How to fix BBYA

Liz Burns and Marc Aronson have been keeping an eye on the Best Books for Young Adults drama. That list is going to become strictly YA fiction; the Alex Awards (adult books of potential interest and value to teens) and) list will get bigger, thus picking up the adult book slack; and the new YALSA nonfiction award will publicize its list of nominations, thus theoretically increasing the visibility of nonfiction.

The reason given for the change is that too many books get nominated for BBYA and committee members feel overburdened by the reading. But if I have this right, only one committee member (or YALSA member) needs to nominate a book to get it onto that big list. When I was on BBYA back in dinosaur times, this nomination process produced some true stinkers, books that were only nominated because someone felt bad about not doing something for a book he or she got free in the mail. (Let's hope the nonfiction award contenders are going to be nominated with a bit more rigor if they are going to be publicized as recommended books.) Why not simply increase the number of nominations needed to, say, three? A book that has only one nomination for a choice made by a committee of fifteen is not going to make the list, so why waste everyone's time?

I also worry that the decision is shortsighted. The money in children's publishing right now is in YA fiction, aided by a now-passing boom in the teen population and an adult crossover readership, which will also pass once adult publishing figures out how to make even more money from these readers. At its best, the BBYA list displays the intersection at which YA librarianship is supposed to live: fiction and nonfiction, adult and juvenile, words and pictures (graphic novels are also banished from the new list and relegated to their own.) I think what the new system gives us is a bunch of bitty lists whose individual and collective power will be considerably diminished. It's similar to what happens when you have give out too many awards--whoops, that's another post.

Jacob's Java?

This past Sunday, Debbie Reese's blog featured her friend and colleague Jean Mendoza's trip to Forks and La Push. With photos! The one thing I like about those books is the weather; Jean Reports that no Cullens were seen on her trip, probably due to the abundant sunshine.

Paging the Ambassador . . .

The most interesting statistic of this teen reading survey concerns who responded to it: "while we purposely marketed the survey to attract male readers, females are the vast majority (96%) of responders."

It would be really good to know if book reading breaks down in similarly dramatic proportions. We know that girls and women read more books than do boys and men, but how much eek! many more?

Reading aloud and alone

Twitter is atwitter with responses to Richard Peck's remark in Notes that

"over and over [kids are]telling me that the books I wrote for them to read are being read to them by their teachers. And hearing a story read doesn’t seem to expand their vocabularies. If a teacher is going to take limited classroom time in reading aloud (and even giving away the ending), the least she could do is hand out a list of vocabulary from the reading to be looked up and learned."

While I think Peck was complaining about classrooms where kids' only exposure to trade books was hearing them read aloud, some teachers have articulated thoughtful responses, among them Monica Edinger and Sarah, who blogs at The Reading Zone.

I'm just grateful that Peck is still doing so well in his dual roles, as a novelist both respected by critics and enjoyed by kids, and a provocative voice in the shaping of young people's literature and its importance for readers. Thirty-five years ago, in American Libraries, he wrote one of the most cogent responses I've seen to Cormier's newly published The Chocolate War. And, with the Grandma Dowdel books, I'm loving his renaissance of books for younger readers--remember Blossom Culp?

Also, I predict that this Twitter tempest will seem but teacup-sized once the p.c. police get wind of Mrs. Dowdel's charade, in A Season of Gifts, with the bones of the alleged Indian princess. Pass the popcorn.

It's Not How Long You Make It, Is It?

A tangential question that came up when we were discussing digital review copies made me pull out my calculator. How much longer are books getting?

I compared fiction for ages 12 and up reviewed in the Magazine in the September issues of 2009, 1999, 1989 and 1979 (October issue; we were on a different schedule then).

Average number of pages in books for teens reviewed in 1979: 151
1989: 157
1999: 233
2009: 337

Now, part of this is the current preponderance of fantasy, which has always tended to run longer--the longest book reviewed in the '79 issue was Robert Westall's (fabulous) Devil on the Road, at 245pp. But when I took fantasy and sf out of the 2009 sample, I still came up with 280 pp. average for realistic YA fiction, almost twice as long as it was thirty years ago.

The success of Harry Potter must take some of the heat for this; another factor could be that YA has gotten older: there is much more published for older high school students than there was even ten years ago. Plus, realistic YA seems more character-driven than it used to be in the old problem novel days, and while this has given the genre undeniable depths, it may also have encouraged a certain amount of yammering on. And people are also blaming the nexus of word-processing, larger lists, and smaller editorial staffs combining to mean less pruning. What else? I suppose we have to consider the possibility that the current crop of Horn Book editors and reviewers likes longer books, but surely you know us better than that.

