Via Oz and Ends:
Scalzi discusses the state of YA fantasy and SF sales compared to adult. (Scalzi's got some good stuff this week!) Of particular note is that old refrain, often heard from authors and readers of adult SFF, that YA is an "undiscovered country"--when, as Scalzi points out, it's kinda that the adult SFF people just aren't in on the highly popular open secret that's selling far and above what any adult SFF bestseller is . . . .
So when I saw on Endicott Studio a link to Joseph Campbell's reading list for an Introduction to Mythology at Sarah Lawrence, it gave me a whoooole nother list of books I should look up someday. There are so few books on that list that I've read! (Some might be more outdated than others, but it's a good list.) The first one that I need to rectify is The Mabinogion, a gap in my education that I've regretted many times already.
Also in that page they link to Endicott's own favorite reading list, with more books I should read. And reread--some of those books from that class I need to read again.
*Editor of Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales.
At any rate, I believe I've said here before that a lot of my outside-of-work reading actually gets done via audiobook on my commute, because I don't have the luxury of public transportation to give me a spare half hour to hour every day.
Dairy Queen stood out to me because main character D.J. Schwenk could be living in my own hometown in Illinois (as it is, she's not far off, up in Wisconsin). Her school, her family, and pretty much everything about her story could have been something I experienced or knew someone experienced in my small farm town. I grew up on a farm and though I didn't play football, that feeling of responsibility for the family farm that a farm kid gets really resonated with me.
So go read the book, and notice the voice--she's got such a distinctive voice. Granted, it was filtered to me by the excellent narrator, but I think that the narrator had a lot of good writing to work with.
Notice the setting: it's my experience that contemporary realism doesn't shy away from rural settings (though I think Dairy Queen is unique in setting it in the upper Midwest--I can't think of a single book that's set in Iowa or Illinois farm country, though suggestions are welcome), but what about contemporary fantasy? Mostly, I see urban and suburban settings. There's a reason for this, of course--that's what writers tend to know, because that's where most of the general population lives. But I'd love to find that contemporary rural fantasy that breaks those boundaries, that can mesh small town contemporary life with a fantastic setting without relying too heavily on tropes popular in more medieval rural fantasy.
Can it be done? Has it been done? Recommendations, if so.
Having been to a number of shows in the last year where I've picked up ARCs that I haven't had a chance to read yet (yes, this includes books I picked up LAST YEAR), the 48 hour reading challenge issued by MotherReader is one that I think I'll take up after all. (I saw it when she first posted it and thought, "What a great idea! Too bad I don't have the time," but as it comes closer I am starting to think the pile of books is starting to teeter and I'd really like to at least read a couple of them. So perhaps I'll spend the weekend reading. If it's nice weather, I'll take the books to the park and read there.)
If your TBR pile is anything like mine, you're welcome to sign up and join too. I hear there's going to be prizes.
I'm home sick today, coughing up a lung, and being completely bored. There's a strange program on the arts channel right now of muddy wild horses, silent except for the classical music accompanying the footage. I don't recognize the composer, but it's a violin concerto. Now the horses are gone and I'm seeing terracing ala the Andes. Maybe this is the Andes. Except there's a lot of sandstone that makes me think of Utah. Except that it's too green for Utah--greenery growing on the sandstone. Well, I mean, too much greenery. Of course, I usually saw the Moab area in mid-summer, and who knows, this might be such a red rock desert in full spring.
"Scicilienne" and Ber... Ber-something by Fuare. They just put it up on the screen like a music video.
All that is to say: daytime TV when you're sick and a captive audience, not so interesting, except to tell yourself stories. I'll be less bored later when I pick back up the book I'm editing, Tiffany Trent's book two of Hallowmere, By Venom's Sweet Sting. But I've been too out of it up till about now to think about anything.
Huh. The Discovery channel has a program on about how erasers are made. Who knew? It's not the rubber of an eraser that allows it to erase, but the vegetable oil in the eraser--it allows the rubber to rub away, taking the pencil marks with it. Okay, you can learn a few things, too.
Anyway, I thought I'd join on the Shakespeare meme that
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
slaygroundfound at Miss Erin's.Strike = I've read the play
Bold = I've seen or been in the play on stage / I've seen the film
COMEDIES
As You Like It
Merry Wives of Windsor
HISTORIES
Cymbeline
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
King John
Pericles
Richard II
Richard III
TRAGEDIES
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Othello
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
Huh. I could have sworn I read a whole lot more, especially of the comedies, but most of it was during that 4th grade phase (I really did think that reading Shakespeare and the dictionary would make me the smartest kid in the world) in which I read and listened to on tape everything the library had, but didn't really understand or remember anything except the garden scene in Much Ado About Nothing. I loved that, everyone trying to fool the others and sneaking behind topiary.
