Idle Thought of the Day: What the hell is a “Young Adult”?

I had a thought the other day while walking home from the library – I can’t recall ever being called a “Young Adult” as a child or a teenager. “Young Lady” once in a while, but no good sentence ever started with (or ended with, or contained) the words “Young Lady.” So who came up with the idea of calling books for teenagers Young Adult books? I get that it was an attempt to find a label that wouldn’t seem childish and thus off-putting to potential readers, but it’s a pretty lame attempt. Most teenagers have a fair amount of contempt for adults, so using “Adult” isn’t necessarily going to gain you any points, and putting the “Young” in front of it just adds condescension. I’d be open to other suggestions, but as a stop-gap solution, I say call it “Teen.”

As for the 10-12 set, who are often reading from that section too, well, adults are lame and boring – who wants to be an adult? Whereas teenagers are cool. So I say skip straight from Young Readers (which is also an annoyingly condescending title, but its at least vaguely accurate, plus at that point you’re so excited to be reading real chapter books that it doesn’t matter so much what you call it) to Teen, and call it a day.

Note: I’m aware that the 10-12 age group is called “Tweens” now, but that word hadn’t been invented yet when I was 11, I can’t even think it let alone say it without cringing, and I’ve never heard it come out of the mouth of an actual *cringe* Tween. So not an acceptable bookstore label, IMO.

Note 2: Having done some cursory research, Barnes and Noble does in fact use “Teen”, although I have vague memories that this was not always the case. Amazon, and the Brooklyn and New York public libraries use Young Adult.

Your Brain on Fiction

Courtesy of Vinay:

There’s a new study showing that the brain responds to narrative stories by simulating the action in the story:

Your Brain on Fiction

This strikes me as a bit of an example of a scientific study proving the logically obvious (they do that a lot, in my opinion), but still interesting to think about in relation to my concrete reading experiences.

When I’m absorbed in a good book, I have genuine emotional responses to what I’m reading – I cry if a character I love dies, I squirm and feel horribly embarrassed for the teenager doing the stupid things I did when I was 15, etc. And generally (for fiction) the better the book, the less intellectual and more visceral the response.  If I’m really identifying with a character, I feel what they feel — which is why its so important that characters’ thoughts and emotions are written realistically, because when they aren’t it jolts you right out of the experience – what you’re personally experiencing as you read the book is suddenly disjointed from what the character is experiencing.  

There’s of course a lovely escapism in leaving my world for a fictional one, of being totally removed from wherever I am for a while.  And I guess that’s how certain books can always calm me down (WINNIE THE POOH, especially if I can’t sleep) or cheer me up (HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON).  But there are also certain books where I like to match my mood, rather than escape it, and it works as a bit of an excorcism.  The ultimate for me is ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY when I’m feeling cranky for no reason and can’t snap out of it. 

Anyway, enough rambling by me — anyone want to share thoughts on a) this study or b) books that you use for specific, mood-related purposes?

Friday “Why?”/Why I Love It: Why do we love the books we love?

Today’s post about inexplicable book love inaugurates two series: the regularly scheduled Friday “Why?” and the whenever-the-heck-we-feel-like-it Why I Love It.

Sometimes the depth of my love for a book is inexplicable, even to me.

I felt this way about TWILIGHT (the first book more than the subsequent ones, which I liked a lot less). The characters annoyed me; I felt like we were constantly told that Bella was tough, but only saw her being sniveling and moonish. Edward struck me as a condescending prick. I agree with every feminist critique.

Yet I was completely captivated by the story as they fell for each other and Bella pursued the mystery of the Cullens. The week after I read the book, I reread the first 300 pages — up until when they were definitively together. Ironically, once the actual suspense plot emerged in the form of threat from other vampires, the story was over for me; the story I’d fallen for was Bella and Edward falling for each other, and from this point on I thought the book consisted entirely too much of them talking about their great love for one another. Ugh. But despite the contempt I sometimes felt for the book while I was reading it, I clearly got something out of it. I’m a slow reader, and rereading 300 pages is not something I do lightly.

This, in a way, is how I feel about my favorite Sarah Dessen novel, THE TRUTH ABOUT FOREVER.

The Truth About Forever

TTAF is a flawed book, much more so, in my opinion, than THIS LULLABY or JUST LISTEN (which I think is objectively her best book*).

The main problem with it is that several of the characters are completely caricatured. When I read it, I adjust it in my head so that one character (Jason) suffers from serious Asperger’s syndrome, while another (Monica) is mildly retarded; it’s the only way I can make sense of their behavior. (And that’s not even getting into Macy’s coworkers at the library.)