Blast from the Past

Jen Robinson alerted me to the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for YA fiction, new to ALAN/NCTE but not to me. Years ago, Walden offered this award to YALSA, which turned it down because of her insistence that the winning book demonstrate "a positive approach to life." We (I was on the board then) didn't want to get into the position of deciding somebody else's road to happiness. That said, it's nice to see Walden get some recognition again--back in the 50's-60's she wrote several crypto-lesbionic sports novels notable for their fearless female main characters and basketball play-by-plays as exciting as anything penned by the boys.

Who's reading YA?

A tweet from Chair, Fireplace, etc. led me to this article questioning the link between the health of YA as a publishing category and the assumption that it means teen reading is flourishing. Every time I see The Book Thief on bestseller charts I wonder about this correlation, and I also think the question speaks to the thriving (thanks, all) conversation we've been having about blog reviewing and how it differs from print. Save for the odd review in VOYA, all major print reviews of YA are written by adults for an audience of other adults selecting books for teens. Blog reviewers include both teens and adults, and more often than not YA blog reviews don't speak from or to a gatekeeper perspective--the reviewer treats the book as one she has (or, more rarely, has not) enjoyed and recommends (or not) to those reading the blog, with no "for your kids" implied. This may be why meta-discussions of blog-reviewing get so heated: it's personal.

I don't wring my hands about adults reading YA as much as I used to, but before you go thinking I've become more generous of spirit take a look at the article linked above--maybe YA books are simply adult books with more appealing covers!

You want car crashes? Yes, you do.

Katie Roiphe's Wall Street Journal article about dark days in YA literature is deja vu all over again and again. We last had major hand-wringing over the alleged bleakness of YA about a decade ago with the publication of books such as Norma Fox Mazer's When She Was Good and Brock Cole's The Facts Speak for Themselves. Roiphe seems to have missed this moment; more eccentrically, when she does acknowledge that YA has always had its dark side, she reaches back to Catcher in the Rye and over to Little House on the Prairie for her examples. As Elise Howard points out in a comment on the WSJ site, what about such YA evergreens as Lisa, Bright and Dark and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden? It seems that Roiphe has missed the fairly essential point that YA was at first defined by its darkness; without any apparent irony she writes that "it may be no coincidence that the dominant ambiance of young-adult literature should be that of the car crash about to happen." The road of YA lit is littered with car crashes, a signal event of just about every problem novel published in the 1970s.

We should be used to journalists painting in broad strokes; the real gap in Roiphe's essay is its lack of any acknowledgment of the enduring popularity of books about problems, death, evil, etc. among everybody--look at any bestseller list. When Frances FitzGerald was writing a similarly themed piece for Harper's a few years ago, I kept hammering her to understand that teens--and kids--read for the same reasons adults do. As Thumb points out to his friend Susan, in Ken Roberts' excellent new Thumb and the Bad Guys, "without bad guys, Harry Potter books would just be stories about school."

Blurring boundaries

Kelly Herold (of Big A, Little a) has a new blog with a very promising premise. Crossover "focuses on a rare breed of book--the adult book teens love, the teen book adults appreciate, and (very, very occasionally) that Middle Grade book adults read. I'm interested in reviewing books that transcend these age boundaries and understanding why these books are different." She kicks things off with a discussion of Twilight. Don't forget the Twi-moms, Kelly!

My new crossover favorite is Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim's The Eternal Smile, a collection of three thematically linked graphic stories (First Second/Roaring Brook). Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Lauren Wohl of Roaring Brook about the challenge graphic fiction presents to our traditional concept of grade level. I thought Eternal Smile was YA, or YA enough, to review in the Horn Book but SLJ apparently booted it over to their big brother Library Journal. Conversely, I thought the same publisher's Laika was clearly adult, but Lauren told me it had won a bunch of children's/YA awards. Graphic novels are just one development that promises to keep the reviewer's lot lively; when I think about self-publishing, print-on-demand and e-publishing, I just want it to stay Memorial Day weekend (which I intend to spend reading the new John Sandford and Tom Rob Smith thrillers) for the rest of my life.

Craig Virden

I was sorry to hear of Craig Virden's death today. We first met when I was chair of the Margaret Edwards committee and he was Richard Peck's publisher at what is now Random House. Craig was more excited than winner Peck (who got the news while transiting the Panama Canal, so there's that). We weren't close friends but I always found Craig to be genuine and honest and contagiously engaged--enthusiastic. You can read his blog postings from the recent Bologna book fair to get a real sense of his voice.

