December meme, day 8: YA books, and City of Bones movie
So the rodents and I watched City of Bones, which took us three days, and I'm left with feelings of deep WTF. The hell did I just watch? spoilers for movie and books
First, just the overall look and feel of the movie was all wrong. I guess they tried for dark and atmospheric and suspenseful, but instead it was just hard to see and tedious. Whatever criticisms one can bring against the book, it is charming and fast-paced, and the movie was decidedly neither.
I don't know if it was the choice of actor or if it was trying to make Jace into an Edward or what, but he did not look anything like he should have (except for being nominally blond) and delivered his lines entirely with the wrong expression, so instead of witty he just sounded pissy all the time. Clary barely registered as a character, beyond being a brat to her mother in the beginning. Alec was sulky and vicious, with zero feeling, let along chemistry between him and Jace. I did like Isabelle (and her whip, and flamethrower) and Simon best of the teens, but that's not saying much, and I felt like half the time they weren't given anything to work with. Of the adults, Jocelyn totally stole the movie in her 2.5 scenes onscreen in the first 20 minutes (of how many? seriously, this thing felt interminable); showing at least a few things from her POV was the sole way in which the movie was better than the book. I liked Magnus Bane even though he wasn't nearly sparkly enough, and Luke was OK, but Hodge was a disappointment, mostly because he never felt like a character whose betrayal could be felt, and Valentine... IDEK what that was supposed to be. Oh, and giving Shadowhunters British accents was something I didn't expect, and it just made the teens seem extra pretentious.
I was looking forward to rat!Simon and was irked to be cheated out of this -- one of the ways the movies traded one of the book's most amusing (to me) moments for more generic angst. (And... what was the deal with movie!Simon getting bitten but not being turned? Or am I missing something? There was a bit mark, right? And that's what Simon not needing his glasses anymore was about? That... just kind of got dropped, right?) Moving all the action to the Institute just made things more confusing to me in the endgame -- I couldn't tell what was going on with whom or why -- and also made it look like they were trying to save money on sets. Oh, also, I thought it was a pretty lame ass-covering move to have Hodge tell Valentine that he should *lie* and *pretend* that Jace and Clary are siblings before Valentine even has the conversation with Jace in which he tells him he's his father -- I mean, it's not surprising that the movie would want to dispel the threat of incest right off the bat, but way to spoil that ~mystery~ and ~tensions~ *eyeroll* But of course the hawk story came through intact -- yet again :P
The movie was darker (visually) and gorier than I'd expected. The demon attacking Clary's apartment was kind of cool, in a really gross way, especially when its bits start coming together. As we were wathing it and going EWWW! O said, indignantly, "Zachem ty nam dayesh' eto smotret'?" [Why are you letting us watch this?], which was a good question. They laughed a couple of times during the movie, most notably at Simon's zombies question and at Jace's repetition of "They weren't cops", but I'm not sure I cracked a smile even once. Wait, no, maybe once, when Magnus was flirting with Alec and Jace seemed genuinely surprised that someone could find someone else to be "the hot one" in his presence. But mostly I was just surprised by how little humour there was here, given that I remember the book as funny first and foremost. A lot of the humour was sapped by Jace's dying-consumptive delivery, but a lot of it (like the rat) was intentionally cut from the movie, too, which I find to be such an odd choice...
L figured out Luke was a werewolf and Jocelyn was hiding something about Clary's father (before Jace even asked about the father's photo), guessed (?) that Simon not needing his glasses was a sign he had been bitten by vampires, and guessed that Clary had given Valentine the replica Cup from the exhibit hall, which is both par for the course for her and not bad at all. She also complained about how the movie was derivative of everything and called it City of Stupid. I cannot say I disagree... XP
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And then, because my previous post was mostly pictures, and it's thematically appropriate anyway, I'll already do the Sunday ramble meme post:
December meme, day 8: YA books (thistle_chaser)
I'm pretty sure I started reading YA books as an adult. When I was a kid in Russia, there was no YA, so when I outgrew or read through all of the kidlit books of interest to me, I just moved on to grown-up books. And then I came to the US and eventually started reading books in English, and it was either continuing my trajectory of reading grown-up books, or catching up on all the English fantasy stuff I missed out on, like Prydain and Diana Wynne Jones and so on. So I'm pretty sure I was at least in college and possibly even married when I started reading YA. These days, it's a pretty sizeable part of the books I read, because so much of new genre writing comes from YA. I do occasionally read non-genre YA also.
