pop culture consumption Sept-Oct 09
I have my reading mojo back! *dances*
recs in bold
anti-recs in italics
37. Sprout - Dale Peck
Narrated by Sprout Bradford, a smart-alec, smart-writing kid in a small town who can't help but stand out (drunk dad, green hair, gay) as he trains for a national essay writing competition that will give him a chance to get out of this small existence, that forces him to examine a few secrets he has been keeping. Sprout's voice is at first too knowing, peppered with pop culture references that ring false, but it settles down as Sprout starts to write more honestly about himself, and reveals himself to the reader little by little. It's bitingly funny, there's a bittersweet romance, a nebulous ending, and depite the fact it's yet another coming-of-age YA novel I *loved* it.
38. Halfway to Good - Kirsten Murphy
Luke is dealing with family troubles, year eleven, and his first relationship. Anna is dealing with family troubles, year eleven and her last relationship. One is a student, the other his teacher, and over the year Anna and Luke strike up a friendship that helps them get through their respective problems. I really like Kirsten Murphy's writing, how she makes her characters and their lives seem so real to me.
39. Pink - Lili Wilkinson
I found this, in contrast, unrealistic and broad-stroke in its portrayal of teenagers dealing with relationships, sexuality and peer pressure. Ava has been brought up by countercultural parents who encourage her relationship with the loledgy Chloe, and so her idea of rebellion is to ask to be transferred to a preppy private school (which is supposedly in Melbourne, but sound remarkably like a high school out of teen-movie-America) and transform herself into one of the perfect 'Pastels'. But in her new school she struggles between wanting to finally fit in with the crowd and hiding her sexuality, while being drawn to the outsider group of drama tech geeks.
The book tries very hard to confront some of the social norms usually taken for granted in YA books - there's one particular passage where Ava has an epiphany about white privilege that's nicely put - but overall it's a mess of ideologies masquerading behind a novel about some really annoying characters!
40. The Sweet Far Thing - Libba Bray
Finally finished the trilogy! Not a bad read overall, though a tad long as Bray drags out if and how Gemma will finally work out who is on her side, and how to restore power to the realms without being manipulated and/or killed by all the opposing sides. It's nice that Felicity and Ann are able, finally, to live the lives they want, and Gemma to some extent. I didn't find the thwarted romance between Karthik and Gemma particularly heartrending though, as Bray never put in much work to make that ring true (I was, however, both sad and happy that the book finally made explicit the relationship between Felicity and Pippa, even as we knew that it could never be).
41. Shakespeare - Bill Bryson
An easy read of a wide-ranging discussion of the controversies of discovering Shakespeare the man behind the writing. There is a lot of debunking of often accepted 'truths' that I found fascinating, and I often wished that Bryson would spend more a little depth delving into the research. There were good tangents on the background to the trials and tribulations of theatre in Elizabethan and Jamesian times. It doesn't, in the end, shed a great deal of light on Shakespeare, but I guess that's the point of the book!
42. The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
Lovely short stories of faerie and folk focussing on female protagonists (for most part). I love her writing style. And it made me determined to get through her more famous book one day (I know, you all love it, it's just so freaking dense).
43. Funny Boy - Shyam Selvadurai
Sad and elegant. Six linked stories out of Arjie's life from child to teen, documenting events that change his life, first on a personal level, and rippling out as he begins to understand life beyond realising his sexuality and to the growing unrest between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in his homeland of Sri Lanka.
44. Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) - Justina Chen Headley
Patty struggles as she tries to live her life as a normal American teen while dealing with the fact that she is half Asian and half Caucasian, her mother is really strict on the issue of boys, and she's being sent to a math camp for the summer. I really enjoyed this, despite some misgivings about how Chen Headley waxes lyrical about the beauty and intelligence of mixed-race children. But I recognised and laughed at and agreed with Patty's thoughts and frustrations about her Asian mother, and the competitive, stereotypical-but-true diasporic Asian community in a Western country. And it was just refreshing to read a YA bok with a half-Asian protagonist who strugged with the divide between finding and being herself, being true to her birth ethnicity, and fitting in with the culture she grows up in.
45. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
Junior, a really smart kid on a reservation, is encouraged to go to a school for white kids off his reservation in order to give him the chance to leave his underprivileged background behind. Sometimes Junior's voice seems too authoritorial, as Sherman uses him as a mouthpiece to tell this partly autobiographical story. But I was still moved by the story, by the many obstacles Junior has to overcome, by the tragedies he has already endured as so young an age.
46. Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend - Jenny Colgan
Eh. Imagine if, let's say Nikki Hilton, loses all her money and her friends and family, and is forced to live in a dirty sharehouse with four guys as she tries to find her own way in the world. Transpose it to London, and you have this story. Of course Sophie has to choose between two of the guys she lives with - shy, nerdy Eck or hot Cal who sleeps around - and of course she falls into a job that allows her to develop of childhood love of photography while meeting many odd but fabulous people. It's a quick, sweet, untaxing read, fairly typical in the romance department, and utterly unbelievable.
47. King Dork - Frank Portman
I had fun reading this, but I can barely remember it now, only a month out. Tom hates Catcher in the Rye but when he digs up his dead father's copy for school he discovers a mysterious code that he hopes will lead to the truth about his father's death. Add in a search for a myserious girl from a party, his best (and only) friend acting weird, trouble in the social heirarchy at school, and a sadistic PE teacher, and you have a confusing book that can't quite decide whether it wants to focus on the mystery, humour or coming-of-age elements, and doesn't satisfy on any of those three levels in the end. The pop cultural references in Tom and Sam's band names were fun though.
R Raincheck on Timbuktu - Kirsten Murphy
Reread of Murphy's first book, about a snarky teenager dealing with friendship and relationship problems at a private girl's school, which I strongly identified with since I read it first as a teenager dealing with friendship and boy problems at a private girl's school. :)
48. Nation - Terry Pratchett
For once I found I really had to push to get through a Pratchett. He writes all the characters with an eye to deflating idea of colonialism, and he writes it well, but I didn't really care for any of the characters and the relationships. Plus I almost kept calling Daphne 'Tiffany' because, well, she practically is the same girl (archetype), just in a different universe.
R Last Days of Summer - Steven Kluger
Reread from last year; still fresh and wonderful and funny and bittersweet. And now I get more of the baseball stuff!
49. Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
A return to form. Ostensibly about the reinstitution of football (soccer) in Ankh Morpork, it's also a great romp focussing more on the wizards, and the inner workings of the Unseen University. Okay, I have to admit that Glenda is, as Pratchett is wont to do, a rehash of another of his female archetypes (the old-before-her-time 'unattractive' female of great capacity a la Agnes) but I still really liked her; I liked seeing how she processed the changing personalities and times around her, her cleverness, and her capacity for kindness. And through Mr Nutt, Pratchett continues his theme of exploring the increasing 'multiculturalism' of Ankh Morpork and how attitudes are being changed towards once hated races/species. So it's one of his 'topical' books (as most of the latter ones are) but I still think the writing is as good as ever, and I was literally chortling out loud through the last third of the book as all the setup started paying off in intricate, wonderful ways.
50. Julie and Julia - Julie Powell
I liked this, I loved reading about the food and the food preparation. I liked less, in an embarrassment squick inducing way, the stories about her own life, her own fallibility, and those of the people around her. I know it's probably exaggerated for comedic and dramatic effect, but it doesn't make it any easier to read, in that queasy "these are real people and real hurts that she's using for her narrative means" kind of way.*
51. The New Centurions - Joseph Wambaugh
I'm on a real Southland kick at the moment, so in lieu of any new episodes (at all; I really hope that network change happens) I've been reading Wambaugh, whose books are kinda the inspiration for the series. This book follows three new LAPD recruits as they move from the academy to life on the beat, in the five years leading up to the LA riots of 1965. Wambaugh is a really good writer; he has a real knack for detailing police work with such in-character observations of race and behaviour, while maintaining clear, separate voices through different characters.
R Almost Like Being in Love - Steven Kluger
52. Over Tumbled Graves - Jess Walter
Walter has lovely writing, but I didn't find this to be a particularly outstanding mystery procedural. Everything progresses as can be expected. He takes the time to delve deeper into the lives and thoughts of all those involved - the police, the detectives, the hunter and the hunted - but I don't think that's particularly new to the genre anymore. I also didn't really warm to the characters.