X hits the spot

Reviewer X has a good discussion going on blog reviewing. I confess I'm dying to try Twitter if only to see just WHO is:

comparing their "hit lists" for authors they plan to ask for ARCs, trading e-mail addresses and results, complaining about whether they're getting an ARC, and actually encouraging each other to send nasty mail to authors they "know" have ARCs, and just won't give them to them. As if they're entitled! (And YES, I have the transcripts. I was appalled.)

I don't do book reviewing here, so I hesitate to join the discussion. Oh, not really. I'm surprised to find out that some book-bloggers request ARCs from authors. Way tacky. But then, it must work often enough if it's being debated as a practice. The forum also has me wondering about just what effect YA book-blogging was having on sales and readership: if the audience for review blogs is mainly other review blogs, and if they are all scrambling for ARCs, do any books get sold as a result? And: Are these bloggers largely adults reading for their own enjoyment and essentially simply swapping recommendations (and tips on how to score free books) among themselves? But then I saw that the very smart X was fifteen and the world brightened a little.

Whither YA?

Josie has a post up about adults buying young adult books for their own pleasure, citing The Book Thief, Hunger Games and the Stephenie Meyer books as particular favorites among customers at The Flying Pig. I was musing about this topic the other day with the YA class over at Simmons, as we asked the question "what makes a book YA?" The students had read Stephen Chbosky's Perks of Being a Wallflower for the session, and it's a book that rather famously was denied consideration for the Printz Award because it had not been published specifically as a YA book. (Reading it again for this class revealed to me that it has not exactly held up well, either.) When I look at books like Madapple, The Book Thief, Octavian Nothing, Tender Morsels--basically, literary YA fiction--I wonder what the gains and losses were in publishing them as YA. These are all books that undeniably have a YA audience, but without an adult audience as well they would be unviable. But had they been published as adult, would they have an audience at all?

In the end, and assuming we will see a shrinkage of publishers' lists due both to economics and in the way people parcel out their attention to the various recreational media, I wonder if YA books (the high-schoolish ones, anyway) will become subsumed again into general trade fiction, reaching a dual audience without laying claim to either one in particular.

Put It Where You Want It

Debra Lau Whelan's SLJ article on where librarians are shelving The Graveyard Book is classic shit-stirring. The article's lead asks a question ("Where does the book belong—in the children’s area or in the teen section?") and then goes on to give selective anecdotal evidence to conclude that any decision to put the book in YA consists of internal censorship. "And that's against professional ethics."

Nonsense. If you're classifying a book that you think appeals primarily to fifth-through-eighth graders (SLJ's estimation; Horn Book coded it as sixth-grade up), you are going to shelve it where you think most likely readers will most likely find it. Putting it in the YA section is not necessarily (or even probably) an act of censorship, if that's where you put all your other middle-schoolish books. (Hell, putting it in adult because that's where your Gaiman fans are is all right, too.) The fact that a book wins a Newbery Medal does not give it some kind of free pass into the children's room; remember, the Newbery goes through age fourteen, which, by the ALA definition, includes the first two years of the young adult age range. (The ALA turf war over the twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds is ever with us.) Different libraries serve different populations and make different decisions. I like Pat Scales' suggestion--multiple copies--but if you're only buying one, don't let SLJ's admonitory finger force you into putting the book where it doesn't belong.

I agree with Whelan that if you put The Graveyard Book in YA because you're trying to keep it out of younger readers' hands, then, sure, that's censorship. But the article--like her piece with Rick Margolis about the "controversy" inspired by Gaiman's fuck-filled Twittering--doesn't give us the whole picture, instead only citing evidence that supports a sensationalized angle. That ain't reporting.

Lurve is in the air

and Claire has been busily sighing and swooning on your behalf. See her latest booklist of love stories.

Speaking of Claire, she's been pushing me for years to read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I'm finally doing. And loving, not least for the following exchange, among the most indelible in American literature:

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together.

Got the Horse Right Here

What interests me most about the new William C. Morris award for new YA writers is the presentation of a shortlist from which the winner will be chosen. While standard procedure for some children's book awards in other countries and for our own National Book Award, this is a new twist for ALA.

I'm of two minds but mostly I like it. The announcement of contenders allows librarians--and kids--the chance to invest themselves in the process and thus the award. It also allows for two chances of outrage, joining "they didn't even nominate X" to "they picked Y?!," that second chance currently the only one available to Newbery, Printz, etc. watchers. Outrage is good for an award and has kept the Oscars going for decades. (Go see Slumdog Millionaire, by the way.)

