Last Chance to enter an awesome list-making contest

A while back, A Fuse #8 Production announced a contest to determine the 100 best picture books – everyone e-mails in their top 10, and they’ll count ‘em up.  Tonight at midnight (eastern time) is the deadline, so send your lists now if you haven’t done so already. Which I haven’t, because I am still deliberating and need to go browse the picture book aisle one more time before clicking send on the final list. But I will, by the deadline, which is tonight. And then I’ll post my list here because I know you all desperately want to know what my picks are.

The Princess Bride and the naivete of (my) youth

I wanted to buy this, but was too disturbed by the cover; when you see it in the store, it doesn't even look like Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn!

Many blog readers have probably seen the movie THE PRINCESS BRIDE, where screenwriter William Goldman uses the framing device of a young kid (played by Fred Savage, a.k.a. THE WONDER YEARS’s Kevin Arnold) being read to by his grandfather, with all appropriate dubiousness about the book’s romantic elements.

Fewer have probably read the book that came first, also by Goldman. Starting in third grade, I read it over and over for many years (much as I had obsessively watched the movie from a younger age, until my mother taped over part of it with the six o’clock news, and no I am not still bitter, but only just barely).

Here, Goldman uses a different framing device: he presents the book as being culled from an old academic history, inserting editorial notes into the text where he has removed “a two hundred page digression on the history of the Florish crown” and similar.

The embarassing part: I did not get that this was all Goldman’s invention, at all. I was in high school when I was earnestly explaining to my friend Seth what a great book this is and how Goldman had really improved it from the original by deleting all this boring stuff, when he — entirely from my description — said, “But you know he made all that up, right?”

I just looked at him.

The really embarassing part is that if he hadn’t said that, I sincerely don’t know how long it would have taken me. Would I have a vague sense, to this day, that the history of Florin and its royal intrigues is something I really ought to know more about? We’ll never know.

I’m skeptical

I have been a silent blogging partner for the past week or so due to craziness at work, but I’m back in action now, with lots of stored up Things To Say, which will trickle out as soon as I can type them up.

For starters, two beloved classic picture books are apparently being made into movies. Of course, there are the obvious issues with making books into movies, and how the movies are not as good 98% of the time.* But I think there’s specific difficulty in making a picture book into a feature length movie, b/c inevitably you have to add in all kinds of extra stuff that’s left unsaid, only implied, or just absolutely not there in the book, and in doing so I think you really change the whole nature of the thing. I guess its actually similar to the overall problem of adapting any book to a movie, but the length issue with picture books adds a layer to me.

But, there’s money to be made, so we got HORTON HEARS A WHO (which I didn’t see, although I suppose in the interest of the blog I should add it to my netflix list), and now there’s a movie version of Maurice Sendak’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is in the works. 100 Scope Notes (and various others, but I saw it there first) has the trailer.

I will say that the trailer looks promising visually. But I’m still anxious about what they might do to this book that’s so dear to my heart. Frankly, I don’t want there to be a WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE movie – even if its a good movie. In all these years, I’ve never felt like “man, they should make a movie of that.” For me, this one just is a book, down to its very core, quintessential self. And if they’re making it into a full-length movie, they’re bound to add in all kinds

There’s also a trailer out for a movie version of CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS, by Judi Barrett. I think it looks a lot like every other children’s animated movie that’s come out lately. Which is not to say it won’t be an enjoyable movie. But if I ruled the world, I don’t think it would get made.

*My only personal exceptions to the rule are: The Princess Bride; Lord of the Rings; Wind in the Willows. What are yours?

If you’re looking for a teen vampire romance…

…that is 800 million times more original, creepy, and moving than TWILIGHT, rent LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

But oh my god, it scared the crap out of me.

Best scene, according to me: a discussion about what “going steady” means, held between two twelve-year-olds. One of them is a vampire who is rather covered with blood during this conversation, but the conversation is played straight teen angst and joy. Best part: the characters are totally believable, but there’s such a mismatch between the content of their words (going steady doesn’t mean anything) and the emotions that come along (one of them, in particular, in disbelieving ecstasy at the decision to do it). It’s an in-character incongruity, and it’s awesome.

