one book leads to another
The other day, people at work were talking about how they prefer physical books and cannot understand why people would like ebooks, it’s just not the same.1
I love books as physical objects. I own hundreds of them and seeing them on my shelves makes me happy - if I was a dragon, they would be my hoard.
But I also like finding out about a book at 4pm, and being able to borrow it right then and there, without getting off the couch.
When I was a student, spending lunch breaks and time between classes in libraries, it was easy to pick things up impulsively, just because I was there and that book was there and I had time to read. I don’t spend time in libraries like that any more; I have to make special trips2. Overdrive means impulsive borrowing is possible. It’s a bit like constantly being in a library.
1 There are definitely times when physical books are superior to ebooks, particularly when images are involved. The other day, I kept wanting to refer to the map at the front of the ebook I was reading and the image resolution was so poor I couldn’t read all the town names.
… it just occurred to me, I should have looked up the Amazon.com preview for the hardcover edition! Yep, I checked, it’s beautifully clear. I tried the Kindle preview but that wasn’t any better quality, I tried a Google image search, but I didn’t think of that one, because I went to my local Amazon site, which doesn’t sell the hardcover… Ahh, if only!
Anyway, I’ve borrowed a lot through Overdrive this year and it’s the first time I’ve had that problem.
2 If my local library was like my university’s recreational library, I’d probably go there just to hang out. Especially since the library has airconditioning and my house does not. But it isn’t like the uni’s rec library - and I can understand why. It’s designed for the community generally. Whereas the rec library was for a specific subsection of the community: book lovers who belonged to the university. They didn’t discard books just because they had ugly 80s covers, and if there was no space on the shelves, books were just stacked up on the floor. You can do that when you don’t have storytime for toddlers every week, and you don’t ever need to push shelves aside so the space can be used for other functions.
The local library’s open and accessible plan also means there aren’t nooks where you can hide away to read or write.
*
Because Molly Knox Ostertag’s illustrations were a huge part of why I loved Sharon Shinn's graphic novel Shattered Warrior, I was curious about Ostertag's solo debut, The Witch Boy.
In Aster's family, girls become witches and boys become shapeshifters. But Aster shows no signs of becoming a shapeshifter and, even though everyone discourages his interest in witchery, he keeps learning in secret. When some of the boys go missing, he has a chance to use his skills to help his family and to prove to them that this is who he's meant to be.
This is a solid, diverse story about being different and finding acceptance. I would have stronger feelings about it if the artwork’s aesthetic had appealed to me more. I didn’t dislike it, there are artwork styles that are a lot less to my tastes, and it’s only the colour palette (and the worldbuilding) that’s different from Shattered Warrior... but I didn’t love it, either? Graphic novels are not my preferred mode of storytelling, so maybe I’m just not very interested if I don’t love the artwork.
Which is very close to how I feel about picture books. (But it’s not quite the same - I read a lot of picture books to children, so I don’t just look at them with my own tastes in mind.)
I bought the Kindle edition of Shattered Warrior, but borrowed this one through Overdrive. The Kindle app is great for reading graphic novels, much better than I expected it to be - zooming in is easy and there's the option of scrolling through one panel at a time. Overdrive isn't quite so convenient to use. You can't pinch to activate zoom-mode, and you have to tap out of zoom mode to access the menus. But the resolution was good and text was readable without zooming in, so this is probably in the minor quibble category.
*
I really enjoyed Emma Mills' First & Last, so I read This Adventure Ends, about Sloane, a high school senior whose family has recently moved to Florida.
There’s a lot of different things going on here: Sloane’s voice lessons and her uncertainties about her future; her father, an author struggling with writer’s block, and the tensions this causes; Sloane’s friendship with twins Vera and Gabe, her mission to track down a painting by their late mother and her lab partner’s reasons for helping with this. And at first, there didn’t seem to be quite enough space to explore them all properly.
I didn’t mind, because Sloane is witty and I was entertained. This book made me laugh aloud more than once.
But as I read, I realised that all of these are actually about love, in its many forms. Family relationships. Friendships. Romantic relationships that have ended, that are long-standing, that are new. Things people are passionate about.
Love is why Vera and Gabe’s mother’s painting is significant, and why Sloane is prepared to go to such lengths to find it. Sloane’s father discovers fandom and fanfiction - stories people write for the love of it, stories people write about love - and shares his discoveries with his daughter because that’s the sort of relationship they have. And Sloane has to decide whether singing is a hobby she loves or a passion she wants to pursue further.