On the other hand, I've talked with NBA finalists and winners who hate the whole horse race aspect of the thing, disliking being put into competition with their peers and, frequently, friends. The thinking seems to be that literature is meant for better things and finer feeling. We all know that the Oscars are essentially a sham, driven by politics and money as much as by sincere regard for a film's achievements, and are happy that, whatever their failings, the ALA book awards are largely free from such pressures. (Yup, they are.) The knowledge that one of a certain five books is going to win an award makes the whole publisher's-dinner drama (that's not a post in itself, it's a chapter. Of my memoir.) at ALA more suspect than usual, yes? Luckily, the stakes are small.

[Title of Post]

I review John Green's Paper Towns and Kevin Brooks's Black Rabbit Summer in the Times today. I had originally called the piece "Cherchez la Femme," as both books are mysteries about boys looking for missing girls, but the Times in their wisdom retitled it. I like mine better but titles have to be the editor's prerogative--witness my discussion years ago with the author who did not understand why I wouldn't let him call his article, "The Lead in My Pencil."

Read and Grow Thin

The New York Times is reporting that reading a novel about weight loss can help you lose weight. I'd love to believe this. But don't.

Help me out?

Martha and I are looking for illustrations for our forthcoming book for parents and want to include an iconic cover or illustration from a YA book that shows a teen reading. Any bells ringing? I was hopeful for The Book Thief but it's got dominoes.

Songs for the New Depression

Claire* reviews Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

*Making Martha and me feel old, for being the only people in the office who seemed to know Nick and Norah when they were Nick and Nora.

Palin/McCain for peace and quiet

Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go has won the Guardian's children's fiction prize. The book was published this month in the U.S. by Candlewick and will be reviewed in the November issue of the Horn Book Magazine. It's an SF novel about a society where people can hear each other think. Like that dude on Heroes!

Is Passion Old-Fashioned?

Over on the PUBYAC listserv, Jan Hanson of the Longview Public Library in Washington is looking for it: "A HS teacher called and is asking for ideas of books that illustrate a teen with passion, as in "a passion for dancing" or a "passion for football."

I love this query; it's requests like these that make us think about what books for kids do and don't do. Off the top of my head I think of that Joan Bauer book about a girl with a passion for shoe-selling, Hope Was Here Rules of the Road, and several of Chris Crutcher's early books feature teens with a passion for various sports. Oh, and that extremely high-minded but badly dated Madeleine L'Engle book about a fledgling actress, The Joys of Love. What else? Generalizing wildly, too often it seems that intense interest in something that isn't another person is viewed in YA books as dysfunctional or simply as a way to i. d. a character; i.e. "Jane loves music," but do we ever see her practice?

P.S. I put Harriet the Spy in the tags because she's the most passionate person I know in children's books, plus I've just started listening to Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost, an adult mystery that begins, anyway, with a very Harriet-like third-grader.

Yikes

Liz B. pointed me toward this PW essay on the thin line between reader's advisory work and putting limitations on library access for kids. It gives me the willies.

Is it right for me to discourage a kid’s reading choice? No. But is it right for me to give a kid a book that I think is probably not appropriate? At the risk of sounding censorship alarms, or being seen as an “uncool” librarian, my answer is again, No. I just don’t feel comfortable giving a sixth-grader one of these books—all popular titles that, in my library, are shelved “over there” in the teen area, through the door and around the corner from the children’s room.

I don't see how these positions (not discouraging a reading choice and not giving a kid an inappropriate book) are reconcilable. I recognize that the author recognizes that the question is a difficult one, and I agree that some books are too mature for some kids. But I think she errs on the side of caution where I would rather give the kid what she asks for (an eleven-year-old wanting Twilight is an example she cites), hold my breath, and hope for the best. What we don't know from the essay is how easily kids are allowed to dodge the librarian's best intentions entirely and simply go to the YA or adult books by themselves. That would have been my own strategy as a sixth-grader, particularly if I had had a previous encounter with a librarian that made me feel snooped upon or deflected. While I hate librarians who don't move out from behind the desk, there's a little too much leading patrons by the hand going on here.

What the essay does not take up--and what so few arguments for restricting access do--is what she thinks is going to happen if a child reads a book he or she "is not ready for." Really, what? Sexual thoughts, anxiety, nightmares? Maybe, but by no means necessarily--and, while I hate to quote Dick Cheney, so what? Kids have sexual thoughts, anxieties and nightmares anyway. Normal, healthy kids. And as Liz points out, what's more likely is that a kid simply will breeze past what she doesn't understand: "Deenie had masturbation? As a kid, I had no idea."

Branded

When Richard and I went to Paris a few years ago, I was intent upon visiting the House of Balmain, where I purchased a beautiful tie from their small men's collection. But I was less interested in shopping than I was in seeing the place where Valentine O'Neill began her career as a fashion designer. Valentine is fictional, a character in Judith Krantz's Scruples, a book that positively sizzles with brand-name-dropping, put there not as paid product placement but as verisimilitude of an especially glamorous kind.