I tried to ponder this for a bit, and I think part of what attracts me to YA is that I really, really loved my time in high school. Like, there's this cliche that adults supposedly trot out -- though I've never actually heard it except being disputed or disproven -- that high school is the best years of your life, but I feel like for me it really was -- the time when I formed and strengthened my most lasting friendships, grew most productively, discovered new subjects that I came to love (chemistry, physics, calculus, ceramics), read so many things that contributed to who I am and how I think, wrote most prolifically, honed my skills, felt like I had the most freedom to explore and be myself. So, I tend to really like books set in high school, an dwith protagonists that age. The other part of the appeal, I think, is that YA is where relationships between children and parents tend to be explored in interesting ways. In kidlit, in order for anything to really happen with the kid protagonists, the parents need to be out of the way, but teenagers do have some legitimate autonomy, so parents are usually present and things are happening sometimes outside of their knowledge, sometimes with it, but whether they're in on the story or not, they're still important in the teen protagonists' lives. And I like reading about parent/child relationships; always liked it, because I've always had a close relationship with my parents, and now that I have children of my own, there's another dimension to it.
As for specific books, on the non-genre side, I've enjoyed Chris Crutcher's books -- they're very Issue-driven, which annoys me a little bit, but I do think he's also a good writer, and I find his stuff moving and not nearly as anvilicious as it could be given the subject matter. I really liked Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and would like to read more by him, though I haven't yet, and enjoyed Will Grayson, Will Grayson when I read it earlier this year, and want to try some solo John Green books, too, since I keep hearing really good things about him. Most of my YA reading, of course, is still SFF. I think if I had to name a favorite YA author, it would be Holly Black at this point. Her books are not necessarily my favorite, but I find myself liking things in her execution that I didn't expect to like -- I'd been skeptical about Curseworkers and ended up loving the series, and am currently reading The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which is a vampire book, and I don't like vampire books, but it's still really good. And on top of writing really good novels, she is also a really good short story writer. I started reading Holly Black with Tithe and the Modern Faerie sequels, and those are still the books that are the most up my alley, but I actually do think her later stuff is better and more interesting despite being less tailored to my specific tastes. I like the way she writes teenagers who feel very real, who have adults in their lives who are damaged themselves without being cartoonishly evil, so there's both a realistic YA setting and the magic of genre, and the way they mesh together feels very natural. I think the Curseworker books (White Cat, Red Glove, Black Heart) are the most ambitious in terms of both worldbuilding and character work, but, really, I've loved or at least liked a lot everything I've read by her.
I like Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy a whole lot -- I think it might be my favorite set of YA books recently, and the first book is pretty nearly a masterpiece, IMO, though book 2-3 don't quite live up to it, and I had fun with Team Human (the vampire novel for people who think vampire novels are dumb, basically), which SRB co-authored with Justine Larbalestier, but her modern Gothic, Unspoken, worked for me considerably less well, even though I did like a couple of characters. And speaking of Larbalestier, she's kind of hit-or-miss for me, too. I thought Liar (no spoilers, because reasons) was quite brilliant and quite powerful, but the Magic of Madness books just didn't do anything for me.
Another author who works better or worse for me depending on the book is Libba Bray. I read the Gemma Doyle books and liked them mostly for the friendship between the four girls (one of my favorite portrayals of female friendship) and for Felicity, but wasn't particularly wowed, but I think her modern-setting stuff is better, the short stories I've read, and the crazy near-future books like Beauty Queens (which I both really enjoyed reading and respect for what it's trying to do) and Going Bovine.
Actually, hit or miss is even more applicable to Kristin Cashore for me. I read Graceling first, and actually quite disliked it while respecting what it was trying for. I don't think it was just because I found the book overhyped, though that was part of it, too. I couldn't stand Katsa, the protagonist, and still maintaing she's way too close to Mary-Sue territory. At the same time, I really like some of the things the book is doing, especially given the teen girl audience -- Katsa's insistence on not getting married or having children and the fact that it's respected both by other characters and by the narrative, is a pretty big deal. But I didn't like Graceling much at all, so was super surprised when I *loved* her next book, Fire (except for the IMO-unnecessary bits that tethered it to the earlier book). This year I read Bitterblue, which is a straight sequel to Graceling, and liked it more than Graceling but a lot less than Fire, though it's a book I'm glad someone tried to tackle... while hoping that next time that will be done by someone with a defter hand. So, Cashore is one of those authors I read to see how she will take on her rather ambitious projects, but come away disappointed more often than not.