I really liked the way everything fitted together.”It’s not a big deal,” this kid is saying, pitching his voice over the thrum of the room. Clearly it is a big deal, because a ring of onlookers has formed around him. It’s that sort of Shakespearean chorus that pops up at parties like this, to observe and cast judgment and report back to the masses.
I’m only three weeks in at Grove County High School, but I recognise the speaker from my AP biology class. His name is Mason, and he sits at the lab bench in front of mine.
I also recognise him from the pages of my father’s novels. In a few short years, Mason could be the sheriff’s son who backhands the preacher’s daughter, or the ex-high school quarterback hell-bent on avenging some romantic slight. Guys like him were a dime a dozen in Everett Finch’s world, and they usually died in a fire.
Neither of them could just let the other have their grief, their moment. I know it wasn’t the intention - they’re opening up! Sharing the tragedies that made them who they are! The regrets and fears they can’t share with anyone but each other! - but Christ, it seemed like one-upmanship to me. Where is the fic where Mickey says, I lost the only family I had when I was a kid and James just says I’m so sorry. And they sit in silence, and maybe hold hands, or maybe they don’t, maybe that’s all there is. One of them says what they need to say, and the other one just listens, absorbs, acknowledges it. Lets their sadness have a place to land.
*
All things considered, I didn’t enjoy Summer Days and Summer Nights: twelve summer romances quite as much as Stephanie Perkins’ previous anthology, My True Love Gave to Me. But I did like that Perkins’ story, “In Ninety Minutes, Turn North” was a sequel to her story from the previous anthology. That was unexpected and delightful - and the story itself was one of my favourites.
My other favourites were “Inertia” by Veronica Roth, in which SF technology gives Claire a chance to revisit shared memories with her former ex-friend before he undergoes surgery, and “A Thousand Ways This Could All Go Wrong” by Jennifer E. Smith, about Annie, who is working at a summer day camp for young kids. I haven’t often come across autism included in stories the way it is in the latter, as a factor, a part of life, but not as the central focus. Casually yet thoughtfully handled. There should be more stories like that.
And I liked how “The End of Love” by Nina LaCour unfolded, and the way time repeated in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” by Lev Grossman.
(Halfway through one of the stories, I became distracted trying to find a way to turn my university results into a GPA, because I thought that would give me some context to understand this foreign concept which keeps coming up in fiction. Success was limited - but I do feel like I understand it better than I did.)
*
Something which struck me after I finished Summer Days and Summer Nights was that the stories were all set in the US. (Not exactly surprising from an American anthology written by Americans - but, hey, Perkins has a couple of novels set in Paris, so it doesn’t automatically follow.) Maybe I should find some non-American YA next time, I thought, vaguely… and instead of following up on that thought, I looked up Jennifer E. Smith’s novels to see if any sounded interesting.
But when I noticed a Cath Crowley novel amongst the recommendations for one of Smith’s books, I clicked on it because she’s not American, she's Australian. (Also I’ve seen seen positive comments about her books over the years and have largely ignored them, because I once skim-read one in the library of a tiny town we were passing through and didn’t feel like reading any more. But that was years ago3 and maybe it was time to reconsider.)
Words in Deep Blue is set in a secondhand bookshop. Moreover, a bookshop with a Letter Library, books with interesting marginalia which people can add to, or leave letters in. That is an ideal setting for a book! And it was this year’s Children’s Book of the Year Honour book, so that decided it.
Coincidentally, this is also a love story about summer days and nights.
Rachel and Henry were best friends until a few years ago, when Rachel moved away and stopped replying to Henry’s letters.But now Rachel is back. Her brother has drowned, and Rachel has given up swimming, broken up with her boyfriend, drifted away from her friends and failed Year 12. To escape from the ocean and from everyone who knows what happened, she moves in with her aunt - unaware that her aunt has arranged for her to work in Henry’s family’s bookshop.
Henry’s parents are arguing about selling the bookshop that is his home. His girlfriend has just dumped him, in spite of their non-refundable tickets to go travelling overseas, and he still has no idea why Rachel stopped writing to him - or why she’s become so grumpy.