Sometimes the inexplicable characterizaton is Dessen stretching her love of metaphor too far. That’s my take on one character (Delia)’s refusal to fix a big freakin’ hole in her driveway, because “some things are better left unfixed,” or some such nonsense. No… that would be false. The crater in your driveway is better off fixed, and Dessen’s better off when she’s not sacrificing believable characters to make her point.

Worse yet, for me, I feel like Dessen stacks the deck at the book’s climax. Without giving away specifics of the denouement, let’s just say that when a character needs to finally make a choice that the entire book has been building toward, Dessen makes the path she’s already won the readership to even more blindingly obvious by having someone act like a complete ass. Not necessary.

So why do I call this my favorite Dessen novel? Because I feel compelled to re-read it every nine months or so, and I love it every time. The appeal of this kind of book, for me, is the fantasy of the guy falling for me; with Wes, it’s an attractive fantasy. And what Dessen, like Meyer in TWILIGHT, utterly masters in TTAF is the slow build from crush to relationship — with plenty of small advances along the way. It’s these small moments — the unexpected escalation of the flirtation — that are what I read and re-read for.

One of the TTAF reviewers on Amazon complains that Wes is utterly bland; one of my favorite book bloggers even calls his ability to solve Macy’s problems, all while lacking a personality of his own, “Sarah Dessen Syndrome.”**

They’re not wrong, but maybe for me that’s the point; he’s the perfect foil for a book that’s really about Macy. What’s appealing about Wes is that he falls for Macy. But Dessen makes it fun by not dwelling on telling us about Macy’s feelings of unlovability; instead, she lets us feel Macy’s roller coaster of continuous humiliation punctuated by amazement at the growing realization that this guy actually likes her. It works for me.

I think that’s also why THIS LULLABY didn’t do quite as much for me, especially the first time I read it. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed it just fine, and expect to for years to come. But the point of this book is in large part imagining quirky Dexter falling for you, and the thing is — I’ve had that kind of quirky boyfriend. And frankly, mine was better.

* excluding from consideration Lock and Key, which I’m not reading until the paperback comes out in April; Dessen is one of the authors that provokes my pronounced book-buying fetish.

** This same blogger’s “Sarah Dessen Syndrome 2″ (from the same post), namely the guy bugging the girl until she realizes he was right all along, her emphatic “Not interested!” did mean nothing, and he’s perfect for her!, is something I find a lot harder to tolerate. This is my biggest issue with THIS LULLABY.

Free Books!

A couple other blogs’ contests for free young adult books:

• Death by Bikini
  
• Tons of books with complicated rules
• Wintergirls (which I am so excited about!)
• Aaaaand, a whole bunch of books from Penguin

I pass this on as a public service to those who, like me, love nothing more than a book of their very own.

On Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little, by Peggy Gifford

Reasons I loved this book:

1. Excellent use of chapter headings. For example: “Chapter 22 In Which Impending Doom Comes in the Front Door.” Constructions like this using “In Which” are seriously underutilized in the world in general, and its nice to see effusive and appropriate use at the top of practically every page of this book (the chapters are quite short).

2. The tone/style almost exactly match my own voice when I am in a slightly silly mood and/or am justifying or explaining something I recognize to be a bit silly, but which I have decided to earnestly defend anyway. Slightly sarcastic, endlessly parenthetical and self-interrupting, every sentence either a run-on or extremely abrupt, with an absolute seriousness and earnestness combined with a degree of self-awareness that such seriousness and earnestness may not actually be warranted.

3. Moxy likes to make lists! I like to make lists!

Note: I read the sequel, MOXY MAXWELL DOES NOT LOVE WRITING THANK YOU NOTES – still enjoyable, but not as good. At first I thought maybe it was just too much of the same and it was getting old, but when I re-read the first one I laughed hard again, so I think the second one’s just not quite as good.

When does a book cross the line?

I was already not much enjoying Richelle Mead’s VAMPIRE ACADEMY when it crossed my line into unredeemable.

My initial complaints were pedestrian: the prose meant to evoke the characters’ deep lust for one another was so generic that it mostly provoked my befuddlement and laughter (“His hands and lips took possession of my body, and every touch was like fire on my skin”); I didn’t feel for the characters.

The entire book — its plot and any emotional punch it aspires to — is premised on your caring about the deep friendship between two characters, but since we learn little specific about either of them, I didn’t really see why they felt for each other. Rather, I kept being told that they did. A lot. More than any other friends in the history of human companionship. Memo received; motivation lost in the mail.

Nevertheless, I kept reading because the world was sort of interesting. Mead’s book has two kinds of vampires — one evil, one not, but with the potential to turn — and the half-humans who devote their lives to guarding the good ones. It’s an interesting social structure and I saw potential there, if unrealized by the actual book. Sometimes that’s enough.

