Sweet Valley Confidential

Have you heard about this? I know I’ve talked about my undying love for Sweet Valley High before. Haven’t I? I talk about it a lot in life, so I assume I’ve mentioned it here. Anyway, for those of us who miss those perfect size six Wakefield twins and their eyes the colour of the Pacific ocean, there is Sweet Valley Confidential, a new book due out in 2010 wherein Francine Pascal (not a ghostwriter! the real thing!) returns to the Sweet Valley universe years later. The twins are now thirty years old, and (gasp!) not speaking to each other. I need to know why. I am very excited for this book to come out. Other important questions: Does Jessica still wear one item of purple clothing per day in order to comply with the rules of the Unicorns, Lila Fowler’s prestigious club? Does Bruce Patman still have 1Bruce1 license plates? Is Todd Wilkins still insufferably boring? What of the beach disco?

In a conversation about SVH recently, my boss told me her favourite book was one in which Bruce Patman is dating one very nice girl whom everyone loves, but then at a party flirts with another girl, prompting his goody-goody girlfriend to snort coke and die. I personally favour one in which a strange girl, Margo, comes to town, where she discovers that she just happens to look eerily like the Wakefield twins. At which point she decides the only logical thing to do is to murder Elizabeth and take over her life. Naturally. What’s your favourite?

Reading is Hard Sometimes

It's book awards season. Otherwise known in my brain as that time when I remember all the good books I'm not reading, panic slightly about how I will ever have time to read them all, remember that I don't have an unlimited book-buying budget, cry, and go home.

Not really, but it does always cause me some anxiety. I love books, but it's overwhelming sometimes how many of them there are. I had a lot of this type of anxiety in university, when it seemed absolutely essential to read every single classic, not to mention all the obscure essays/poems/novels that no one has heard of now but obviously changed forever the landscape of essay/poem/novel writing and because of which nothing will ever be the same. I eventually let this go, because it was either that or invent a time machine, and I'm pants at science. (I obviously got far enough into the British contemporary realm to learn the modern slang usage of the word pants.)

But, as some of you may know, I work in publishing. I'm pretty new at working in publishing, relatively speaking, and while I love my job I would eventually like to move into something different, and to do that I know that I'll need to be more up on the contemporary book scene that I am. So my anxiety about needing to read every book ever hasn't really gone away, it's just changed. Classics don't matter now; contemporary fiction does.

How do people do this? Libraries only go so far, and I never have the patience for them anyway. Plus, though I know award-winning books will probably be good, that doesn't mean they're always going to be my first choice. Do people in the industry just read enough reviews to sound like they know what they're talking about, or do they actually read everything relevant to them? I suspect the former.

Anyway, the point of this post is, I guess, to appeal to some rich book-buying patron. Anyone? Do you guys find yourselves wondering if you should be reading something, even if you don't particularly want to?

The Baby-Sitters Club

With nineties nostalgia in full swing, I feel like every couple of months or so there is a new funny thing online about the favourite ghostwritten children's lit series du jour. Today it is The Baby-Sitters Club, or BSC for those in the know. The Huffington Post has put up this Where Are They Now? satire. Now, this might just be my leftover fondness for the series talking, but I didn't find it terribly funny. It's been done before (a search for it brings up more than one), but I still like being reminded of the series, so I thought it was worth posting.

When I was about 9, my best friend and I used to devour these books. I remember she had a drawer full of absolutely all of them, books I had never even SEEN, as my exposure was pretty limited to the local library, which was very, very tiny. Apparently her aunt worked for a bookstore or a publisher or something, and the result was that she had every BSC book in existence. I was already jealous of her tropical fish tank and how she had her own room when I had to share mine with my older sister, but this made me ridiculously jealous.

Looking back, I recognize how ridiculous these books are. I realized it to some extent even then, because I always skipped chapter two, knowing it contained all the same tired information about how Kristy's parents were divorced and Dawn was from California and Mary Ann was a loser, etc. Still, I loved those books. I really admired their business moxie, I guess.

That's a lie. What I admired was the drama. I was (and still, let's face it, am) a sucker for an overwrought, dramatic story line. My favourite character was Stacey, because she was from New York (glamorous!) and had diabetes (glamorous?). I still remember the book where she ate a candy bar in a flash of pique and went into a diabetic coma, during which the book flashed back to when she discovered she had diabetes. She was on a train to New York to visit her dad (her parents had just gotten divorced! The poor girl!) when she found herself having to pee all the time and also being unreasonably thirsty. I have no idea if these are real symptoms of diabetes, but for years I wondered excitedly every time I was thirsty or had to pee a lot if I had a dramatic, potentially terminal illness. I am not particularly proud of this. But there it is.

