Fake Friday “Why?”: Why do I own so much crap… and WHY is it all so DIRTY?

Just a quick note to say sorry about the light posting… my old lease ends tomorrow, which means all the parts of moving I’ve been “planning to get to” are, you know, needing to be gotten to.

The one extremely satisfying part? Every time I find something related to my old Master’s thesis — the one I abandoned for a different topic I love at the beginning of the summer — and I throw it away. This has happened a lot because I worked on that shit for two years, and accumulated a lot of crap related to it. I saved two small things (both pieces that I wrote) for posterity. But mostly I have loved throwing them in the garbage with a big smile on my face.

Next week, having given away a box of children’s books, I will buy more in reward!!!

Friday Why: What makes books absorbing vs. good?

I started thinking about this because I recently read Libba Bray’s THE SWEET FAR THING, and THE EARTH, MY BUTT, AND OTHER BIG ROUND THINGS by Carolyn Mackler. And my reaction to both was that they were not very good…but they were extremely absorbing. The kind of reading where I totally get lost in a book and forget what’s going on around me, and where I don’t want to put it down. But they weren’t very good. It seems contradictory, but that’s my reaction, and as I think about it there are a fair number of Teen books that I feel that way about, whereas absorbing and good almost always go hand in hand for me with both younger kids’ books and adult books.  So why?  What is the distinction between what makes a book good and what makes it absorbing?  And why do Teen books seem to lend themselves to being absorbing-but-not-good?

Friday “Why?”: Why are curly-haired characters always brushing their hair?

Why are curly-haired characters always brushing their hair? And why do authors not ever seem to have curly-haired test readers who can tell them to stop this?

The immediate impetus of this post is Sydney Salter’s MY BIG NOSE AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS, but it’s a longstanding puzzle/complaint of mine. In Salter’s book, the protagonist thinks her long blond curls are her only attractive feature, and as such, she’s often… brushing them.

Except. I have curly hair, so I can tell you this is the last thing you should do, unless your goal is a big bush of hair a la certain particularly awesome music videos from the decade of my birth:

And I feel confident in saying that this is not, in fact, your goal. So what’s with all the curly-hair brushing in books?

Back me up on this one, Emily.

Random question: are teen girl actors better?

So I’m rewatching ONCE AND AGAIN, a Herskovitz & Zwick (the producers of MY SO-CALLED LIFE) show. Why? Because it’s finals time.* Ahem.

And there’s a lot of things I’m thinking this time through, mostly centering on how much recognition I feel at all the classically identifiable H&Z moments and tropes. Some of which is wonderful and moving for me, and more of which, actually, is annoying than I would have expected.

But here’s my question. They did a simply amazing job of casting the teen girl actors, Evan Rachel Wood (who’s gone on to a very successful movie career) and Julia Whelan (who I believe mostly stopped acting after the show). And the teen male lead is… not as good. I don’t recall whether he improves later in the show (I’m still just halfway through season one), but it’s very noticeable. He’s not awful, but… the difference is striking.

And it’s making me remember just how incredible Claire Danes was in MSCL, and how in a few key scenes, Jared Leto just doesn’t measure up. (Like, after they’ve broken up and he comes to her house to return her bike, except it’s really Brian’s bike, and they’re talking about sex and death, and it turns out her dad is listening the whole time…)

So, obviously any show can have a dud actor. And I’m not talking about duds here, just actors who don’t always rise to the greatness of their costars. (And actually, I think the weakest acting in MSCL comes from Devon Odessa, who plays Sharon.) But H&Z have been consistently incredibly successful about casting female leads who take your breath away. Is it a general pattern that in the teenage years, it’s more common for female actors to reach great heights of naturalistic displays of emotion? Or am I overreaching? What do you guys think?

* I don’t actually watch much TV anymore; I never watch it live. But some semesters, when I’m really in a panic over finals, I feel an inexplicable urge to watch my shows. My first semester of grad school, I didn’t watch any TV all semester (which was actually kind of an adjustment, moving away from my parents’ TiVo and all)… until finals hit, when I suddenly felt compelled to watch three seasons of ANGEL. (My first-year-of-grad-school roommate and I picked one another for several reasons, but the complementary nature of our respective TV-on-DVD collections was not the most minor of them. I had MSCL and the Collectors’ Edition of Freaks and Geeks, both of which were hard to find at that time; she had… everything else.)