Best scene, according to my boyfriend: Let’s just say it involved body parts. And not in a “now they’re trying to make you think about sex” way, in a “oh my god, all these people are going to die” way. He called it HEATHERS-esque.

Also: watching this movie really makes me realize how BUFFY/ANGEL’s occasional little glamorous tricklets of blood do not do justice to what would be gushing around and messing up everyone’s clothes and faces if there were real vampiric consumption taking place.

Also also: I liked the way the movie gives its own take on some of the vampire canon while making it a genuinely cool scene, instead of a belabored “Now we’re going to explain why vampires can’t do X.” Well done. (You know, I hope this post makes any sense since I am trying so hard not to ruin anything. Spoiler-free is the way to be!)

Wednesday Words: After all, those jocks are always so judgmental.

The Wednesday Words are going up a bit late today, but a good John Green quote is always worth waiting for.

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.

– John Green, LOOKING FOR ALASKA

Free Books!

Presenting Lenore is doing a giveaway of 11 young adult novels. Leave a comment on her blog saying how many novels you read per month to enter.

Shades of MSCL: When you can’t help but notice all the noticing you’re not supposed to notice. Also, boys are watching you. Don’t look.

From Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS (Advance Reader Copy; may be different in the version available in stores and libraries). The number is the calorie-counting the anorexic narrator does throughout the book:

When the bread is done I scrape on a microscopic layer of [honey] (30) and pour a cup of coffee, black. She pretends not to listen or watch as I crunch through my breakfast. I pretend that I don’t notice her pretending.

…Now if only it’d been “pour a cup of coffee, black, with three or four sugars,” we’d be in a whole other realm of My So-Called Life reference. But anyways. This is from THE SWEET FAR THING by Libba Bray:

“I said, don’t look now,” Felicity hisses through clenched teeth. “The key is to make it seem as if you do not notice their attention.”

It may seem tenuous to connect these two quotes, which after all, don’t really have much in common. But what they do have in common is that they both totally echo this classic line from the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE:

ANGELA (voice-over): Like with boys, how they have it so easy! How you have to pretend you don’t notice them, noticing you.

Of course, since this is television, that line precedes an ironic segue — in this case, a brilliant one, to Brian getting shoved up against some lockers. Oh, Angela. What don’t you notice, indeed.

Our first blog award!

We told y'all we were winners.

Thanks, Sadako at Dibbly Fresh. You rock, and not just because you gave us an award.

Emily and I are now supposed to bestow this award on other blogs we like. We will have to confer.

An assortment of thoughts on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls

This cover? Is so beautiful.

Now that my town is acting like winter is done (though considering that I live in Wisconsin, I mostly think it’s trying to fake me out), here are some thoughts about Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS, about a severely anorexic high school girl whose best friend has just died.

[All quotes are from an Advance Reader's Copy, which means they may be different in the final version you get from a bookstore or library.]

Things I noticed:

• I found the subjective experience of reading WINTERGIRLS to be quite odd, because of how strongly I felt my loyalties divided. Lia, the protagonist, goes to great lengths to hide her anorexia from those in authority who could make her eat — especially, her dad and stepmom — and at times is quite clever about it. I have a very strong identification with anyone cleverly trying to get away with things; it’s probably part of the juvenile mindset that keeps me reading young adult fiction even as I age ever farther past its target audience.

  So I kept rooting for Lia to keep on getting away with all her schemes; the schemes, in fact, may have been the main thing I identified with in her. But then, of course, I as a reader would step out of this identification, and be aware of how getting caught might be the only thing that would save her life. This dual awareness, in and out of her head, is always a strange experience for me, much like when I find myself rooting for a novel’s villain because they just seem more interesting than the hero.

• Anderson continues to excel at expressing the alienation of being a high school student. She has a cynical take on school that I love reading, and I expect those who are still stuck in high school love more. Here’s a representative quote:

My English teacher flips out because the government is demanding we take yet another test to assess our reading skills, because we’re seniors and pretty soon we might have to read or something.

What I think is interesting in this and similar quotes (and I totally thought I had a better example, except now I can’t find it) is that Anderson’s expression of high school angst often involves adopting a seemingly adult POV, commenting on the situation of the kids. This, on its face, is violating a convention of fiction for young readers, except that I also totally remember thinking like that (and feeling very adult doing it) as a teenager.