53. The Lost Languages of Cranes - David Leavitt
I didn't like The Page Turner, so I was wary of this, one of his better known works. Philip Benjamin, young and in his first major relationship, is steeling himself up to come out to his middle-aged parents, Owen and Ruth. They themselves are being rocked by some destablising news - they will have to leave their New York home of over twenty years, and Ruth realises she doesn't know a think about her husband. Owen, meanwhile, is struggling with his secret even as he inches closer to admitting he is gay. It all sounds very melodramatic, but there's a spare elegance in Leavitt's writing that makes all three characters real and needy and human, and the relationships between them are touching. I felt very very bad for Ruth by the end of the book though; both Philip and Owen are given hopeful endings, which was still quite unusual at the time of its publication for gay characters, but only at her expense as a mother and wife, a woman whose whole life is upturned at the age of 52.
54. Evernight - Claudia Gray
littlerhymes pushed this at me as an antidote for Twilight, and I'm glad she did. Bianca, who has lived a sheltered life with her schoolteacher parents, is sent to a gothic boarding school where she feels like an outsider amongst the other beautiful, worldly students. She finds herself gravitating towards Lucas, a kid who seems like he should be one of those beautiful people, but is shunned by them. The book is a smart, readable take on the human-vampire romance that is self-aware enough to play with the power balance. I like the world-building too. If you love Twilight then give this a try; if you didn't like Twilight but like vampire stories give this a try too.
* I know that as a RPF writer this may seem like a hypocritical statement to make. I kind of feel like the difference is a) I am not writing a non-specific, mainstream audience, but a niche; b) I am not making any money out of these stories about real people; c) I do not have a close relationship with the people whose stories I am exploiting. Your lines may be different, and if so I respect that. You may also feel like my justification of RPF is really really weak, and I know I need to put more thought into a response. But I just know that I did wonder, at the end of the book, how her husband and family and best friends felt about the details of their private lives being part of a bestselling book.
recs in bold
anti-recs in italics
37. Sprout - Dale Peck
Narrated by Sprout Bradford, a smart-alec, smart-writing kid in a small town who can't help but stand out (drunk dad, green hair, gay) as he trains for a national essay writing competition that will give him a chance to get out of this small existence, that forces him to examine a few secrets he has been keeping. Sprout's voice is at first too knowing, peppered with pop culture references that ring false, but it settles down as Sprout starts to write more honestly about himself, and reveals himself to the reader little by little. It's bitingly funny, there's a bittersweet romance, a nebulous ending, and depite the fact it's yet another coming-of-age YA novel I *loved* it.
38. Halfway to Good - Kirsten Murphy
Luke is dealing with family troubles, year eleven, and his first relationship. Anna is dealing with family troubles, year eleven and her last relationship. One is a student, the other his teacher, and over the year Anna and Luke strike up a friendship that helps them get through their respective problems. I really like Kirsten Murphy's writing, how she makes her characters and their lives seem so real to me.
39. Pink - Lili Wilkinson
I found this, in contrast, unrealistic and broad-stroke in its portrayal of teenagers dealing with relationships, sexuality and peer pressure. Ava has been brought up by countercultural parents who encourage her relationship with the loledgy Chloe, and so her idea of rebellion is to ask to be transferred to a preppy private school (which is supposedly in Melbourne, but sound remarkably like a high school out of teen-movie-America) and transform herself into one of the perfect 'Pastels'. But in her new school she struggles between wanting to finally fit in with the crowd and hiding her sexuality, while being drawn to the outsider group of drama tech geeks.
The book tries very hard to confront some of the social norms usually taken for granted in YA books - there's one particular passage where Ava has an epiphany about white privilege that's nicely put - but overall it's a mess of ideologies masquerading behind a novel about some really annoying characters!
