Mango Shaped Space & other disjointed rambles
Mango Shaped Space is the most creative, well written, brilliant, touching, enthralling, and all other shades of awesome YA book I have read in a long time. There seems to have been, as a brilliant friend of mine put it., a "mehpedemic" of late in YA literature. A very few things on the shelves now catch my attention, and even fewer of those turn out to be worth the read. Everything decent I've read lately is older, a couple years removed.
Nothing is truly horrible, but nothing is great, either, with a few notable exceptions. I think the era of sweet-shy-thing -meets-big-scary-boy-and-falls-in-love is over, but publishing doesn't seem to have caught up to that yet. Post-apocalyptic I could go for, but there's not much of that published yet. We're just getting over the vampire craze and now it's faeries and zombies - which are basically the same thing as vampires, from a plot perspective. As a reader, this is incredibly frustrating. I'm bored. MG and Adult and even nonfiction business management (literally...) are more interesting. (Though Adult has it's own annoying cliches).
I've been too far out of the book-loop to know what kinds of things are being acquired these days, but I sure as hell hope publishers are getting sick of the distressing damsel too. Maybe everything on the shelves now is just backlog?
In other news, there are days when I really hate being young. The majority of the time, I don't want to grow up. But there are some perks I wouldn't mind.
Driving, for instance. I've spent the last.. oh, I dunno, three hours trying to coordinate rides to an event I'm going to. This process is made easier by some wonderful friends who have their licenses... but still. If I could drive, it would be a ten minute process that consisted only of who was going to pay for gas. Grr.
Also, I need to start writing again. My head is getting all cluttered, which usually means it needs some sort of outlet. Thus, writing. It's odd, I'm realizing I write less because I like to write and more because if I DIDN'T write, I'd be a few pieces short of a jigsaw puzzle...
Nothing is truly horrible, but nothing is great, either, with a few notable exceptions. I think the era of sweet-shy-thing -meets-big-scary-boy-and-falls-in-love is over, but publishing doesn't seem to have caught up to that yet. Post-apocalyptic I could go for, but there's not much of that published yet. We're just getting over the vampire craze and now it's faeries and zombies - which are basically the same thing as vampires, from a plot perspective. As a reader, this is incredibly frustrating. I'm bored. MG and Adult and even nonfiction business management (literally...) are more interesting. (Though Adult has it's own annoying cliches).
I've been too far out of the book-loop to know what kinds of things are being acquired these days, but I sure as hell hope publishers are getting sick of the distressing damsel too. Maybe everything on the shelves now is just backlog?
In other news, there are days when I really hate being young. The majority of the time, I don't want to grow up. But there are some perks I wouldn't mind.
Driving, for instance. I've spent the last.. oh, I dunno, three hours trying to coordinate rides to an event I'm going to. This process is made easier by some wonderful friends who have their licenses... but still. If I could drive, it would be a ten minute process that consisted only of who was going to pay for gas. Grr.
Also, I need to start writing again. My head is getting all cluttered, which usually means it needs some sort of outlet. Thus, writing. It's odd, I'm realizing I write less because I like to write and more because if I DIDN'T write, I'd be a few pieces short of a jigsaw puzzle...