But I don't like the Goodreads' "look what I'm reading" thing any more, being all text. Which is why I started coding my own, because it's prettier. But that also means it's more cumbersome.
Anybody on LJ have experience with something like these services that works on LJ?
So pop on over and take the quiz, whether you read the newspaper or not.
For me, I wish it gave you the choice for several options, rather than just one. I use blogs, personal recommendations, what jumps out at me on the shelves, reviews in journals such as SLJ, VOYA, or the Horn Book--all those except the newspaper review section. Hm...
I'm trying to pack for my trip and deciding that once again, I have no idea how to pack light. I have a choice between three different books for the flight, plus four movies (I take my laptop whenever I travel, might as well bring a movie). I of course must bring
melissawriting's lovely Wicked Lovely, which I've been working on since ALA Midwinter. I'm about 3/4 of the way through and must know how it ends! I only read it at night as I'm drifting off to sleep, because I've been both sick and busy, so it's taking me forever.I also have
metteharrison's The Princess and the Hound in ARC that I want to read, but haven't gotten to yet. She is a Utah author, so perhaps I should also take it in honor of my Utah trip. She's not going to be at LTUE (as far as I know, at least), but it's that whole connection thing. The other choice is a book called Nobody's Princess another ARC from Midwinter, that I picked up mostly for the cover--combine the title with the stance of the model on the cover and it just makes me giggle. It's about Greek gods, so I'm not so sure I'll be all that into it (just not my thing), but I might be pleasantly surprised. I was going to give it to zeliot if it didn't grab me, but sadly she won't be making it up this weekend after all. (I'll let you know what I think, though, and if it'd be up your alley, zeliot.)I know I won't get through all 3 books, but I might just finish Wicked Lovely and start another one. The movies, well, I might just bring them all. One, you never know when you might like a quiet movie alone, and two, you never know when you might need a great girls' night movie. I just got Bride and Prejudice for myself for Christmas, so that's my latest fun thing (and it brings up good memories, too--watched it the first time at Cascadiacon with zeliot and
raisinfish). My perennial favorite Frank Capra movie, You Can't Take It with You, is due for another watching (I think I've worn out My Favorite Wife, so it's out of the rotation for a while). And I just treated myself with a little babysitting money to National Treasure, which I don't care what anyone says, it's a great movie, and Goonies, which I've loved since the 5th grade at Brandy Wheeler's slumber party. The latter two I haven't opened yet, and I might just let them have their maiden voyages on this trip.And don't even get me started on the swag I'm bringing. I have to bring an extra suitcase every time I go to LTUE, between bringing friends swag with my product points and all the bookmarks, flyers, ARCs, and samples I bring for the con people. Thankfully, that means I get to leave the contents in Utah and fly back much lighter. Well, but this time I'm taking my Star Wars minis back with me. The product room was sold out, so I said I'd bring my full set (that I won for employee appreciation week) to get a chance to finally play it with someone. So let's hope I get the chance, or that's just one more thing I'll be carting around!
I'm still waiting, at nearly midnight, for my laundry to finish. Perhaps I should have thought of doing that yesterday, seeing as how the cab will be here to pick me up at 5:50 a.m. I hate early-morning flights. I'm a late-night packer. I have such a hard time making decisions, that I end up staying up entirely too late the night before, and finally end packing about 2 a.m. I leave the full suitcases right by the door, toiletries and all, because I'm so afraid of oversleeping that I take my shower the night before so all I have to do is jump up, dress, and run out the door if necessary.
literaticat, fusenumber8 (I think), etc.Aw man, I just copied something else onto the clipboard, and now I have to go back and find it again...
Ah yes! It was also fusenumber8. Here it is:
Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star [*] in front of the title, if you didn't, give it a minus [-]. Then, put the total number of books you've read in the subject line.
Only 19?? How in the world?