40. The Sweet Far Thing - Libba Bray
Finally finished the trilogy! Not a bad read overall, though a tad long as Bray drags out if and how Gemma will finally work out who is on her side, and how to restore power to the realms without being manipulated and/or killed by all the opposing sides. It's nice that Felicity and Ann are able, finally, to live the lives they want, and Gemma to some extent. I didn't find the thwarted romance between Karthik and Gemma particularly heartrending though, as Bray never put in much work to make that ring true (I was, however, both sad and happy that the book finally made explicit the relationship between Felicity and Pippa, even as we knew that it could never be).
41. Shakespeare - Bill Bryson
An easy read of a wide-ranging discussion of the controversies of discovering Shakespeare the man behind the writing. There is a lot of debunking of often accepted 'truths' that I found fascinating, and I often wished that Bryson would spend more a little depth delving into the research. There were good tangents on the background to the trials and tribulations of theatre in Elizabethan and Jamesian times. It doesn't, in the end, shed a great deal of light on Shakespeare, but I guess that's the point of the book!
42. The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
Lovely short stories of faerie and folk focussing on female protagonists (for most part). I love her writing style. And it made me determined to get through her more famous book one day (I know, you all love it, it's just so freaking dense).
43. Funny Boy - Shyam Selvadurai
Sad and elegant. Six linked stories out of Arjie's life from child to teen, documenting events that change his life, first on a personal level, and rippling out as he begins to understand life beyond realising his sexuality and to the growing unrest between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in his homeland of Sri Lanka.
44. Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) - Justina Chen Headley
Patty struggles as she tries to live her life as a normal American teen while dealing with the fact that she is half Asian and half Caucasian, her mother is really strict on the issue of boys, and she's being sent to a math camp for the summer. I really enjoyed this, despite some misgivings about how Chen Headley waxes lyrical about the beauty and intelligence of mixed-race children. But I recognised and laughed at and agreed with Patty's thoughts and frustrations about her Asian mother, and the competitive, stereotypical-but-true diasporic Asian community in a Western country. And it was just refreshing to read a YA bok with a half-Asian protagonist who strugged with the divide between finding and being herself, being true to her birth ethnicity, and fitting in with the culture she grows up in.
45. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
Junior, a really smart kid on a reservation, is encouraged to go to a school for white kids off his reservation in order to give him the chance to leave his underprivileged background behind. Sometimes Junior's voice seems too authoritorial, as Sherman uses him as a mouthpiece to tell this partly autobiographical story. But I was still moved by the story, by the many obstacles Junior has to overcome, by the tragedies he has already endured as so young an age.
46. Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend - Jenny Colgan
Eh. Imagine if, let's say Nikki Hilton, loses all her money and her friends and family, and is forced to live in a dirty sharehouse with four guys as she tries to find her own way in the world. Transpose it to London, and you have this story. Of course Sophie has to choose between two of the guys she lives with - shy, nerdy Eck or hot Cal who sleeps around - and of course she falls into a job that allows her to develop of childhood love of photography while meeting many odd but fabulous people. It's a quick, sweet, untaxing read, fairly typical in the romance department, and utterly unbelievable.
47. King Dork - Frank Portman
I had fun reading this, but I can barely remember it now, only a month out. Tom hates Catcher in the Rye but when he digs up his dead father's copy for school he discovers a mysterious code that he hopes will lead to the truth about his father's death. Add in a search for a myserious girl from a party, his best (and only) friend acting weird, trouble in the social heirarchy at school, and a sadistic PE teacher, and you have a confusing book that can't quite decide whether it wants to focus on the mystery, humour or coming-of-age elements, and doesn't satisfy on any of those three levels in the end. The pop cultural references in Tom and Sam's band names were fun though.
R Raincheck on Timbuktu - Kirsten Murphy
Reread of Murphy's first book, about a snarky teenager dealing with friendship and relationship problems at a private girl's school, which I strongly identified with since I read it first as a teenager dealing with friendship and boy problems at a private girl's school. :)
48. Nation - Terry Pratchett
For once I found I really had to push to get through a Pratchett. He writes all the characters with an eye to deflating idea of colonialism, and he writes it well, but I didn't really care for any of the characters and the relationships. Plus I almost kept calling Daphne 'Tiffany' because, well, she practically is the same girl (archetype), just in a different universe.
