Cory Doctorow let Boing Boing readers know yesterday that his new book Little Brother can be found in the YA section after hearing from his publisher that it hasn't been easy for fans to find. While the post about the good books to be found in YA is informative (with Cory admitting he's a fan of several YA authors), it's the comments that really make this something else. I think my favorite is the guy who's concerned that if he is found browsing in the YA section he might be considered a pedophile...or maybe it's the one by the guy who wonders if he will be escorted out of the section by security guards. If that's not eye-rolling enough, there's all the helpful suggestions from people providing the titles of good YA books.
I mean really - are these folks so far removed from books with teenage protagonists? Have they all grown up without reading Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland or Little Women?
Tom Sawyer, anyone????
I was tempted to post links to several YA blogs in the comments over there but then I just didn't have the energy. If there are still readers out there afraid to actually enter the teen section of a bookstore, then I doubt they will take the time to read a YA blog (or the YA column at Bookslut). I mean really - is this too silly or what?
In the adult world of reading, there is an interview with Alexandra Fuller (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood) in the NYT about her new book on the oil industry in Wyoming, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. This is a book I'm determined to read and it is perfect for The Modest Proposal I posted on yesterday. Here's some of the NYT piece:
Wyoming is under assault here, Ms. Fuller said, standing on a road buffeted by the infamous high plains wind. She believes people are being used by the energy industry. In the past several years, dozens of workers have died on the rigs around the West.
“Throwing warm beating hearts at a failed energy policy is a tragedy, whether it’s the war or the oil fields,” Ms. Fuller said. “The jobs are a good thing. But going after it so frantically and doing so much damage is wrong.”
The cruel and beautiful landscape here reminds her of her childhood. She was born into white Rhodesia and came of age during the war for independence by the black majority, who renamed it Zimbabwe. By the age of 6, she said, she had learned how to use an Uzi submachine gun and knew the basics of first aid. She suffered the ordeal of her baby sister drowning, an older brother who died of meningitis and another who died in infancy; she says the cause of death was being born in Africa.
Now she considers herself a messenger who must bear witness to what she sees as the war on the land, with its natural and human casualties.
“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said. It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field. That’s why I wrote the book.”
We don't need a gas holiday, we need a plan - a focused, intelligent energy plan that will take us into the future. Fuller's book is just one more reason why.
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May 2
2008
04:05 AM
Actually, C., Jenn Robinson and I have often joked about the whole 'escorted out by security' thing. Both of us started our children's and YA book searches in libraries, and both of us have gotten LOOKS from librarians -- maybe in reality, maybe mostly in our imaginations.
I've chalked up the LOOKS to maybe color+childless= possibly threatening, but seriously, you can get a feeling from booksellers, too, that you're NOT SUPPOSED TO BE in the section that is decorated and separated from The Rest of the books, sometimes with kids in the area, running amok without parents. Also, the idea that much of YA lit is directed toward girls may make a guy feel like he's going to be identified as a pedophile. It's seriously something that comes up, especially in big box bookstores, where things are set up sort of in primary colors and generic pinks and blues, you know? If you're a guy, why are you over there in the pinks? Are you deviant? Should they call security???
Welcome to our the realities of a paranoid nation: Making little things like READING good books harder than it should be...