Posts Tagged Books

Image by Pesky Library via Flickr

I was reading an article over at the Saucy Scrivener about being treated as creepy  for reading young-adult fiction.  It’s not something I’ve ever encountered personally, though I am well familiar with a similar sensation from being the only girl standing in the comic book/sci-fi/gaming section of a bookstore or library.

People do tend to discount young-adult fiction for the same reason that they shove to the side any other kind of genre fiction. The accepted thought is that YA fiction is “easier” and “less complex” than adult literary fiction.

I have a great love of literary fiction. I have also, however, long been a crusader for genre fiction. True, the vast majority of genre fiction, no matter what genre it is in, is formulaic and trite. But there are those rare gems among genre fiction and young adult fiction that fully deserve praise based on their literary merit.  Unfortunately, many of them will always be looked down upon for being “just” genre fiction or for having a broad popular appeal.

While I routinely and happily join in the horror that such a horribly written book as Twilight was ever published, I have devoured and loved other books that were classified as “Young Adult”, “Teen”, and even “Children’s” books.  The language might be simpler, the text more straightforward, but complexity of character is what drives the best of these novels, and the best of them absolutely deserve any literary awards or “adult” praise they might receive.

The best of these books have characters with depth and dimension. The characters grow, they learn, they change, and they come alive in the mind of the reader and stay with them long after the book is put away.  Almost all but the most prurient and romance-driven of these books have something to teach their audience, and manage to do so without being didactic.  The very best of these novels? They manage to break away from formulas and tell their story in a wholly original way.

Making a story easier to read does not rid it of any merit, and many of these books are only called “Young Adult” as a marketing gimmick by the publishers. The stories contained within come without age restrictions.

Related articles

• The Future’s Not Bright… (tor.com)
• Soap box: I see a difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. (jillianisreading.wordpress.com)
• Spring 2011 Fiction Reading List – Young Adult eBooks Will Save Science Fiction (hanselman.com)

We have a black president. People like to talk about us living in a post-race society (of course we don’t…but some like to say so).  Generally, being overtly and obviously racist is Not A Done Thing. Not if you, you know, want to stay in business.

Except, apparently, in the publishing industry. Can you tell me why this keeps happening?

I’ve had this book Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon on my to-read list for a while after seeing a lot of good reviews of it and all of the awards it’s won.  It is set in what is a historically accurate pre-China. The main character is Asian.

← This is the original cover.  It’s beautiful and accurate to the book and the character.

But apparently, some book buyers in charge of acquiring books for the major chain stores insist that this cover won’t sell. They insist this often before the book ever makes it to the bookstore. Before anyone who goes into the bookstore to buy books ever has a chance to buy the book with its original multicultural cover.

The bookcover gets redesigned so it will “sell better”. Here’s the new version →

Hmm. This is a book set in historical Asia, pre-China. Why does the character appear to be wearing modern clothes? And is she Asian? You can’t really tell. She rather looks like a modern goth girl ready to go clubbing. Is this Yet Another Vampire Novel? No? Then why?

They wanted to make her look more white. It’s even more obvious on the cover for the sequel to Silver Phoenix. The model is very clearly white. There is nothing to indicate that the story is set in Asia or that the character is Asian.

If there is anything whatsoever to indicate the plot or even the feel of these novels anywhere on these new covers, I can’t find it.

If there is a picture of a character on the front of a book, I want it to reflect the character that I am reading about within the pages of that book. I want it to reflect that character’s ethnicity and beauty, regardless of whether that beauty is white.

If the character is not white, I definitely don’t want to see a white girl on the cover. This has happened again and again, and is specifically rampant in YA novels.

Why does this keep happening? When will the publishers get a fucking clue and realize that people want their literature to be just as multicolored and diverse as the world is around them?

There’s only one way to combat this sort of thing. Let the publishers know that this is absolutely unacceptable.  In this case, the publisher is Harper Collins, but they are hardly the only ones guilty. Bloomsbury has had a particular habit of doing this sort of thing. Contact them and tell them to make their covers reflect the story inside, instead of turning every character everywhere white.

But don’t stop buying the books. To do so only punishes the author and reinforces the idea that diversity in books does not sell. It cheats the author out of the royalties for what may be a very good book, regardless of what the publishers decide to put on the cover.

I got my nook this weekend, from the lovely BF (A Christmas gift that got delayed by lack of availability from B&N) and have been playing about with it here and there.

My initial first impression is good, even once I got over the requisite geek-girl squeeing over a new gadget. The interface is incredibly intuitive and had no learning curve whatsoever.  In fact, while opening the package it came in required instructions (I kid you not. And they were very necessary.), the only instruction manual you get for the actual device is in its own library, and virtually unnecessary.

It came pre-loaded with three classics (Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, and Little Women) – the inclusion of Pride and Prejudice admittedly won some points with me, as that’s one of my favorite books and likely one I’d have been buying if it hadn’t been there.  Both it and my first purchase via the nook interface, Coraline, look really spiffy rendered in the e-ink screen.