This alternates between Rachel and Henry’s POV. It would be a very different, probably lopsided, story if it didn’t, but it does mean there’s a lot less suspense as the reader knows what both of them are thinking. On the other hand, knowing what they think of each other gives a sad story about endings - of life, of relationships, of dreams - a hopeful inevitability.I know it’s time to get up because Henry starts reciting poetry again. I get my poetry from two places - school and Henry - so I haven’t heard any for a while. The last poem I heard in Henry’s voice was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Tonight it’s one I don’t know.
The words drop, drunk and heavy, and I see the poem as Henry speaks it - a raining world, a hiding sun, a person fighting to love the terrible days [...] He recites the poem one more time because I ask him. There’s something in it that I need to find. An answer, maybe, to how it’s done, how a person starts living again. I don’t find it. All the poem does is make me ache, in places unlocatable.
“Amy’s going out with Greg Smith,” I say to explain why Henry’s drunk. “I found him in the girls’ toilets.”
“In my defence, I was too drunk to know it was the girls’ toilets,” Henry says.
“Go to sleep,” his dad tells him. “It’ll seem better in the morning.”
“No offence, Dad,” Henry says, “but unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly worse, because you have a whole day ahead of you.”
3 I was 19. I think maybe I partially out-grew YA for a while, because I was used to reading it looking for characters I could relate to or for characters I could be friends with, for characters who were my age - and as I got older, they were no longer my age.
But as I got more distance on my teenage years, I came back to YA again, because characters my own age was never my only reason for reading YA.
Anyway, that’s my bookish epiphany for today.
*
“In the Greenwood” by Mari Ness is a short story retelling of Robin Hood (published on Tor.com). It’s sharp and unexpected and fraught, in a way that I appreciate in short fiction or poetry but tend to find unsatisfying in novels. “I’ll wear a hood, perhaps something over my face. They’ll guess, of course, but they won’t have proof. I’ll have my men wear the same.”
“No women?” She cannot help but ask.
“If you can find me another of your skill.”
She keeps her hands folded in her lap.
“I doubt I’ll even need to go to the greenwood for a while. It will simply be a last retreat, as long as I have the manor.”
And how long will that be? But she does not ask this question. They both know.
He does not ask for her help. He doesn’t need to. She will give it unquestioningly, unasked.
.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.
I love books as physical objects. I own hundreds of them and seeing them on my shelves makes me happy - if I was a dragon, they would be my hoard.
But I also like finding out about a book at 4pm, and being able to borrow it right then and there, without getting off the couch.
When I was a student, spending lunch breaks and time between classes in libraries, it was easy to pick things up impulsively, just because I was there and that book was there and I had time to read. I don’t spend time in libraries like that any more; I have to make special trips2. Overdrive means impulsive borrowing is possible. It’s a bit like constantly being in a library.
1 There are definitely times when physical books are superior to ebooks, particularly when images are involved. The other day, I kept wanting to refer to the map at the front of the ebook I was reading and the image resolution was so poor I couldn’t read all the town names.
… it just occurred to me, I should have looked up the Amazon.com preview for the hardcover edition! Yep, I checked, it’s beautifully clear. I tried the Kindle preview but that wasn’t any better quality, I tried a Google image search, but I didn’t think of that one, because I went to my local Amazon site, which doesn’t sell the hardcover… Ahh, if only!
Anyway, I’ve borrowed a lot through Overdrive this year and it’s the first time I’ve had that problem.
2 If my local library was like my university’s recreational library, I’d probably go there just to hang out. Especially since the library has airconditioning and my house does not. But it isn’t like the uni’s rec library - and I can understand why. It’s designed for the community generally. Whereas the rec library was for a specific subsection of the community: book lovers who belonged to the university. They didn’t discard books just because they had ugly 80s covers, and if there was no space on the shelves, books were just stacked up on the floor. You can do that when you don’t have storytime for toddlers every week, and you don’t ever need to push shelves aside so the space can be used for other functions.
The local library’s open and accessible plan also means there aren’t nooks where you can hide away to read or write.
*
Because Molly Knox Ostertag’s illustrations were a huge part of why I loved Sharon Shinn's graphic novel Shattered Warrior, I was curious about Ostertag's solo debut, The Witch Boy.
In Aster's family, girls become witches and boys become shapeshifters. But Aster shows no signs of becoming a shapeshifter and, even though everyone discourages his interest in witchery, he keeps learning in secret. When some of the boys go missing, he has a chance to use his skills to help his family and to prove to them that this is who he's meant to be.