I will probably try anything I see by Scott Westerfeld. His Leviathan series, which is steampunk/biopunk WWI AU with flying whales and a Sweet Polly Oliver protagonist is my favorite, even though I'm not sure whether that is really YA or midgrade, but I also liked Peeps and sequel (despite not liking vampire books), and even the Uglies series -- well, sorta. I liked Shay and thought she was worth the price of admission, and liked some of the central ideas around which the dystopia is built, but the worldbuilding itself was too crude for my taste, and I didn't much like the protagonist or the obligatory love triangle.
I liked The Hunger Games (though don't find myself particularly fannish about these books), and Harry Potter, naturally (though I think of Harry Potter as more mid-grade than YA). I like Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, in this approximate order of favoritism: Protector of the Small > Terrier > Song of the Lioness (although it was the first I read and so I have a special fondness for it, and respect for how early it did things that many modern YA books don't do, like showing that one doesn't need to marry the first guy one falls in love with, or sleeps with) > The Immortals (too much twee, though I like Rikash the Stormwing) > Trickster's Queen (just... no, though points for trying with a non-Western setting, and Nawat Crow is adorable), but the Circle of Magic books just never snagged me. I like Robin McKinley's books a lot; I don't remember the early ones very well any more, since those were books I did read when I was still in the target audience, but I like the way she writes in general, and her characters.
Among less well-known authors and titles, I really really loved Rampant, Diana Peterfreund's first Killer Unicorns book, and also the short story set in the same universe (and the historical setting novella, too), but was quite disappointed by the sequel, and as there's no conclusion to the main clearly-meant-to-be-a-trilogy, this is really annoying. Ysabeau Wilce has the series starting with Flora Segunda (which might be midgrade, but whatever, I want to talk about it) set in AU!San Francisco which on the other hand is delightfully zany and on the other deals with some heavy-duty stuff like parental guilt and PTSD. I like Melissa Marr's urban fantasy with fairies books, starting with Wicked Lovely, well enough, though only about a quarter of the arcs, if that, actually interest me. I've read two of Adele Geras's modern fairy tale retellings/allusions set in a boarding school, the Egerton Hall Novels, and they were pretty neat. Also, there was the one summer I spent binging on Cate Tiernan's Sweep books, which weren't good or anything, but were really addictive.
First, just the overall look and feel of the movie was all wrong. I guess they tried for dark and atmospheric and suspenseful, but instead it was just hard to see and tedious. Whatever criticisms one can bring against the book, it is charming and fast-paced, and the movie was decidedly neither.
I don't know if it was the choice of actor or if it was trying to make Jace into an Edward or what, but he did not look anything like he should have (except for being nominally blond) and delivered his lines entirely with the wrong expression, so instead of witty he just sounded pissy all the time. Clary barely registered as a character, beyond being a brat to her mother in the beginning. Alec was sulky and vicious, with zero feeling, let along chemistry between him and Jace. I did like Isabelle (and her whip, and flamethrower) and Simon best of the teens, but that's not saying much, and I felt like half the time they weren't given anything to work with. Of the adults, Jocelyn totally stole the movie in her 2.5 scenes onscreen in the first 20 minutes (of how many? seriously, this thing felt interminable); showing at least a few things from her POV was the sole way in which the movie was better than the book. I liked Magnus Bane even though he wasn't nearly sparkly enough, and Luke was OK, but Hodge was a disappointment, mostly because he never felt like a character whose betrayal could be felt, and Valentine... IDEK what that was supposed to be. Oh, and giving Shadowhunters British accents was something I didn't expect, and it just made the teens seem extra pretentious.