So I'm a little impatient with the argument that we should be worried about brand names in YA fiction. I could certainly get into a fine frothing if the YA series actually whored themselves out to the highest brand-name bidder, which would be both sneaky and lazy: if it doesn't matter if your heroine wears Chanel or Balmain you haven't thought hard enough about her. But that's not what's happening, and I am more scandalized that the Times article pimped this possibility so heavily only to reveal that it had no basis in fact. Yet.

Catching Up

Cruising through Bloglines to see what I've been missing over the past ten days, I was stopped by Colleen's post about blog tours wherein the author ponies up cash to a third party who then alerts its squad of bloggers to review the author's new book. Holy crap. I share the outrage but feel that this concept is going to thrive just about well as the just-announced Progressive Book Club, which will fail not because America has been taken over by benighted republicans but because book-of-the-month-type book clubs are an anachronism. The blog-squad concept will fail because buzz-generating reviewers won't join in and will make mock of those who do. Jeanne duPrau, pull out now.

Then there's Frank Cottrell Boyce's comments about YA publishing, but I think the worthy arguments advanced against them are missing the funnier semi-scandal of one Guardian children's fiction award longlister (Boyce) queering (albeit probably obliviously) the chances of another (Patrick Ness) by saying his really isn't a juvenile book at all!

New Podcast

In our latest podcast, Martha Parravano talks to Catherine Gilbert Murdock about Princess Ben (Houghton), a slyly subversive--and satisfyingly romantic--fantasy that is receiving a starred review in the upcoming May/June issue of the Horn Book.

It's a Mystery

Colleen Mondor wonders why there aren't more YA mysteries. And now, so do I. After reading her post, I did a quick search of hornbookguide.com, querying for mystery and detective stories for YA (grades 7 and up)published in 2007. I got twenty hits, but most were, as Colleen suggested, for either general realistic or fantasy fiction with a mystery element rather than some kind of straight-up detective procedural. Years ago I looked at teen reading-interest surveys which consistently showed that kids named "mysteries" as their favorite genre, but their definition of such was broad--Flowers in the Attic, for example. But it seems to me there have been better eras for teen mysteries as traditionally defined: writers such as Jay Bennett, Lois Duncan and Joan Lowery Nixon used to turn them out regularly. (That was, however, back when YA was mostly thought of as junior high.) I dunno--maybe teen mystery fans are so used to crossing over to adult (the way adult fantasy fans cross over to juvenile) that they fail to constitute an imperative market? Or are the exigencies of the murder mystery, particularly, and those of teen life too incompatible to seem credible? Great, now I'm picturing Encyclopedia Brown chasing Hannibal Lecter . . . .

Are you out there, Nancy Werlin? What do you think?

I Think She Might Have Liked Mine More

Horn Book reviewer Christine Heppermann heard a Who at the cineplex this weekend. I saw Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, which felt like a YA novel written by Robbe-Grillet, when in fact it was based on a YA novel written by Blake Nelson. It was good.

What are the odds?

The New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books have been announced; as commenter Ruth notes on a previous post, the gender score is eight to two. Elsewhere in the Times's special section on children's books I review Jaclyn Moriarty's The Spell Book of Listen Taylor (Levine/Scholastic).

I note with only fortuitous smugness that the last time I judged this list, in 2005, we selected five male and five female illustrators. But I didn't know this until now, as Henrike Wilson (winning for Brave Charlotte) and Alexis Deacon (for Jitterbug Jam) didn't come to the party.

Creative Writing Exercise

Try and rewrite this story, forwarded to me by Kitty and Zoe, as an episode in a YA novel by:

a) Jack Gantos
b) Cecily von Ziegesar
c)Chris Crutcher
d) Paula Fox

Compare and contrast. I thought of including Ron Koertge among the choices, but this scene already practically happens in his first novel Where the Kissing Never Stops.

Hitting Them over the Head

Child_Lit has been unusually lively the last couple of weeks, with discussions of The Dark is Rising, Love You Forever (again), gypsies, and gay-seeming children all perking along nicely, but what has intrigued me most is a thread inspired by a post from GraceAnne DeCandido, who has given me permission to reproduce it here:

Dear colleagues,
it is one of those teaching days that make one want to scream and
throw things (the Yankees loss last night did not help, but I
digress).

Several of my students (graduate students all) think that if they
buy a book or give a booktalk or promote a book to a teacher or a
class it means somehow that they condone and approve everything
that takes place in a book. They cannot, for example, buy or
promote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist because that means
they approve of the language (which is salty and true to life). One
student objected to the grammar and usage in Walter Dean
Myers' books because she felt it didn't model good and
appropriate speech.

