Uncataloged

courtneyleighandstuff asked: Nice reviews so far! Especially WTCB. You handled that one really well. Looking forward to more!

Thanks!

I don’t think I’ve been unclear about my feelings toward genre stickers. While some books are romances and some books are mysteries and some books are adventure stories, most books involve elements of all three and should therefore have bare spines and unstickered covers.

It may seem strange that I’m bringing this up again. I’ve only written four book blogs so far, and I’ve now mentioned genre stickers in 50% of them. They seem like such an insignificant thing, but I insist that they are not. A librarian I respect recently said that she will not sticker a book if she feels that the sticker will deter a patron from checking the book out. For example, take one of my favorite books of this year— Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch. Let’s say I choose to slap a Romance sticker on the spine. What leads me to this decision? Most likely, in this scenario, I am the type of person who enjoys romance in books and, because Hautman does an excellent job of portraying young romance in an original and realistic way, I see this as being the most important element of the book. I am labeling this book  failing to see the book from an outsider’s perspective. Another reader will see the sticker and will, quite understandably, recall the stereotypical “Romance Novel” and decide to read something else. Now I have deterred a reader from an excellent book due to my own bias, which, for a librarian, is the worst.

So, knowing this, you will understand why I was recently frustrated when I came across a terribly mis-stickered copy of Gregory Galloway’s As Simple As Snow. I picked out the book because John Green, a writer of realistic and character-driven YA fiction, said it had been a great inspiration to him and that he highly recommended it. I would not have picked it out had I just come across it on the shelves, due to the fact that it was labeled “Mystery.”

Agatha Christie wrote Mysteries. Sherlock Holmes solved Mysteries. Clue is a parody and a Mystery at the same time. I enjoy Mysteries. In fact, one summer it was all I read. But there are stereotypes associated with Mystery novels that do not in any way apply to As Simple As Snow. Characters in Mysteries are often relatively flat and sometimes downright archetypal (the butler, the socialite, the professor). Mysteries are fast-paced and thrilling— the plot is generally unrealistic, but logic is somehow the highest of virtues and always ends up saving the day. At least one British person is involved in some way in a Mystery story. Mysteries have dark and stormy nights and roaring fireplaces and ponderous detectives smoking pipes and drinking sherry. Mysteries are delightful, but, again, none of this (even the British thing, to my recollection) speaks to As Simple As Snow.

I’m tempted to say ASAS is the story of a relationship, but it’s more accurate to say it’s the story of a boy in a relationship. The narrator is a young man living in a small town— all we know about his name is that it is a double dactyl. Anna Cayne, nee Anastasia, is the object of his affection and the subject of one of the best first lines ever written: “Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town.” Had this been literally true, the book may have earned the Mystery genrification. As it is, Anna writes obituaries for fun, and does so great care and respect for the hypothetically deceased.

And that is what makes Anna’s character so admirable— she cares. About everything. She cares about the lives of people she hardly knows, she cares about words and thoughts and music and the long-dead artists who created them. She pays attention to things, even the smallest things, even to the narrator, who claims to be wholly uninteresting: “I’m bland. I’m milk. Worse, I’m water.” Anna is interested, and that’s what makes her interesting.

So genre stickers are small and seemingly unimportant, but if you ignore them and broadly and carelessly classify books with them, then you are boring and no one will write a book about you.

If I had to choose one novel that proved to the world that excellent YA literary fiction exists, I may very possibly choose John Corey Whaley’s Where Things Come Back.

I seriously hesitate to tell you too much about the plot… for several reasons, really. First, the plot is complexly layered and entirely surprising and I don’t want to give too much away. (While I like writing book blogs for those who have already read the book, I don’t think I know anyone else who has read this one.)

Second, taken out of context, the main elements within the plot— those things that tell you what the book is about— seem incredibly depressing. It’s like how I don’t want to tell you that It’s Kind Of A Funny Story takes place in a mental hospital or Hattie Big Sky is an unloved orphan. You could get the wrong idea. So I won’t risk it— instead, I’ll tell you about Cullen Witter, the main character, sometime narrator, and true reason why the reader is left more or less unscathed by all the dark stuff that happens.