Um, you can all feel free to psychoanalyze 9-year-old Stephanie now. Current Stephanie can probably take it.

The Hunger Games

I mentioned in my last post that Patrick Ness had gotten me interested in Dystopian fiction. But after I devoured The Knife of Never Letting Go, I had a few weeks' wait ahead of me before The Ask and the Answer came out in paperback. Luckily, about the time I finished the first book, there was some general internet hubbub about a book called Mockingjay, the third in a series that had been hovering in the back of my mind since I first heard about it on the lovely Sarah Rees Brennan's journal. I decided that since all three books were out, it was about time I read it. The series is called The Hunger Games, after the title of the first book.

The Hunger Games is about a girl named Katniss Everdeen. Katniss lives in District 12, in a country called Panem. Every year, one girl and one boy from each of the twelve districts of Panem are chosen to fight in The Hunger Games, a fight to the death on national television.

Yep. Fight to the death. You see why I was interested.

Again this is a book that is hard to explain without spoiling, but I think it's safe to say that Katniss is a participant. What follows is a story very smoothly written (it's in present tense and I didn't even notice until I was a third of the way through the book, which is extremely impressive) that kept me constantly guessing and never took the easy way out of anything. The critique of reality television is extraordinarily interesting; the games are fought by district children for the entertainment of the people of the capitol, whose lives of extreme leisure juxtapose nicely with the lean, impoverished lifestyle of the districts. Though we watch reality television knowing that the contestants are there voluntarily, there is still a sense that their actions are for our benefit. While they're on television, they essentially exist for our entertainment. When we no longer find them interesting, their television careers die. Taking it a bit further, to a fight to the death, isn't as much a stretch as it seems at first. Rich from fourfour has a more in-depth (and much better) analysis of the reality television theme here.

This book contained many moments when I wanted the characters to do one thing, and then was extremely relieved when they did something else. Because what I want for the characters isn't always (actually, is probably almost never) what is best for the story. Suzanne Collins doesn't shy away from putting her characters in difficult situations, and she certainly has them make a bad decision or two. Katniss is very compelling despite being extremely flawed (the best description I've heard so far called her a "loveable asshole"), and it's interesting to watch her try to make the best decision when there isn't really a right decision available.

I'm afraid to say much more in case any of you decide to read it (which I obviously think you should). So: fast-paced? Yes. Well written? Absolutely. Did I cry? Maybe a little. So you should read it.

p.s. It is worth noting that I cry very easily when bad things happen in books. So take that one with a grain of salt.

Ramble ramble books life ramble

Hello, everyone! Are all three of you here? Good. I have been away awhile. But don't worry, though I haven't been writing, I have certainly been reading. Clearly I like books, so this should be obvious, but I sometimes go through periods of literary apathy. I credit this largely to my job, which includes reading copious amounts of fiction all day (Listen, I'm almost done crying you this river, so just be patient), but I will admit that sometimes I just stop reading and don't really know why. Anyway, I stopped reading for fun sometime in the bustle of buying a home (!) and packing and moving and all this time also working and generally panicking about life. I needed a kick start, and I decided to go on vacation to visit my friend Chloë (visit her wonderful blog, to which I too-seldom contribute) in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Vacations are good for sightseeing but I also wanted to use the downtime, what seemed like my first in weeks, to read. But what book? I was coincidentally, what with the moving and the vacation and all, having some anxiety about money, so I decided to read one of the many books I have sitting on my bookshelf, living the sad lives of unread and unappreciated literary genius. The book I chose was Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly, and I could not recommend it highly enough. It is not for young adults specifically; you would find it in the fiction section of your local bookstore, but I feel it is a book that teenagers would appreciate just as well as "adults." It is also a perfect summer read, and not in that way that people say where they mean you don't have to use your brain at all. This book is a hilarious look at an extremely dysfunctional family, written in beautifully poetic language with incredible insight. (That was my extremely poor attempt at a real book review/blurb, I guess. Needs some work. Too many adjectives?) Needless to say, I liked it. It got me excited about reading again, and I moved on to other books with enthusiasm, including, and here's where this post becomes at least semi-relevant to the blog's subject matter, some YA!