Things I liked:

• Anderson does something I didn’t expect, but loved, when she has a groping-toward-recovery Lia imagine her future:
  

  I’m angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy or maybe a girl with gentle lips and strong hands.

  It would have meant so much to me to read something like this when I was in high school, announcing the possibility of life with women or with men with just as little fanfare as Anderson gives here, but I never, ever did.

• Meanwhile, she managed to avoid what the blogger Amee calls “Sarah Dessen Syndrome” with her character Elijah, just when I thought she was going to succumb to it.
• Anderson also uses her sense of irony well in one of the book’s “stylistic quirks,” the repeated use of strikethrough text to convey both Lia’s initial reaction and her rejection of it:
  

  No, I am never setting foot in this house again it scares me and makes me feel sad and I wish you could be a mom whose eyes worked but I don’t think you can. “Sure.”

  At some of these times, I viscerally identified with Lia. Like in TWISTED, Anderson does depressed well.

Things I didn’t like:

• The thing is, depressed is not always that much fun to read. I spent more days reading this almost-300 page book than I did Libba Bray’s almost-800 page THE SWEET FAR THING later that week, even though I think WINTERGIRLS was better.
• There were also times that I didn’t feel like I could really get in Lia’s head at all. Nicki at the blog Dog Ear made some interesting criticisms about Lia supposedly being a reader, but not thinking like one. I liked the book more than Nicki did, but it’s true that Lia has virtually no interests — that’s part of the point — and that makes it harder to care about what happens to her. I’m not sure how else you can convey a character as depressed as this, but maybe that’s just another reason why depression is not necessarily my favorite thing to read about. Maybe I identified with Lia the most when she was most destructively hiding her illness because that’s the only time she ever did anything active.
• Also, some of Anderson’s “stylistic quirks” meant to convey Lia’s mental state didn’t work so well for me. In particular, Anderson repeats this refrain, set off in the text to indicate Lia’s thoughts:
  

  ::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/
  stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

  I like the idea of Lia having a self-loathing refrain — it fits the kind of obsessiveness I think we needed to see from her — but the text didn’t really work to convey it for me. It was moments like this where I agreed with Nicki that it felt like we were being continually told about Lia’s messed-up mind rather than really feeling it. It’s also possible that this just isn’t my style of book; I tend to like my narratives literal.

Overall, I think WINTERGIRLS is quite an achievement. Anderson is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and there’s stuff in here I think she did incredibly well; it made me think a lot. (Insert your own joke about how that really is an achievement here.) But I can’t quite imagine picking this one up to read again, like I can virtually all her other young adult books. Almost a week after I finished reading it, I don’t feel like it’s stuck in my soul the way some of her other books are, months or years after being read. Ultimately, I think I just don’t love Lia enough. I wish her the best, but that’s all.

Friday “Why?”: For cripes sake, why do the Roma always have to be magic?

So I’m nearing the end of THE SWEET FAR THING, the final installment in Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series, and there’s a lot I’m going to say about this book next week after I finish it, even though I think it’s going to be kind of exactly what I already said about the first two books, but with new examples.

But here’s one thing I’m going to say now: Do the damn Gypsies have to be magical in everything? I mean, seriously.

Season two of BUFFY rocks my world, now and forever, but it was bad enough that they built the whole show around an ancient Gypsy curse. But after they already did that, it’s even lamer for Bray to do it, in my opinion.

"I find your gypsy curse as attractive as your blank stares, Angel!"

And at least in Buffy, some of the Roma, when they went from being plot devices to actual characters in season two, were real people with conflicting desires, better or worse motivations, etc. The Roma in Bray’s book tend to be wise and mysteriously all-knowing about evil and how to fight it. We never learn (at least, not yet, at over 700 pages into the third book) why they know so much about the magic that is hidden from almost everyone else, maybe because it just seems so obviously in-character that they would. They are Gypsies, after all!

There’s a funny scene in Sherman Alexie’s RESERVATION BLUES where he has these two Indian guys make fun of a condescending tourist they meet in a rest stop bathroom by pretending to be magically at one with nature. Who’s the Roma’s Sherman Alexie?