I was looking forward to rat!Simon and was irked to be cheated out of this -- one of the ways the movies traded one of the book's most amusing (to me) moments for more generic angst. (And... what was the deal with movie!Simon getting bitten but not being turned? Or am I missing something? There was a bit mark, right? And that's what Simon not needing his glasses anymore was about? That... just kind of got dropped, right?) Moving all the action to the Institute just made things more confusing to me in the endgame -- I couldn't tell what was going on with whom or why -- and also made it look like they were trying to save money on sets. Oh, also, I thought it was a pretty lame ass-covering move to have Hodge tell Valentine that he should *lie* and *pretend* that Jace and Clary are siblings before Valentine even has the conversation with Jace in which he tells him he's his father -- I mean, it's not surprising that the movie would want to dispel the threat of incest right off the bat, but way to spoil that ~mystery~ and ~tensions~ *eyeroll* But of course the hawk story came through intact -- yet again :P
The movie was darker (visually) and gorier than I'd expected. The demon attacking Clary's apartment was kind of cool, in a really gross way, especially when its bits start coming together. As we were wathing it and going EWWW! O said, indignantly, "Zachem ty nam dayesh' eto smotret'?" [Why are you letting us watch this?], which was a good question. They laughed a couple of times during the movie, most notably at Simon's zombies question and at Jace's repetition of "They weren't cops", but I'm not sure I cracked a smile even once. Wait, no, maybe once, when Magnus was flirting with Alec and Jace seemed genuinely surprised that someone could find someone else to be "the hot one" in his presence. But mostly I was just surprised by how little humour there was here, given that I remember the book as funny first and foremost. A lot of the humour was sapped by Jace's dying-consumptive delivery, but a lot of it (like the rat) was intentionally cut from the movie, too, which I find to be such an odd choice...
L figured out Luke was a werewolf and Jocelyn was hiding something about Clary's father (before Jace even asked about the father's photo), guessed (?) that Simon not needing his glasses was a sign he had been bitten by vampires, and guessed that Clary had given Valentine the replica Cup from the exhibit hall, which is both par for the course for her and not bad at all. She also complained about how the movie was derivative of everything and called it City of Stupid. I cannot say I disagree... XP
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And then, because my previous post was mostly pictures, and it's thematically appropriate anyway, I'll already do the Sunday ramble meme post:
December meme, day 8: YA books (thistle_chaser)
I'm pretty sure I started reading YA books as an adult. When I was a kid in Russia, there was no YA, so when I outgrew or read through all of the kidlit books of interest to me, I just moved on to grown-up books. And then I came to the US and eventually started reading books in English, and it was either continuing my trajectory of reading grown-up books, or catching up on all the English fantasy stuff I missed out on, like Prydain and Diana Wynne Jones and so on. So I'm pretty sure I was at least in college and possibly even married when I started reading YA. These days, it's a pretty sizeable part of the books I read, because so much of new genre writing comes from YA. I do occasionally read non-genre YA also.
I tried to ponder this for a bit, and I think part of what attracts me to YA is that I really, really loved my time in high school. Like, there's this cliche that adults supposedly trot out -- though I've never actually heard it except being disputed or disproven -- that high school is the best years of your life, but I feel like for me it really was -- the time when I formed and strengthened my most lasting friendships, grew most productively, discovered new subjects that I came to love (chemistry, physics, calculus, ceramics), read so many things that contributed to who I am and how I think, wrote most prolifically, honed my skills, felt like I had the most freedom to explore and be myself. So, I tend to really like books set in high school, an dwith protagonists that age. The other part of the appeal, I think, is that YA is where relationships between children and parents tend to be explored in interesting ways. In kidlit, in order for anything to really happen with the kid protagonists, the parents need to be out of the way, but teenagers do have some legitimate autonomy, so parents are usually present and things are happening sometimes outside of their knowledge, sometimes with it, but whether they're in on the story or not, they're still important in the teen protagonists' lives. And I like reading about parent/child relationships; always liked it, because I've always had a close relationship with my parents, and now that I have children of my own, there's another dimension to it.
As for specific books, on the non-genre side, I've enjoyed Chris Crutcher's books -- they're very Issue-driven, which annoys me a little bit, but I do think he's also a good writer, and I find his stuff moving and not nearly as anvilicious as it could be given the subject matter. I really liked Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and would like to read more by him, though I haven't yet, and enjoyed Will Grayson, Will Grayson when I read it earlier this year, and want to try some solo John Green books, too, since I keep hearing really good things about him. Most of my YA reading, of course, is still SFF. I think if I had to name a favorite YA author, it would be Holly Black at this point. Her books are not necessarily my favorite, but I find myself liking things in her execution that I didn't expect to like -- I'd been skeptical about Curseworkers and ended up loving the series, and am currently reading The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which is a vampire book, and I don't like vampire books, but it's still really good. And on top of writing really good novels, she is also a really good short story writer. I started reading Holly Black with Tithe and the Modern Faerie sequels, and those are still the books that are the most up my alley, but I actually do think her later stuff is better and more interesting despite being less tailored to my specific tastes. I like the way she writes teenagers who feel very real, who have adults in their lives who are damaged themselves without being cartoonishly evil, so there's both a realistic YA setting and the magic of genre, and the way they mesh together feels very natural. I think the Curseworker books (White Cat, Red Glove, Black Heart) are the most ambitious in terms of both worldbuilding and character work, but, really, I've loved or at least liked a lot everything I've read by her.