After reading Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, I began to notice the bracing effect a stoic main character can have on a reader. Coraline’s story is truly terrifying, but her composure throughout always comforted me and kept me from fully freaking out while reading it. Similarly, when unthinkably tragic happenings occur all around Cullen Witter, his humor and strength of personality make the story enjoyable regardless.

Being seventeen and bored in a small town, I like to pretend sometimes that I’m a pessimist. This is the way it is and nothing can sway me from that. Life sucks most of the time. Everything is bullshit. High school sucks. You can go to school, work for fifty years, then you die. Only I can’t seem to keep that up for too long before my natural urge to idealize goes into effect. I can’t seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.

It is important to point out that Cullen is not saying that he believes that things are overwhelmingly good, only that he is unable to overlook the possibility of it being so. He muses on the world’s injustices, becomes disgusted with greed and carelessness, and harbors gory zombie fantasies about decapitating the school jack ass. Through all of that (and, honestly, so much more), he stays hopeful.

One of my favorite things about Netflix— and there are many good things about Netflix— is the way it classifies movies into super specific sub genres. At first, I found designations like “Critically-acclaimed Cerebral Movies from the 1950s” cumbersome, but after a while I was charmed by its specificity. I began to feel as if Netflix understood me. As someone who classifies books for a living, I know how limiting it is to slap some vague qualifier on a book that encompasses so much more than “Romance,” “Fantasy,” or “Mystery.” It is my belief that our minds do not work that way. Unless the book or movie comfortably fits into a particular genre (Tropical Kiss is a Romance novel. No more, no less.), our brains are able to classify books into very complex and precise categories. That is how we find ourselves reading books with very particular threads running through them.  A woman approached me at the library’s Teen desk today to ask for Somewhat Romantic But Not Super Sentimental Works Of Realistic Fiction. Last week, a teen wanted me to recommend Novels That Include Suicide And Its Aftermath. YA author John Green boasts a sizable collection of The Life Stories Of Conjoined Twins.

I feel that everyone should have a favorite bizarre genre of books— mine happens to be Novels In The Voice Of An Autistic Person. The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd was my first favorite—it’s a joy to watch the young narrator’s autistic brain working in its foreign and brilliant way. In Pete Hautman’s Invisible, narrator Doug is probably not out and out autistic, but his literal interpretation of the world and his emotional detachment make him close enough to fit in this genre, and also make the novel one of the eeriest I have ever read.   

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a steadfastly faithful account of the syndrome and an all-around beautifully written novel. Narrator Christopher Boone is both a genius and completely oblivious. He can remember exactly what he ate on any particular day, he can draw detailed maps of places he visited only once, and he can name every prime number into the thousands. However, he is unable to conduct many tasks that most people could do without thinking, such as reading body language and facial expressions to detect a person’s mood. It is this trait that makes him such an interesting narrator, and an even more unusual detective. In the novel, Christopher stumbles upon a clue that leads him to believe there is a mystery afoot, and, in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, he sets out to uncover the truth through logic and reasoning, and what he uncovers is truly shocking.

While the novel’s plot is riveting, the most gratifying aspect of this book, in my opinion, is seeing the world through Christopher’s analytic eyes. Haddon writing style mimics Christopher himself, interpreting the world in a way both systematic and poetic.  

Mr. Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end. And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightfoward answers at the end. I know he meant this because this is what he said.

This is because Mr. Jeavons doesn’t understand numbers.

While this may not technically be a YA novel, it was an Alex winner so it totally counts.

Oh, and if you have a favorite bizarrely specific sub genre of books or movies, I’d like to know what it is.

I wanted to think of a clever title for my very first YA book blog, but I decided to save myself the work and write about a book that already has a clever title. How to Say Goodbye in Robot is one of those books that I both love and resent— the characters are strong and interesting, the plot is unexpected, and the dialogue is realistic. On the other hand, it successfully deals with such an important and original topic, I wish I had written it first.

Totally Unspoiled Summary

Ignore the book’s pink pink pink cover—this story is neither girly nor sentimental. In fact, according to her mother, narrator Beatrice is a cold, hard, bitch. While her mother presents this as a character flaw, the reader benefits from Beatrice’s stoic narration and Beatrice herself is unsurprisingly unruffled by the assessment.