This is a solid, diverse story about being different and finding acceptance. I would have stronger feelings about it if the artwork’s aesthetic had appealed to me more. I didn’t dislike it, there are artwork styles that are a lot less to my tastes, and it’s only the colour palette (and the worldbuilding) that’s different from Shattered Warrior... but I didn’t love it, either? Graphic novels are not my preferred mode of storytelling, so maybe I’m just not very interested if I don’t love the artwork.
Which is very close to how I feel about picture books. (But it’s not quite the same - I read a lot of picture books to children, so I don’t just look at them with my own tastes in mind.)
I bought the Kindle edition of Shattered Warrior, but borrowed this one through Overdrive. The Kindle app is great for reading graphic novels, much better than I expected it to be - zooming in is easy and there's the option of scrolling through one panel at a time. Overdrive isn't quite so convenient to use. You can't pinch to activate zoom-mode, and you have to tap out of zoom mode to access the menus. But the resolution was good and text was readable without zooming in, so this is probably in the minor quibble category.
*
I really enjoyed Emma Mills' First & Last, so I read This Adventure Ends, about Sloane, a high school senior whose family has recently moved to Florida.
There’s a lot of different things going on here: Sloane’s voice lessons and her uncertainties about her future; her father, an author struggling with writer’s block, and the tensions this causes; Sloane’s friendship with twins Vera and Gabe, her mission to track down a painting by their late mother and her lab partner’s reasons for helping with this. And at first, there didn’t seem to be quite enough space to explore them all properly.
I didn’t mind, because Sloane is witty and I was entertained. This book made me laugh aloud more than once.
But as I read, I realised that all of these are actually about love, in its many forms. Family relationships. Friendships. Romantic relationships that have ended, that are long-standing, that are new. Things people are passionate about.
Love is why Vera and Gabe’s mother’s painting is significant, and why Sloane is prepared to go to such lengths to find it. Sloane’s father discovers fandom and fanfiction - stories people write for the love of it, stories people write about love - and shares his discoveries with his daughter because that’s the sort of relationship they have. And Sloane has to decide whether singing is a hobby she loves or a passion she wants to pursue further.
I really liked the way everything fitted together.”It’s not a big deal,” this kid is saying, pitching his voice over the thrum of the room. Clearly it is a big deal, because a ring of onlookers has formed around him. It’s that sort of Shakespearean chorus that pops up at parties like this, to observe and cast judgment and report back to the masses.
I’m only three weeks in at Grove County High School, but I recognise the speaker from my AP biology class. His name is Mason, and he sits at the lab bench in front of mine.
I also recognise him from the pages of my father’s novels. In a few short years, Mason could be the sheriff’s son who backhands the preacher’s daughter, or the ex-high school quarterback hell-bent on avenging some romantic slight. Guys like him were a dime a dozen in Everett Finch’s world, and they usually died in a fire.
Neither of them could just let the other have their grief, their moment. I know it wasn’t the intention - they’re opening up! Sharing the tragedies that made them who they are! The regrets and fears they can’t share with anyone but each other! - but Christ, it seemed like one-upmanship to me. Where is the fic where Mickey says, I lost the only family I had when I was a kid and James just says I’m so sorry. And they sit in silence, and maybe hold hands, or maybe they don’t, maybe that’s all there is. One of them says what they need to say, and the other one just listens, absorbs, acknowledges it. Lets their sadness have a place to land.
*
All things considered, I didn’t enjoy Summer Days and Summer Nights: twelve summer romances quite as much as Stephanie Perkins’ previous anthology, My True Love Gave to Me. But I did like that Perkins’ story, “In Ninety Minutes, Turn North” was a sequel to her story from the previous anthology. That was unexpected and delightful - and the story itself was one of my favourites.
My other favourites were “Inertia” by Veronica Roth, in which SF technology gives Claire a chance to revisit shared memories with her former ex-friend before he undergoes surgery, and “A Thousand Ways This Could All Go Wrong” by Jennifer E. Smith, about Annie, who is working at a summer day camp for young kids. I haven’t often come across autism included in stories the way it is in the latter, as a factor, a part of life, but not as the central focus. Casually yet thoughtfully handled. There should be more stories like that.