By this point my anxiety about money was gone, which was good because I had already read all the YA books on my shelf and therefore needed to buy more. But which ones? A friend had brought my attention to the twitter account of a wonderful local bookstore, Nicholas Hoare (@NicholasHoareTO). The person running this account (I am still not sure which cute bookstore guy this is, though I have speculated on it every time I've been to the store since; if it's the woman who works there I will be extremely disappointed) was doing an amazing thing. People wrote him with the names of three books they liked, and he would recommend a new book that he thought they would like. So cool, right? I jumped right in, made it in just under the wire with my books. One was The Great Gatsby, one was Apologize, Apologize! and one was Paper Towns by John Green, who is, incidentally, a person I like to think of as my nerd author husband. I should write a whole post on him. It would be no problem for me, let me tell you. TO THE POINT. NicholasHoareTO recommended a book called The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

Well. This book is hard to review because it is the kind of book that is very easy to spoil. The Guardian review manages it in much better words than I ever could. But I love it. A lot. Many people who don't read YA fiction dismiss the genre as kid-lit (why this is a derogatory term I don't know, but it is often used as such), assuming that because a book is aimed at a younger audience it is aimed at a dumber audience. I have discussed this before, and it just baffles me that people think this because it is so WRONG. This book, which takes place in a dystopian future, takes on big issues—feminist issues, globalization-related issues, postcolonial issues, climate change issues—while using language in a racing, creative way that makes you almost physically incapable of putting the book down. It's funny when it wants to be funny, serious when it needs to be serious, and extremely heartbreaking when it wants you to cry. Go read it, and when you're done go read the second in the series (called Chaos Walking). But don't tell me about it, because I'm only halfway through as of this writing.

This book was so good it inspired me to continue on the dystopian fiction path with The Hunger Games, a little blockbuster series you may have heard of. More to come on that next time. For now, I'm going to go read some more.

I'm Not Dead

It's just been pretty busy around here. Since I last posted I bought a condo and now I am preparing for a move. I hate moving. Anyway, all my books are packed away in boxes and therefore I am unable to thrill y'all with the prospect of literary adventures. Right now all I can really offer is a quick do and don't of hot weather. Do: drink cucumber-lemon water. Yum. Don't: eat chips and salsa. Self-explanatory.

It's looking like the next book I'll be reading is Anne of Green Gables. I have, shockingly, never read this. But I'm taking a trip to Halifax soon and am hoping to go to P.E.I., and I hear they don't let you in if you haven't read the full works of L.M. Montgomery. So I'll work on it, and keep you posted.

Until then, enjoy the summer!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory post-read

Before we begin, let me just make it clear that I strongly dislike when educated people decide to impose critical interpretations on something that I believe should not be altered. Maybe I just want to remain ignorant in my original readings of a text, but that’s just the way I feel. (A perfect example of this: I once read a poem in which Jughead angstily lamented his unrequited love for Archie. NO. Just no.)

Having said that, I am finding it really difficult not to do a post-colonial reading of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I mean, come on! Willy Wonka “rescuing” the Oompa-Loompas from an “uncivilized” existence of living in trees and eating…well, eating green caterpillars, which they admitted themselves were disgusting. So maybe, in that respect, they’re better off in the chocolate factory. Anyway, the point is that there are a LOT of things in this book that make an adult reader think twice.

That is, of course, the whole point. This book is aimed at a younger audience than any of the others I’ve covered so far. (The inscription in this particular used copy, for example, says “For David Freeman, Happy birthday #8, Love, Aunt Wendy and Uncle Ted.”) It’s not for me now, it was for me when I was eight, or nine, or ten. I remember loving, and probably not thinking twice about, many of the plot points that I got stuck on this time around.

Willy Wonka is delightfully insane, and one of the best recurring gags is the way the children frequently question him, at which point he claims to be unable to hear them or not to have time. This highlights the way kids in children’s literature are often smarter than adults, even in this book, where most of the kids are quite stupid. Dahl walks the fine line between blaming parents for children’s bad behavior and making kids take responsibility for their actions. In the end, Charlie proves himself to be the smartest of all and is rewarded with a chocolate factory for his efforts.

I am sure there is more to say, but it’s been a long day and I’m sleepy. So I’ll leave you with this: this book is almost but not quite as great now as it was when I was younger. Sometimes your reading skills don’t improve with age.