R Last Days of Summer - Steven Kluger
Reread from last year; still fresh and wonderful and funny and bittersweet. And now I get more of the baseball stuff!
49. Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
A return to form. Ostensibly about the reinstitution of football (soccer) in Ankh Morpork, it's also a great romp focussing more on the wizards, and the inner workings of the Unseen University. Okay, I have to admit that Glenda is, as Pratchett is wont to do, a rehash of another of his female archetypes (the old-before-her-time 'unattractive' female of great capacity a la Agnes) but I still really liked her; I liked seeing how she processed the changing personalities and times around her, her cleverness, and her capacity for kindness. And through Mr Nutt, Pratchett continues his theme of exploring the increasing 'multiculturalism' of Ankh Morpork and how attitudes are being changed towards once hated races/species. So it's one of his 'topical' books (as most of the latter ones are) but I still think the writing is as good as ever, and I was literally chortling out loud through the last third of the book as all the setup started paying off in intricate, wonderful ways.
50. Julie and Julia - Julie Powell
I liked this, I loved reading about the food and the food preparation. I liked less, in an embarrassment squick inducing way, the stories about her own life, her own fallibility, and those of the people around her. I know it's probably exaggerated for comedic and dramatic effect, but it doesn't make it any easier to read, in that queasy "these are real people and real hurts that she's using for her narrative means" kind of way.*
51. The New Centurions - Joseph Wambaugh
I'm on a real Southland kick at the moment, so in lieu of any new episodes (at all; I really hope that network change happens) I've been reading Wambaugh, whose books are kinda the inspiration for the series. This book follows three new LAPD recruits as they move from the academy to life on the beat, in the five years leading up to the LA riots of 1965. Wambaugh is a really good writer; he has a real knack for detailing police work with such in-character observations of race and behaviour, while maintaining clear, separate voices through different characters.
R Almost Like Being in Love - Steven Kluger
52. Over Tumbled Graves - Jess Walter
Walter has lovely writing, but I didn't find this to be a particularly outstanding mystery procedural. Everything progresses as can be expected. He takes the time to delve deeper into the lives and thoughts of all those involved - the police, the detectives, the hunter and the hunted - but I don't think that's particularly new to the genre anymore. I also didn't really warm to the characters.
53. The Lost Languages of Cranes - David Leavitt
I didn't like The Page Turner, so I was wary of this, one of his better known works. Philip Benjamin, young and in his first major relationship, is steeling himself up to come out to his middle-aged parents, Owen and Ruth. They themselves are being rocked by some destablising news - they will have to leave their New York home of over twenty years, and Ruth realises she doesn't know a think about her husband. Owen, meanwhile, is struggling with his secret even as he inches closer to admitting he is gay. It all sounds very melodramatic, but there's a spare elegance in Leavitt's writing that makes all three characters real and needy and human, and the relationships between them are touching. I felt very very bad for Ruth by the end of the book though; both Philip and Owen are given hopeful endings, which was still quite unusual at the time of its publication for gay characters, but only at her expense as a mother and wife, a woman whose whole life is upturned at the age of 52.
54. Evernight - Claudia Gray
littlerhymes pushed this at me as an antidote for Twilight, and I'm glad she did. Bianca, who has lived a sheltered life with her schoolteacher parents, is sent to a gothic boarding school where she feels like an outsider amongst the other beautiful, worldly students. She finds herself gravitating towards Lucas, a kid who seems like he should be one of those beautiful people, but is shunned by them. The book is a smart, readable take on the human-vampire romance that is self-aware enough to play with the power balance. I like the world-building too. If you love Twilight then give this a try; if you didn't like Twilight but like vampire stories give this a try too.
* I know that as a RPF writer this may seem like a hypocritical statement to make. I kind of feel like the difference is a) I am not writing a non-specific, mainstream audience, but a niche; b) I am not making any money out of these stories about real people; c) I do not have a close relationship with the people whose stories I am exploiting. Your lines may be different, and if so I respect that. You may also feel like my justification of RPF is really really weak, and I know I need to put more thought into a response. But I just know that I did wonder, at the end of the book, how her husband and family and best friends felt about the details of their private lives being part of a bestselling book.