But then! Our protagonist gets one up on her rival by circulating the news that said rival’s parents are — can you bear the horror? — janitors! And when this hasn’t completely vanquished the girl, our would-be hero clinches the rival’s social exclusion by spreading word of her sexual dalliances. Apparently the uppity slut had it coming. At least, that’s the message I took from Mead, who doesn’t seem to be exploring her protagonist’s dark side as much as cheerfully affirming it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to root for an “underdog” who mobilizes the grossest elements of sexism and class snobbery to win her petty schoolyard disputes, without the slightest hint of either remorse or comeuppance. I lost all respect for the character and the book.

So, question for the readers: what does a book have to do to become unredeemable in your eyes? And does that mean you stop reading? (I finished VAMPIRE ACADEMY, but angrily.)

And now, to descend to a much pettier level of complaint: these books have a love interest named Dmitri who you’re supposed to believe is the hottest thing since ice caps started melting into the ocean. But the model they use on the second and third books (which I haven’t read, thank you) is just not hot. At all. Whereas the female model for the first book is, in that she looks exactly like Angelina Jolie.

Judge for yourself:

Vampire Academy

Vampire Academy #2

Vampire Academy #3

I do not like it, Emily I am

It’s a well-known and much made fun of fact amongst my friends that I am a very picky eater. Although I have expanded my menu somewhat since childhood (I no longer order chicken fingers in every restaurant situation), I am still notably and, I’ll admit it, sometimes slightly irrationally picky. I don’t like berries. Or 90% of vegetables. Or fish, except for salmon teriyaki.

So I’ve always had a special affinity for characters that take an emphatic stance about certain foods. I read BREAD AND JAM FOR FRANCES by Russell & Lillian Hoban, and I think “yes, when you’ve got a good thing, you stick with it!” Likewise, I’ve always cheered for Sam in Dr. Seuss’ GREEN EGGS AND HAM. 

My only complaint towards the genre is that in the end the character always tries whatever it is and discovers that they like it. Whereas in my experience, I’m generally quite happy just not eating it if I don’t want to. And when I’ve been pressured, coerced, or otherwise made to try something I didn’t want to try, I usually don’t like it. Besides which, if you take a stand like Sam’s, and go to the trouble of listing all those places where you will not eat the green eggs and ham, you stick with it! What kind of lesson does it teach our children about standing firm and sticking to your principles when he just suddenly caves right in? Talk about a flip-flopper. Let’s have a children’s book where the moral of the story is “if you don’t like it, or if no, you’ve never tried it so on some theoretical level perhaps you do not know and might like it, but frankly it just sounds yucky, (like, say green eggs)…well then don’t eat it.”

eeeewww

Good god.

When I was looking up the authors of MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS for the Wednesday Words, I found… this money management site’s teaching guide to MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS.

Yes, I am serious. And I quote:

Remind students that Mr. Popper used credit wisely. He was able to use credit for goods and services even though he did not have enough money to pay for them at the time. He made an agreement with the engineer to pay him when he got the money. Then Mr. Popper fulfilled his agreement by paying the man as soon as he got the first paycheck for the Performing Penguins.

Challenge to the readers: can anyone think of a more pathetic pedagogic use of a completely awesome book?

Also: I had to make up a whole new category for this post, yet I am extremely hopeful about the opportunity to use it again. It seems replete with possibilities that are almost guaranteed to be interesting.

Wednesday Words: Learning by Doing

Inaugurating a weekly feature…

“Mr. Popper soon found that it was not so easy to take a penguin for a stroll.”

– Richard & Florence Atwater, MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

I did it — I read J.K. Rowling’s TALES OF BEEDLE THE BARD. I knew it wouldn’t be another Harry Potter book. I knew it would just re-open the gaping hole left by the completion of the Harry Potter series. But I read it anyway, and it was predictably meh. I found the stories boring, although I’ve never been one for fairy tales of any kind, so others may have liked them more. The “commentaries” by Dumbledore were entirely predictable, didn’t say much, and were interpreting stories with pretty simple morals to begin with. BUT…it was Dumbledore again, a little slice of him brought back to life to say a few new things. His voice, his style, his funny, almost snide asides about the stupidity and silliness of certain historical wizards and the unkind accusations in Lucius Malfoy’s old letters. And so, while it’s a boring, predictable, not-quite-worth-it book, its also a reminder of the incredible characters J.K. Rowling gave us in Harry Potter — characters I love so much that it was a joy to have one of them back, alive and speaking, for a few more pages.