This is of course all connected to the teaching book/didacticism
thread we have had. I am teaching a literature course to adult
people studying for the MLIS degree. I need to find ways of
addressing this issue, although I am puzzled so much by their
attitudes that I scarce know where to begin.

Well my dear GA, I think three things are going on here. First, either these students aren't readers or they've forgotten that kids read the same way grownups do: just as reading a Donna Leon mystery does not overwhelm me with the urge to push someone into the Grand Canal, reading Nick and Norah . . . isn't going to introduce the word fuck into a spoken vocabulary from which it was previously absent. So, I think we're talking about library school students who don't love reading, which makes me want to jump into the Grand Canal.

But here's the second thing, which is worse: humans over time have demonstrated an inordinate fondness for the ability to push around those of their kind who are smaller and weaker. And some people, especially people who don't like to read, use books as weapons in service to this objective. This goes for books that are either suppressed or required when the point of either action is to control what another person thinks or does.

The third thing, though, can give us all hope; namely, that these grad students are laughably deluded if they think any child really cares what the librarian thinks.

But I wonder if these students really are the grammatically correct Polly Puremouths they're presenting themselves as. Are they truly worried about modeling bad behavior, or are they just afraid to get in trouble with other adults? That fondness for picking on the vulnerable doesn't look so good when the vulnerable is you.

And then they were upon her, and with good reason, too.

Fuse8 posts a link to what she accurately characterized as another hand-wringing piece about allegedly depressing YA novels on reading lists, but I am even more depressed by the author (a professor of creative writing, no less) condemning some "young adult fiction", unnamed, where "a town holds a lottery. At first it seems like an innocent exercise, but the author slowly reveals that the winner of the lottery will be sacrificed."

We had joy, we had fun

Perhaps inspired by the Spring Awakening music (too rockeroo for the high-school me but I love it now), I was tempted by this top one hundred songs of your senior year meme, but had to swiftly back away when I saw what they were. I don't recognize half of them and won't own to remembering most of the others, but it did make me wonder if there was some kind of calculus of regret and denial for those of us who, as adults, make our livings in professions devoted to the young. Do we do it because we liked being kids? Or because we didn't, and are trying to patch that over? Does being embarrassed by the tastes of your younger self make you a better or worse librarian? If you still love "Dark Lady," are you hopeless? More or less so if you never did learn the words?

Adolescent upsets

In addition to the satisfying spectacle of Maria Sharapova being picked off by a younger (and quieter!) player, I was also treated this past weekend to a superb exposition of teen angst, in the unlikely Broadway musical Spring Awakening. Based on Frank Wedekind's 1891 German play, the show and catchy tunes are pure YA: love, sex, death, and grades. Go see it. Take the kids!

Maybe she's older than I thought

People's Leah Rozen on the new Nancy Drew movie: " . . . all that talk of Ned, roadsters and hunting for clues in abandoned mansions paled next to the thrill-filled young adult novels I was sneaking off my adolescent sister's bookshelf, like Johnny Tremain and Island of the Blue Dolphins."

Maybe they were on to something,

those YA writers
who made
spareness of line
look like
poetry.

The company Live Ink believes this in fact is a more efficient way to read prose. Look here to see what they've done with Moby-Dick.

And if you're not an English major?

The discussion about Shakespeare reminds me of something a friend of mine said she was going to do while taking some extended leave from employment: she was going to read Ulysses, because she thought it was something every educated person needs to have on their read-that list.

Maybe, if I'm on a very small, very deserted, Irish island, Ulysses might make its way on to my list--it's not that I'm planning not to read it, but the fact that I haven't doesn't make me feel incomplete. Time spent feeling guilty about the books you don't get to is time wasted not reading something else.

I wish (and maybe this could be my next job) high schools offered their seniors a class in Reading. Not literature (although I hasten to add that I think they should be studying that, too), but a class instead designed to demonstrate the breadth and methods of reading in one's life quite apart from the pursuit of educational degrees. The students would learn about the different genres of popular fiction, for example; cross gender boundaries by reading Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy; go on a field trip to a book store and library to learn how to browse. Slow readers could learn techniques for speeding up (if they so desired); grinds could be taught to relax; fluent readers could be challenged to stretch their preferences. Everybody would learn how to skim. Students could practice giving and receiving book recommendations. They could learn to give up on a book that isn't working for them and how to stick with something that might prove rewarding. You could survey magazines from Car & Driver to Granta; find out how to parse product manuals.

