a whole pile of book recs

[causeways]

I was just reading lyra_wing's post where she mentioned Little Women and WHY did Jo and Laurie not get together? And then I was reading wendy's post mentioning Unwind, which I have not read but sounds all kinds of intriguing (YA sci-fi -- excerpt on Amazon is here). And suddenly all kinds of things are pinging in my head, about YA and love stories and books, and

Comments

[slob_child]

I loved The Giver! We read it when I was tiny, in one of my elementary classes, and it stuck with me. I have heard it said that the Logan series (Logan's Run, etc) sort of deals with similar themes, only with grown ups. I'm not sure on this by any means, but it's what I've heard, so. For YA apocalyptic-ness, I like Garth Nix's Shade's Children and Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. Both are intensely creepy and amazing.

Re. Margaret Atwood - I actually dislike her quite a bit. I've read a lot of her older books (Handmaid, Surfacing, Robber Bride, Cat's Eye, etc), and poetry, and even picked up Oryx and Crake but couldn't finish it. I never quite knew why I had this aversion to her, but I recently found out that in the Canadian literary circles she's known to be a bit racist, so maybe that was part of it? *shrug*

I'm going to keep my eye open for The Rapture of Canaan; thanks so much for the rec!

[subterrain]

Sorry for eavesdropping, but WHAT? MADGE IS A RACIST NOW? Seriously, you have to tell me where you read that, because you are blowing my mind. O.O

[slob_child]

Hahaha, uh, actually it's kind of well known in Canadian literary circles. Uh, if you read her text Survival, which is admittedly dated now, she denies the problem of the Japanese concentration camps, 'the plight of the Japanese'. She also told Nourbese Philip that Philip's audience "doesn't know how to read" - like, not that they were illiterate, but that they didn't know how to understand what they were reading. She and Philip have an antagonistic relationship, or so I've heard from some Canadian scholars. The criticism against Atwood is basically that, like, she's the token female author in the CanLit canon and that a lot of her attitudes are the same as the overall patriarchal literary dominating force.

Don't take anything I say as gospel, though! She might not be racist? I just find it telling that writing as an author of a country renown for multiculturalism, her characters are predominantly white - or at least of the texts of hers I've read. Compellingly written, but yeah.

[subterrain]

Honestly, I'm just astounded that I've never heard that criticism of her. Of course, all my canlit profs were way too postcolonial to assign her books, so I was only reading her in like, my gothic seminar. Perhaps that's telling in itself, though.

As for the whiteness of her characters, there was that huge academic flamewar about appropriation of voice a few years back, and I can guess which side of the divide she was on with that. But all the women from her era - Laurence, Munro, Engel, Galloway - were pretty much sticking with the white and female pov. From what I've read anyway, which isn't comprehensive in any way. Feminism was hard enough to champion, it seems like.

Ugh, I'm totally being the apologist here! I just love her for her reputation of dismantling writers' egos with offhand phrases, and for being the kind of woman dumb people call a man-hating bitch. It's heartbreaking for me that she'd say that about Philip's audience, but I can believe it. :/

[causeways]

We read other stuff by Lois Lowry in elementary school (Number the Stars sticks out) but I read The Giver on my own. I should check all of those out -- thanks for the recs! I've looked at a couple of Garth Nix books before, but never actually sat down and read them.

Huh! I haven't actually read a whole ton ABOUT Margaret Atwood, so I'll have to get on that.

No problem!