Bea’s general indifference prevents her from fitting in with the gossip-obsessed girls at her new school— while they make casual, and somewhat obligatory, friends, Bea is drawn to Jonah, a prickly outcast whose ghost-like appearance makes him the butt of the school’s cruelest practical jokes. As their relationship progresses, they find they share bizarre interests that have, up until now, made them outcasts.

Lightly Spoiled Summary

Theme: Unromantic Relationships

The idea of unromantic relationships is perhaps the most underrepresented in YA books, and is possibly the most difficult to pull off. Friendship is almost always deemed somewhat less than romantic love— the male and female main characters play out their will-they-won’t-they scenario against the backdrop of incidental friends and acquaintances, and the happiness of the ending is determined by whether or not the main characters end up together. I don’t have a problem with this formula— most of my favorite books are written this way. However, as a reader, I personally have always looked for a writer who would acknowledge that this trope, while entertaining, does not reflect reality in a satisfying way. From the epigraph, we know that Jonah and Beatrice are not bound for romance:

“You can love somebody without it being like that. You keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.” -Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

And perhaps it is because of Standiford’s upfront approach that she (not altogether) avoids the will-they-won’t-they struggle and throws out the idea of a happy or unhappy ending entirely. What is left is this: Bea and Jonah play out a relationship that is as fulfilling, consuming, and tumultuous as any sexual relationship could be, confirming to the reader that such a friendship is possible.

In Beatrice’s words:

“How do you define a boyfriend? If a boyfriend is the first person you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last face you see before you fall asleep, then I was in love with Jonah. But if a boyfriend had to involve physical chemistry and kissing and sex and stuff, then, no, he wasn’t that.”

Lastly, this is a book that is disinterested in normalcy— many of the characters are old, lonely, and/or frankly out of their mind, and yet the story’s (and Bea’s and Jonah’s) casual acceptance of these characters grants them a charming dignity. Yet another refreshing message: a person does not have to be mainstream to enjoy mainstream perks (friendship, romance, family, etc etc.)

It does not surprise me that everyone’s reading YA books. Books that are geared toward teens are edgier, more creative, and less predictable than their adult counterparts, and there are a few reasons for this.

The first thing to consider is the nature of the demographic. Pardon me for generalizing, but teens are frequently edgier and less predictable than adults— they have a flare for the morbid (condescendingly dubbed “emo”) that adults tend to lose over time. The writing is young, and it is interesting.

Also, because the YA/Teen sector is a relatively new one in the world of publishing and librarianship, it hasn’t had time yet to grow stuck in its ways. YA authors have the freedom and flexibility to write what they want, not necessarily what is guaranteed to sell. This is why there are no stock YA blockbuster writers in the vein of John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Janet Evanovich, etc, churning out the same book with a different cover every few months. The most talked-about YA authors are the newest, the budding ones. The most “established” authors have released, at most, a handful of works, one or two series. There has not been time for their writing to grow stale.

Surfing the internet, I recently saw picture of a sign in the YA stacks of a bookstore addressed to the customer. I call it the “It’s Okay” sign. Maybe you’ve seen it— it basically consoles the reader, saying that it is okay for them to purchase young adult novels when they are old adult readers, and they don’t have to feel ashamed. I agree. In fact, I would argue that great YA books, of which there are many, challenge the mind of the reader in ways that mainstream adult literature does not know how to do, or perhaps forgot how to do. My favorite YA books (more on that later) are written with a poetry and a custom-busting originality that would make the literary mechanism in the most sophisticated mind whirr. And, to their further credit, the authors do so in a way that resonates with adults both young and old, green and experienced, emotional and world-weary.

So begins my uncataloged blog of YA lit. The following are discussions of books I enjoyed (and will have enjoyed) reading in a font I enjoy reading. I want to really talk about the content of books, so there will be spoilers. But I also want people who haven’t read the book to get a feel for it, so I want to do unspoilified brief synopses… I’m not sure how I’m going to work that yet. This is just the beginning.