For me, gym class finally became almost bearable in twelfth-grade, when the emphasis shifted from team sports to what the teacher called "lifelong activities" like running, golf, and tennis. For all those people not going on for a B.A. in English, why can't we do the same for reading?

Cheap Thrills on the Moral High Ground

We were discussing Holocaust education on child_lit, and a member forwarded an outline of her temple's planned seventh-grade Holocaust unit, which included a showing of Schindler's List. The outline noted, parenthetically, that "sexual content will be edited out." I thought of that this weekend when Richard and I saw The Black Book, a racy thriller from the director of Basic Instinct about a Dutch Jewess who gets involved in the Resistance after she sees her family shot by Nazis. When the Resistance head insinuatingly asks our heroine how far she's prepared to go in pursuit of bringing down a powerful German commander, I fully expected her to answer "at least as far as Sharon Stone did," and sure enough, we see her bottle-blonding her pubes as well as her head. It's an awfully dumb (R and I are divided on whether this was intentional) movie, with improbable escapes, melodramatic music, and lots of shots of the heroine stealthily, perkily, cutting her eyes from side to side as she enters yet another forbidden room or darkened alley. Very Alias meets Perils of Pauline. And very teen-friendly with its surfeit of sex and flesh, furious brain-spattering gun battles and double-crossing action-packed plot--there's even a nod to teen movie classic Carrie in one of the heroine's more disgusting humiliations.

It's certainly not a learn-about-the-Holocaust movie in the way that Schindler's List was. But the flaw of that movie was the way it wore its virtue on its sleeve, and the way it seemed to applaud its viewers for watching it: I felt like I was being congratulated for being a Morally Serious Person Made Even Better for watching it. This heavy handedness is also what makes it a high-school required-viewing staple, because there's no chance kids will miss the message. Black Book offers the same message but, daringly or dumbly, packages it in an entertainment; Schindler's List feels more like going to church (irony acknowledged). Compare and contrast--there's a high school term paper I would have loved to write!

This time, it was a friend.

Editor Frances Foster called this morning to tell me that writer Janet McDonald died yesterday in Paris, her adopted home. I never met or even spoke with Janet, but my admiration for her books led to my interest in her writing something for the Horn Book, which led to one of the richest--and definitely the most riotous--files in my email archives. There was no joke she would dare not make, but unlike many funny people, she was just as appreciative of other's (mine, I mean) jokes as she was expert at making her own. After we had finished working on her Horn Book article, our correspondence continued, with sometimes a dozen emails in a day when I was allegedly working at home and she was up late in Paris, allegedly doing the same: "I need a new YA book idea and fast, now that I'm done with the one Frances was awaiting. Or how will I pay my rent? It's too hot to set up my Love Tent in the Bois de Boulogne next to the Brazilian trannies (plus, those gorgeous wenches would get much more traffic than me)." We talked gossip, politics, sex, aging, love troubles--books, rarely. In the past year, there were some breaks in our emails due to Janet's illness, which we both thought she'd beat--she told me about doing a victory dance with Kiley Minogue in the chemotherapy ward--but when I didn't hear from her for a good long time I knew it had come back. I'll really miss her.

Her books will remain a signal contribution to YA literature: smart, teen-intriguing tales set in the African American neighborhoods of the Bronx and Brooklyn, told by someone who really knew what she was talking about, and who knew that a situation was never enough; you need a story. And while Janet's books frequently deal in tough issues, plenty of her characters have a gift for backtalk that could have you, as Janet often said, "on tha flo'!" Her novel Off-Color will be published this November by Frances Foster Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kurt Vonnegut

has died, and Monica Edinger offers a brief tribute to his impact on her "arty and alienated" group of high school chums. I never "got" Vonnegut the way many of my friends did, but I can certainly appreciate the way he pushed at the boundaries of science fiction to make us rethink it and literature in general in more expansive terms.

I wrote an article for SLJ a hundred years ago about "cult novels," books that may or may not have had a wide audience but still seemed to speak to the kind of coteries Monica and I were both part of. They were books that made you and your friends feel like part of a special elect. Atlas Shrugged, Dune and The Lord of the Rings were big in that way; Monica also mentions Richard Brautigan, someone I remember Not Getting at all but I also knew he was Cool and therefore I should keep quiet. Who is speaking that way to teens today? Neil Gaiman is one I can think of, and I'm sure there is a whole canon of graphic novelists I just don't know. I could also see M.T. Anderson getting that kind of readership but wonder if being published as a YA writer hurts more than it helps. Part of the appeal of cult writers is that you discover them without the apparent aid of adults (but bless the librarians who put them in our way), and the fact that a YA novel says, de facto, this is for you, can work both for and against a book's appeal.

Flashcards, anyone?