But yeah. I don’t know if this pattern is a reaction to the anxiety (Avoidance, the Greatest Strategy of Them All!) or because when I’m so close to freedom I start fantasizing all the things I could do with it and then I really want to, or what. But this semester’s papers are a particularly painful bunch for me (as measured by the triumvirate of how much I care about these classes (a lot), how much I’ve done on these papers (almost nil), and how soon they are due (let’s not discuss it)), so ONCE AND AGAIN it is.

Friday “Why?”: Why does every single love interest have to have “amazingly dark green eyes”?

Does every heroine have to have red hair and every love interest “amazingly dark green eyes”? (EVERNIGHT sparked this complaint, but believe you me, it ain’t just that book.)

The first line in this book's blurb?
'The only beautiful thing in Ivy's drab life is her glorious red hair.'

Ages ago someone named Joelle Anthony posted the red hair thing as #2 (for best friends, but I think it goes for “feisty” protagonists too) in her list of cliches in young adult and middle grade fiction. (She doesn’t have the “amazingly dark green eyes” thing, but she does have “Guys with extraordinarily long eyelashes” — and I can attest that it’s always put in that exact phrase, too.)

How many of these cliches have you noticed, and how many bother you? A huge number struck a chord with me — either as things I’ve been annoyed by myself (“Using coffee, cappuccino, and café latte to describe black people’s skin”) or things that hadn’t really occurred to me, but upon reading, seemed Duh!-worthy (“Using the word ‘rents for parents, but not using any other slang”).

But her ironic choice for #1 (“Lists”) doesn’t do it for me, mostly because I don’t care how often this is done, I love it always and forever — whether it’s Anastasia Krupnik or Bud E. Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.

Emily already mentioned how THE PRINCESS BRIDE is one of the few kids’ books to have been made into a genuinely good movie, but one thing the book does do better comes from its lists: in the movie, when it ends with history’s greatest kiss blah blah blah, it’s a little bit irredeemably cheesy; but in the book, where the narrator’s been obsessively ranking everything about Buttercup all along, it fits perfectly.

Friday “Why?”: Why do girls get to have a face or a body but not both at the same time?

Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:

These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?

I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.

Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.

My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:

… But they also kind of creep me out.

Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:

For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:

* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.

Friday Why: Why on earth did I love this book?

I re-read THE SECRET GARDEN for the first time in many years, and I’m left with the question: Why on earth did I love this book so much? Because this time around, while its slightly charming, its also kind of boring. I don’t really like or care much about any of the characters. The way the dialect is written in a lot of the dialogue is, as Elizabeth points out, difficult to read, enough so that it jarred me out of the story. And the sort of moralistic-sarcastic omnicient narrator is kind of grating. It really was a favorite when I was a kid, and for most books that I loved growing up, even if I don’t have the same reaction now that I’m older, I see why I loved them then. This one, though, I can’t figure it out.

I know its a classic and a common favorite – can anyone discuss what they loved or still love about this book?  I genuinely want to know, I’d like to reclaim my happy warm nostalgic feelings on it.

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?

Friday Why: Why doesn’t the Berenstain Bear family get to have names?

In the Berenstain Bears series, why are the main characters named only Papa, Mama, Brother, and Sister? The other characters get real names, like Freddy and Honey and Counselor Bob and Dr. Bearson (not the most creative names, but still, they’re names). And its not just that family calls each other Brother, Mama, etc – everyone does. It always bothered me, and I never thought up any explanation, let alone a reasonable explanation. Thoughts, anybody?

Friday Why: Why is a book in which heartbroken parents think their child is lost forever a good book for young kids?

I know I read William Steig’s SYLVESTER AND THE MAGIC PEBBLE as a kid, more than once or twice or Iwouldn’t remember it, and I must have liked it or my mom wouldn’t have picked it out as a present for my little cousin. But re-reading it recently (before it got mailed off to aforementioned little cousin), I felt such distress and empathy for the parents, who for a whole year believe something horrible must have happened to their child because he went missing and couldn’t be found, that I couldn’t really enjoy it at all. I mean seriously, how awful for those poor parents. Yes, in the end, there’s a happy reunion, but still, a whole year.

It occurs to me, though, that perhaps as a child my empathy didn’t naturally focus on the parents (although there are quite a few pages devoted to them and their sorrow), but rather on Sylvester, the child, whose plight of being stuck in the form of a rock is also quite miserable. The Sylvester story line somehow seems less inappropriate to me, more in keeping with common fairy tale themes (hero/heroine stuck in unhappy situation with no apparent way out, in the end finds way out or is rescued). This of course raises the question: when I begin identifying more with the parents in a story than with the kid? How did that happen? What is this creeping, insipent adultness that keeps happening to me???