*The Chronicles of Prydain - Alexander, Lloyd
Carrie's War - Bawden, Nina
Death of a Ghost - Butler, Charles
Ender's Game - Card, Orson Scott
Summerland - Chabon, Michael
King of Shadows - Cooper, Susan
*The Dark is Rising sequence - Cooper, Susan
Stonestruck - Cresswell, Helen
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Dahl, Roald
Matilda - Dahl, Roald
Ingo - Dunmore, Helen
The Sea of Trolls - Farmer, Nancy
Madame Doubtfire - Fine, Anne
Corbenic - Fisher, Catherine
-Inkheart - Funke, Cornelia
The Thief Lord - Funke, Cornelia
The Owl Service - Garner, Alan
Happy Kid! - Gauthier, Gail
Stormbreaker - Horowitz, Anthony
Whale Rider - Ihimaera, Witi
Finn Family Moomintroll - Jansson, Tove
*Fire and Hemlock - Jones, Diana Wynne
The Phantom Tollbooth - Juster, Norton
The Sheep Pig - King Smith, Dick
Stig of the Dump - King, Clive
A Wizard of Earthsea - Le Guin, Ursula
*The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - Lewis, C S
The House at Norham Gardens - Lively, Penelope
Goodnight Mister Tom - Magorian, Michelle
The Changeover - Mahy, Margaret
The Stones are Hatching - McCaughrean, Geraldine
The White Darkness - McCaughrean, Geraldine
*Beauty - McKinley, Robin
*Sabriel - Nix, Garth
*The Borrowers - Norton, Mary
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH - O'Brien, Robert
Z for Zachariah - O'Brien, Robert
A Dog So Small - Pearce, Philippa
Life As We Knew It - Pfeffer, Susan Beth
A Hat Full of Sky - Pratchett, Terry
*His Dark Materials sequence - Pullman, Philip
How I Live Now - Rosoff, Meg
*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Rowling, J K
*Holes - Sachar, Louis
The Foreshadowing - Sedgwick, Marcus
Marianne Dreams - Storr, Catherine
When the Siren Wailed - Streatfield, Noel
The Bartimaeus Trilogy - Stroud, Jonathan
*The Hobbit - Tolkien, J R R
*Charlotte's Web - White, E B
Well, I've decided that this list is biased. I've read Margaret Mahy, but not the The Changover, for example. I keep meaning to read A Hat Full of Sky because I liked other Terry Pratchett so well (and because the man is hilarious in person, too--the best panel I ever saw at a WorldCon was Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett on a panel called "How do you know when you're dead?").
I also tend to be very loyal to authors I like. Love Diana Wynne Jones, for example--I've read most of her books. Same for Robin McKinley and Garth Nix. I own Elidor by Alan Garner and keep meaning to read it because the name of the city, Elidor, is the same name as one of the elves in a series I edit.
Only one choice for all five Dark is Rising books? :(
But the truth is I also have a to-be-read pile that's overwhelming. Perhaps I ought to make a meme of my own listing all the books I read in grad school. It makes me wonder, given the sheer number of children's books published every year and the varied tastes of all the children's lit people I know, how our own list of favorites would coincide with each other. Would any of us have what we would call a definitive canon of children's literature that would coincide in full with anyone else?
cedarlibrarian, for example, has a list of things like going to your library if only to see if they have candy this week, volunteering to run a teen book group, and several other great ideas for getting involved with local teens and helping them get excited about reading.Myself, I'm going to finally post part of my list of book recommendations. I still haven't gotten my LibraryThing going, so this list is incomplete (and often lacking in publication information, and I'm not going to bother with links, sorry), and I'm only going to post the YA recommendations, but it's something. If you haven't read these books, you should (sorry for the lack of pretty-ness for this list):
Historical Fiction
Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson—Newbery Medal—Louise is jealous of her twin sister, Caroline
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fairy tale retellings/Fantasy/Adventure/Science Fiction
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
Goose Girl, Shannon Hale—fun tale by a Newbery Honor author
Princess Academy, Shannon Hale—2005 Newbery Honor
The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley—Newbery Medal
Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure
Beast, Donna Jo Napoli
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Sabriel, Garth Nix
Lirael, Garth Nix
Abhorsen, Garth Nix
Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones—my favorite of DWJ’s books
Cart and Cwidder, book 1 of Dalemark Quartet, DWJ
Drowned Ammet, book 2 of Dalemark
The Spellcoats, book 3 of Dalemark
The Crown of Dalemark, book 4 of Dalemark
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
The Folk Keeper, Franny Billingsley
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L’Engle
Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (2002)
Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix—book 1 of the Shadow Children series
Running out of Time, Margaret Peterson Haddix
Turnabout, Margaret Peterson Haddix
Uglies, by Scott Westerfeld
Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld
Specials, by Scott Westerfeld
Midnighters Series—The Secret Hour, Touching Darkness, and Blue Noon, by Scott Westerfeld
Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbaleister
Realism
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon (Doubleday, 2003)
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow, 1993)
Seek, Paul Fleischman (Marcato/Cricket, 2001)
A Step from Heaven, An Na (Front Street, 2001)
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson (Farrar, 1999)
Cuba 15, Nancy Osa (Random, 2003)
The Gospel According to Larry, Janet Tashjian (Holt, 2001)
The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton (Viking, 1967)
The Pigman, Paul Zindel (Harper, 1968)
Zibby Oneal, In Summer Light
Brock Cole, The Goats
Kazumi Yumoto, The Letters
Francine Prose, After
Cynthia Voigt, Dicey's Song
Poetry
Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems (2001)
Helen Frost, Keesha's House
Nonfiction
Jack Gantos, Hole in My Life. Even though he writes for a middle-grade audience, this book is definitely for a young adult audience.