Galleycat, home of the tall hotties, led me to a London Times story about ICUE, a U.K. company that offers electronic books for your cellphone (yes, yours, not mine). Apparently, one way to get around the small screen size is to use an option in the software that flashes one. word. at. a. time onto the screen. According to the Times:

Books can be read in four ways: as autocue-style text moving from right to left across the screen, a scrollable text block moving up and down, single words flashed up in quick succession, or a full page of text. “Teenagers prefer reading one word at a time, but most adults prefer the horizontal scrolling style,” [ICUE cofounder Jane] Tappuni said.

I suppose reading one-word-at-a-time is analogous to listening to an audiobook, but the thought gives me the jitters. Has anyone here tried it?

Where the world was as blue as an orange

If not the world, then the University of Illinois, where even the damned goldfish gracing the tank in the Illini Union come in the school colors. (As does this blog, I suddenly notice. It has to be the ugliest color combo I've ever seen, and now I know I'm going to see it everywhere.)

But last Friday the colors were accented with green, as the students celebrated Unofficial Saint Patrick's Day, wearing green hats and t-shirts and Mardi-Gras beads and getting drunk beginning at 7:30 AM when the bars opened. And this wasn't like skipping school and getting drunk; the whole idea was to get drunk and stay drunk during the whole day of classes. I saw one young woman getting arrested; a faculty member at the library school stumbled onto a passed-out student in the parking garage. And my speech entailed a bouncer at the door. My goodness--why couldn't they just get quietly stoned off their asses the way we did? (One of my college lit. professors, the late lamented Ellin Ringler, told us that was the best state in which to read The Waste Land.)

The speech went well, I thought, and you'll be able to decide for yourselves when it's published in the May issue of the Horn Book. I spoke (er, yammered) about the last forty years of YA literature and librarianship, starting with my own teen reading and ending with the Printz Award. I lunched with the youth services doctoral students and faculty from associated universities, spoke to a YA class, and got to spend a lot of time with my most esteemed friends and colleagues Betsy Hearne, Christine Jenkins, Deborah Stevenson and Boyd Rayward. (The first three you probably know from their publications in the Horn Book and elsewhere, the last is the world's leading expert on this guy.)

Blue and orange and green and vomit not withstanding, Illinois has one first-class library school. You should all go--and can, thanks to their LEEP program. I don't think there is any other school that has such an amazing confluence of faculty and resources, and such an array of interests and talents among its students.

A correction and a repeated complaint

Re the Printz Award: I posted a while back about how I thought American Born Chinese, published by First Second Books, was not exactly eligible for the award, since it did not seem to me to be expressly published for young adults, an explicit criterion. But I have since heard from the award Chair Cindy Dobrez, who explained to me all the evidence the committee took into account in deciding the book's eligibility. I'm convinced.

But while I'm again on the subject, let me whine just one more time about how wrongheaded this criterion is. By limiting the eligible pool to books designated by their publishers as being young adult books and specifically announcing that "adult books are not eligible," YALSA puts the job of determining what a young adult book is into the hands of publishers rather than those of librarians. It essentially limits eligibility to books published by juvenile publishing houses or divisions, as they are the only ones to give age designations to their books. It rewards a very specific (read: large) kind of trade publishing, as a small press does not have the kind of resources that would allow it to designate a book as young adult if it thought the book could reach an adult market as well.

What has always interested me about library work with young adults is the way it blends materials for children and those for adults in service to an audience poised between the two. But YALSA--which derives a lot more financial support from children's publishers than it does adult--has become too beholden to the juvenile end of things. The annual Best Books list became so disgracefully bereft of adult books that the organization had to add a whole new award program, the Alex Awards, to make up for it--rather than making Best Books the kind of "best of both worlds" list it should be. (It seems that whenever ALA's youth divisions are called out for overlooking one kind of book or another, the solution is found in creating yet another award.)

I think teens want to read adult books. Why don't we want to honor that?

If Anne Frank lived

I'm working this week on a speech about the shifting sands of YA literature (to be given at the Center for Children's Books on March 2, come on down) and the latest news about Anne Frank has me thinking about how central her diary has been to YA. Do you think we would have even had such a flourishing genre of Holocaust memoirs and novels had it not been for that book's impact? I wish someone more knowledgeable than I could tell us if, as I suspect, such books have a longer and richer history in YA and children's than they do in adult books. In this country, anyway--a colleague speculates that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas won more unreserved acclaim in the U.K. than it did here because our young readers expect more sophistication from books about the Holocaust.

The irony of the news of the Franks' attempt to emigrate to the U.S. is, of course, that if they had, there would be no Diary, and thus, no news.