opinions. Meanwhile, in region where selection is often muddied with censorship, it will be interesting to see how this will be played out next. Will it be the books on non-Christian religions? From authors affiliated with left-wing political causes? Or will it merely offer a mechanism for blanket protest against those lists of books, the ones we hear are disseminated at some of the churches?

I got a phone call last spring.
"Do you have 'My Daddy Has a Roommate'?" said the caller, who did not bother to identify himself.
"No," I said, not bothering to correct him on the title or share that, as a high school library, our number of picture books is small and almost all curricular.
"Do you have the Bible?"
"Yes," I said.
"Good." he said, and hung up.

I don't know who preached about homosexual lifestyles seeping into the school via the library collection. But next time, it might be question about a book I hold, and if it comes at the behest of a community member, not a parent whose student has selected that book from our collection, I might have to begin to think about another sort of laboratory altogether.