*There's a lot more great nonfiction out there, but my reference list was incomplete. I might get around to expanding it at some time.
ETA: I was in such a hurry to post this that of course I forgot to mention that OF COURSE you should also read Mirrorstone books! Go find the Practical Guide to Dragons, now #3 on the NYT chapter book list. Then read Time Spies (granted, not a teen read, but still quite fun!), Dragonlance: The New Adventures, Star Sisterz, and Knights of the Silver Dragon. :)
I just read your livejournal post about the panel on reluctant readers and fantasy. I love what Mirrorstone does with the reluctant readers and fantasy. Sounds like the BN Educator's Day you went to was more lively than the one I attended here!
I wonder if there's another readership you might explore, too.
I once heard Lawrence Yep talk about reading fantasy. As a first generation Chinese-American, he grew up in an all black neighborhood, but attended a school that was mostly white (If I remember it right!). He said that for him, reading fantasy was like his life: a character is thrust into an alien environment, must learn the rules of society, and must survive.
Using fantasy to reach out to immigrants might be another avenue of reaching the right readers for fantasy stories.
I completely agree with her. Often fantasy is written from a Western point of view or using mostly British/Celtic lore, and I've seen many a discussion about why that is and how we might gain more multicultural readers if we used more multicultural lore. Laurence Yep's work is a great example of using themes and folklore from other cultures to tell a great story that might appeal to readers of a more broad background. I volunteer for the library here and work with Somali and Cambodian immigrants, and it’s probably an issue they’d relate to.
But related to that, one thing I love about fantasy is that it can address issues like race and culture in a metaphorical way, so that people of many backgrounds can put themselves into an alien world and get out of it what applies to their life. That’s another thing we talked about on the panel, actually, that I didn’t cover in my post--the multicultural themes a lot of fantasy covers. Dragonlance, for example, at least in the New Adventures, often addresses racism between kender, elf, and human. Sindri Suncatcher is a kender who can do magic--something that's simply "not possible" in the world, which causes a lot of discrimination, speculation, and comments from other characters. Elidor is a great example of an elf from a mixed race who has to deal with the racism of his Silvanesti relatives and villagers at his "otherness."
Star Sisterz is another of our series that has alternating protagonists from many cultural backgrounds (Indian-American, Caucasian, Latina, and Asian-American—there’s one more that I’m forgetting), and we really love that it can speak to girls of all types—both in universal themes and in characters of different backgrounds. The authors were talking in the panel about how there’s not a lot of contemporary fantasy like that out there, but that high fantasy often addresses those themes. (Which does make me say, "we need more contemporary fantasy that addresses those themes!")
One thing that fantasy addresses well is the idea of "otherness," metaphorically. It's one of the reasons I love fantasy, really--as an outsider socially, a nerd/geek/bookworm (not to mention a farm girl in an urban world and a member of a minority religion), I've experienced at least some of what it feels like to be an Other, and I think that when we're in that position, even for a moment, it helps us to understand others who might feel like outsiders. Reading a book in which the protagonist is an "other" puts the reader, of whatever background, into their shoes and creates an experience that can help increase empathy, for those who have never felt that way, or just let the reader be able to say, "yeah, I've felt that way, too."
Not that I'm advocating bibliotherapy. But I do believe we look for ourselves in the books we read, as well as looking for adventures that we'd never be able to experience in real life. Both of those elements can be found in fantasy and science fiction, especially in what's out there for kids and teens today.