I like Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy a whole lot -- I think it might be my favorite set of YA books recently, and the first book is pretty nearly a masterpiece, IMO, though book 2-3 don't quite live up to it, and I had fun with Team Human (the vampire novel for people who think vampire novels are dumb, basically), which SRB co-authored with Justine Larbalestier, but her modern Gothic, Unspoken, worked for me considerably less well, even though I did like a couple of characters. And speaking of Larbalestier, she's kind of hit-or-miss for me, too. I thought Liar (no spoilers, because reasons) was quite brilliant and quite powerful, but the Magic of Madness books just didn't do anything for me.
Another author who works better or worse for me depending on the book is Libba Bray. I read the Gemma Doyle books and liked them mostly for the friendship between the four girls (one of my favorite portrayals of female friendship) and for Felicity, but wasn't particularly wowed, but I think her modern-setting stuff is better, the short stories I've read, and the crazy near-future books like Beauty Queens (which I both really enjoyed reading and respect for what it's trying to do) and Going Bovine.
Actually, hit or miss is even more applicable to Kristin Cashore for me. I read Graceling first, and actually quite disliked it while respecting what it was trying for. I don't think it was just because I found the book overhyped, though that was part of it, too. I couldn't stand Katsa, the protagonist, and still maintaing she's way too close to Mary-Sue territory. At the same time, I really like some of the things the book is doing, especially given the teen girl audience -- Katsa's insistence on not getting married or having children and the fact that it's respected both by other characters and by the narrative, is a pretty big deal. But I didn't like Graceling much at all, so was super surprised when I *loved* her next book, Fire (except for the IMO-unnecessary bits that tethered it to the earlier book). This year I read Bitterblue, which is a straight sequel to Graceling, and liked it more than Graceling but a lot less than Fire, though it's a book I'm glad someone tried to tackle... while hoping that next time that will be done by someone with a defter hand. So, Cashore is one of those authors I read to see how she will take on her rather ambitious projects, but come away disappointed more often than not.
I will probably try anything I see by Scott Westerfeld. His Leviathan series, which is steampunk/biopunk WWI AU with flying whales and a Sweet Polly Oliver protagonist is my favorite, even though I'm not sure whether that is really YA or midgrade, but I also liked Peeps and sequel (despite not liking vampire books), and even the Uglies series -- well, sorta. I liked Shay and thought she was worth the price of admission, and liked some of the central ideas around which the dystopia is built, but the worldbuilding itself was too crude for my taste, and I didn't much like the protagonist or the obligatory love triangle.
I liked The Hunger Games (though don't find myself particularly fannish about these books), and Harry Potter, naturally (though I think of Harry Potter as more mid-grade than YA). I like Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, in this approximate order of favoritism: Protector of the Small > Terrier > Song of the Lioness (although it was the first I read and so I have a special fondness for it, and respect for how early it did things that many modern YA books don't do, like showing that one doesn't need to marry the first guy one falls in love with, or sleeps with) > The Immortals (too much twee, though I like Rikash the Stormwing) > Trickster's Queen (just... no, though points for trying with a non-Western setting, and Nawat Crow is adorable), but the Circle of Magic books just never snagged me. I like Robin McKinley's books a lot; I don't remember the early ones very well any more, since those were books I did read when I was still in the target audience, but I like the way she writes in general, and her characters.
Among less well-known authors and titles, I really really loved Rampant, Diana Peterfreund's first Killer Unicorns book, and also the short story set in the same universe (and the historical setting novella, too), but was quite disappointed by the sequel, and as there's no conclusion to the main clearly-meant-to-be-a-trilogy, this is really annoying. Ysabeau Wilce has the series starting with Flora Segunda (which might be midgrade, but whatever, I want to talk about it) set in AU!San Francisco which on the other hand is delightfully zany and on the other deals with some heavy-duty stuff like parental guilt and PTSD. I like Melissa Marr's urban fantasy with fairies books, starting with Wicked Lovely, well enough, though only about a quarter of the arcs, if that, actually interest me. I've read two of Adele Geras's modern fairy tale retellings/allusions set in a boarding school, the Egerton Hall Novels, and they were pretty neat. Also, there was the one summer I spent binging on Cate Tiernan's Sweep books, which weren't good or anything, but were really addictive.