Connecting the nook to my B&N account, purchasing books from the store, etc. was handled admirably fast by the included (and free) AT&T wireless connection, and it seems that the interface lag that I’ve seen folks complain about has been dealt with.  While the AT&T doesn’t pick up at my house (nothing picks up at my house, no matter what service provider. I live in the boonies), it picks up everywhere else I go, and adding WiFi hotspots for my local library and office was simple enough.

My main reason for choosing the nook over the Kindle was because the nook did not use a proprietary e-book format, and allowed side-loading of non-B&N purchased e-books and documents.  Of course, here you have the issue of loading items that have not been specifically formatted for the nook, but the books I’ve loaded onto it in epub format do well. Anything in pdf format, of course, displays as an image and can get cut off. My local library offers e-books in epub format, so I haven’t had any problems with the few I’ve tried out.

I’m very pleased. This is by no means a substitute for actual physical books, I’m looking at it as more of a supplement to my book addiction  . . . and perhaps a way of ensuring that I don’t end up completely buried in books at some point. (This weekend, I pulled a mountain of books out of my car that, once catalogued and sorted, came out to a total of 197 books . . . BF says I should get better gas mileage.) Very likely, the nook will replace only my paperback purchases – the books that I really care about having for posterity, to read again and again and again, I’ll still be buying in hardcover.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Barnes & Noble nook is officially sold out (crunchgear.com)
• Sara Edmonds | The World Of E-readers (freshfiction.com)
• Kindle Vs Nook: My Experience (evilgeniuschronicles.org)
• Barnes and Noble Announces “World’s Largest eBookstore”, Upcoming eReader [Ebooks] (gizmodo.com)

The newly named Ambassador for Young People’s Literature is none other than Katherine Paterson, one of my favorite writers and a long-time crusader for children’s literacy and encouraging reading.  She wrote two of my favorite and often reread books during my childhood (Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved) and has always been an advocate for children’s lit and libraries.

It’s so important these days to have books out there that kids want to read, rather than having to be forced to read for school assignments. I was never without some book or another as a child (even developing the habit of trailing along behind my mom at the grocery, walking and reading, until I’d bump into her when she stopped).  Being a devoted reader as a child only developed into becoming a rather obsessive bibliophile as an adult.  The best books are those that I can read repeatedly, until the bindings are almost falling apart and the words are so much a part of me that I barely require the book to remember them at all.

People in general are reading less and less. Is it any wonder that children spend too much time in front of various screens rather than reading if their parents do the same?  The best way for any child to learn written language skills is through the application of a great deal of reading – without it, we can’t be surprised if in the future we find an entire generation of children who are convinced that “please” is spelled “plz” and that commas are entirely unnecessary decorations.

I am glad that we have someone named as Ambassador who understands all of this and understands that the only way to get kids to read is to offer books that are just as entertaining, or even more entertaining, than anything they can find anywhere else.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Katherine Paterson Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (prweb.com)
• Paterson Named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (omnivoracious.com)
• New Envoy’s Old Advice for Children: Read More (nytimes.com)
• Writer seeks to inspire kids to read (timesunion.com)

I read a lot. At any given time, I might be reading several books at once, and I average finishing somewhere around three books a week.  And since it seems to be time for such things, I decided I’d give a little list of the favorite books I read this year.

These books may not have been published this year. They might’ve been republished in a new edition, or won some awards that brought them to my attention, or they might’ve just been sitting on my waiting-to-read stack for a while, but each of these I read for the first time this year, and would recommend to anyone.

1. Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
   Winner of the Newberry and countless other awards and medals this year, and of course written by my favorite contemporary author, this is one of the best examples of what makes Neil Gaiman so great. His books may exist in the realm of the fantastic, but they are a prime example of just how much truth can exist in fiction.
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
   This is available on Doctorow’s website as a CC licensed e-book, for those with empty pockets, and it’s definitely worth the read, and the purchase. Cory Doctorow is one of the best emerging authors in the sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction genres. There’s nothing pulp about any of his work, and Little Brother, written for an adolescent audience, is just as pointed in its commentary as any of his others.
3. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
   This is written by the same woman who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, which I have not read.  This book is about the “life” of a young woman buried in Highgate Cemetary in London during the Victorian Era. (There did seem to be a lot of good ghost books lately…) Obsession is the major theme of the book, with each character seeming to have his or her own version of it, from obsessive love to obsessive hate and everything in between.
4. Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman, art by Andy Kubert (Pencil), and Scott Williams (Ink)
   As usual, my favorite graphic novel of the year was written by Neil Gaiman,  though this is a departure from my usual Sandman love. I’m usually a Marvel fan, when it comes to comics, but this gorgeous hardcover edition of Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? was too beautiful to bypass, and proved to have a wonderful tale within. It answers the question of  what happens to the world, when a bat dies.
5. Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon and Brett Matthews, Art by Will Conrad, Ink by Jo Chen
   It’s unusual for me to have two graphic novels on my list, but these two were awesome enough for it. Of course, I’m a rather fervent Browncoat, but even putting fan-bias aside, this is an excellent comic.  Perhaps, with the television executives unwilling to give Joss Whedon the free reign he needs to produce truly great material, comics will provide a place for us to find the great writing that we all love him for.