And I liked how “The End of Love” by Nina LaCour unfolded, and the way time repeated in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” by Lev Grossman.
(Halfway through one of the stories, I became distracted trying to find a way to turn my university results into a GPA, because I thought that would give me some context to understand this foreign concept which keeps coming up in fiction. Success was limited - but I do feel like I understand it better than I did.)
*
Something which struck me after I finished Summer Days and Summer Nights was that the stories were all set in the US. (Not exactly surprising from an American anthology written by Americans - but, hey, Perkins has a couple of novels set in Paris, so it doesn’t automatically follow.) Maybe I should find some non-American YA next time, I thought, vaguely… and instead of following up on that thought, I looked up Jennifer E. Smith’s novels to see if any sounded interesting.
But when I noticed a Cath Crowley novel amongst the recommendations for one of Smith’s books, I clicked on it because she’s not American, she's Australian. (Also I’ve seen seen positive comments about her books over the years and have largely ignored them, because I once skim-read one in the library of a tiny town we were passing through and didn’t feel like reading any more. But that was years ago3 and maybe it was time to reconsider.)
Words in Deep Blue is set in a secondhand bookshop. Moreover, a bookshop with a Letter Library, books with interesting marginalia which people can add to, or leave letters in. That is an ideal setting for a book! And it was this year’s Children’s Book of the Year Honour book, so that decided it.
Coincidentally, this is also a love story about summer days and nights.
Rachel and Henry were best friends until a few years ago, when Rachel moved away and stopped replying to Henry’s letters.But now Rachel is back. Her brother has drowned, and Rachel has given up swimming, broken up with her boyfriend, drifted away from her friends and failed Year 12. To escape from the ocean and from everyone who knows what happened, she moves in with her aunt - unaware that her aunt has arranged for her to work in Henry’s family’s bookshop.
Henry’s parents are arguing about selling the bookshop that is his home. His girlfriend has just dumped him, in spite of their non-refundable tickets to go travelling overseas, and he still has no idea why Rachel stopped writing to him - or why she’s become so grumpy.
This alternates between Rachel and Henry’s POV. It would be a very different, probably lopsided, story if it didn’t, but it does mean there’s a lot less suspense as the reader knows what both of them are thinking. On the other hand, knowing what they think of each other gives a sad story about endings - of life, of relationships, of dreams - a hopeful inevitability.I know it’s time to get up because Henry starts reciting poetry again. I get my poetry from two places - school and Henry - so I haven’t heard any for a while. The last poem I heard in Henry’s voice was ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Tonight it’s one I don’t know.
The words drop, drunk and heavy, and I see the poem as Henry speaks it - a raining world, a hiding sun, a person fighting to love the terrible days [...] He recites the poem one more time because I ask him. There’s something in it that I need to find. An answer, maybe, to how it’s done, how a person starts living again. I don’t find it. All the poem does is make me ache, in places unlocatable.
“Amy’s going out with Greg Smith,” I say to explain why Henry’s drunk. “I found him in the girls’ toilets.”
“In my defence, I was too drunk to know it was the girls’ toilets,” Henry says.
“Go to sleep,” his dad tells him. “It’ll seem better in the morning.”
“No offence, Dad,” Henry says, “but unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly worse, because you have a whole day ahead of you.”
3 I was 19. I think maybe I partially out-grew YA for a while, because I was used to reading it looking for characters I could relate to or for characters I could be friends with, for characters who were my age - and as I got older, they were no longer my age.
But as I got more distance on my teenage years, I came back to YA again, because characters my own age was never my only reason for reading YA.
Anyway, that’s my bookish epiphany for today.
*
“In the Greenwood” by Mari Ness is a short story retelling of Robin Hood (published on Tor.com). It’s sharp and unexpected and fraught, in a way that I appreciate in short fiction or poetry but tend to find unsatisfying in novels. “I’ll wear a hood, perhaps something over my face. They’ll guess, of course, but they won’t have proof. I’ll have my men wear the same.”
“No women?” She cannot help but ask.
“If you can find me another of your skill.”
She keeps her hands folded in her lap.
“I doubt I’ll even need to go to the greenwood for a while. It will simply be a last retreat, as long as I have the manor.”
And how long will that be? But she does not ask this question. They both know.
He does not ask for her help. He doesn’t need to. She will give it unquestioningly, unasked.
.
Originally @ Dreamwidth.