I never really thought about series being both useful and fun until I started working here and editing series. Here at Mirrorstone, we make a "reluctant reader kit"* every year free for librarians, teachers, and homeschoolers that includes ideas on how to get your reluctant reader reading. Book club ideas, teacher guides, readers' theater, and samples of the first book in each series the kit covers--each with the intention of giving teachers and librarians tools to help them help the kids and teens they work with.
But one thing the kit hasn't covered yet that our authors discussed on the panel on Saturday is how the right kind of video games can directly give kids the skills they need to feel more confident as readers. Ree Soesbee (
learsfool), who works for a company associated with GuildWars in her day job, talked about how adventure games that give the player a quest make the player have to possess or develop certain comprehension skills. She gave the example of a player coming upon a character in the game who says, "I'm lost in the woods and I can't find my way home! But I have to find my pig first. Can you find my pig?" The player then has to figure out how to find the pig, what clues will lead him or her to the pig, find the character again and lead them both out of the woods. This takes reading skills and the ability to decipher certain clues.I really like that connection. I grew up on Atari and Nintendo, and though I never really game all that much now (though I do enjoy our department's weekly Eberron game, which is paper-and-pencil, rather than video), I can see the value these games have in kids' lives, both as tools for reading comprehension and for enjoyment in and of themselves.
Ree did, of course, make a distinction about this kind of game and others, such as first-person-shooters, but she and Jeff and Anjali also brought up that even these interests can be translated into interests in books. You like first-person-shooter games? Perhaps you'd enjoy a spy novel (or a nonfiction book about true crime, etc.).
For those of you who work with kids or teens directly, how do you reach reluctant readers?
*For a reluctant reader kit for your library or classroom, email libraries AT wizards DOT com, or you can download parts of last year's kit here (this year's has more material for new series):
http://ww2.wizards.com/books/Mirrorston
http://ww2.wizards.com/Books/Mirrorston
http://ww2.wizards.com/Books/Mirrorston
However, my library doesn't seem to keep a history of what we've checked out, so I'll just have to do it going forward, because unless I've already written it down somewhere, there's no way I'm remembering it all. But I did just return Specials, which I've written about before, and book 2 of Claire B. Dunkle's The Hollow Kingdom series, which was named Close Kin. I'd recommend it--and the first one, The Hollow Kingdom, which I listened to on tape. The narrator of that was pretty good, though I don't know her name.
I have been splitting my time on my recent plane trips (when I wasn't sleeping) between Francine Pascal's new Fearless series beginning with Kill Game and Annette Curtis Klause's Blood and Chocolate. Didn't get very far into B&C before having to run out to a dinner, and didn't get back to it, mainly because it feels like it's going to be good and I wanted to give it attention when I wasn't brain dead. Kill Game isn't bad, but it isn't terribly good, either. Feels a little too removed from Gaia's point of view, and when it's in her POV, she occasionally feels emotions related to fear--nervousness, etc.--that if she is incapable of feeling fear, she shouldn't be feeling. Rather like a kender, if you're into Dragonlance.
Also on my to-read list that I either just got from the library or just got handed ARCs from BEA and ALA:
Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith, an ARC that I'm really glad to have. See her beautiful cover referenced in her blog.
Storm Thief by Chris Wooding, who also wrote The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray and Poison, books I picked up at ALA last year and have read half of each, and have LOVED them, but as is common in my reading lately, I've put down and gotten distracted from by more pressing projects and then keep coming back to a chapter at a time.
Rebel Angels by Libba Bray, another of those half-finished books. Did you hear the news that A Great and Terrible Beauty was optioned for a movie by Mel Gibson? I think that would be fun, a movie of it. I don't have a link, but you can google it and find references to it. I saw it earlier today but on a different computer.
Mira, Mirror by Mette Ivie Harrison. Written by a friend of my BYU picture book class teacher, and recommended by
blackholly last week. I've spoken with Mette before, I think, but didn't realize she had a book out. It just happened to be on the YA shelf at my local library branch, so that was fun to have it on my mind and be able to pick it up right away.The Princess Diaries and Princess in the Spotlight by Meg Cabot. Two of those books I've never had at the top of my list, so I just never read them. I just watched Princess Diaries II, though, and I like to read the books movies are based on and decide whether I like the adaptation.
Oh, and have I mentioned that I read Justine Larbaleister's Magic or Madness? I liked it pretty well. I loved how she handled the two different cultures so well. I wasn't a fan of the tough magic system right at first, but it's starting to grow on me. It's certainly one that doesn't hold back from asking tough questions. Very well-written, too--I like her voice.
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