Reading at the right time or Why YA?

                Let’s be honest. There is both a wrong time and a right time to read something, and it can be impossible to know the difference until you start reading. When I was 11, I tried to read 1984. It didn’t work. I found it boring and dry and I only got 50 pages in. I shocked a teacher by saying it was the most boring book ever. I was eventually able to read it though, when I was 15, but only after reading Animal Farm and a whole bunch of other things. I was amazed to find the book so different. It was intense and dark and terrifying, a beautiful nightmare.

                I’m not just talking about reading things before you’re ready, though it is the more likely thing to happen. There are tons of works that are only able to speak to you because of where you were at that time, and they are still able to speak to you as a reminder of the past. It’s hard to imagine people who can’t remember the emotions of adolescence finding anything to enjoy in Catcher in the Rye. Sure Holden’s just as phony as the people he hates, but I felt sorry for him because he doesn’t recognize it yet and because I could recognize myself in him.

                 There are books you need to read in certain ways, at certain times, so that they can touch your heart, save your life, change your mind or move you forward so that you can read that next thing that will mean the world to you. There were books I read, like The Chocolate War and Huckleberry Finn, that I read because other people didn’t want me to. I had found the ALA list of most challenged books and decided to read as many of these as I could. Part of the power of these books came from the fact that someone out there thought that I shouldn’t read them.

                Where does YA fit in to this? Everywhere.

                 Going back to 1984, I needed certain books to move me forward to the point where I could admire it. I needed to read other dystopias, as well as other completely different books. I also needed other books that referenced it to pique my interest once again. A lot of YA makes allusions to other “greater” works, or raised my consciousness about issues that had never crossed my mind before. It made me want to read further, to find out more. YA can be a stepping stone to other works, but it can also be a good unto itself.

                And then there’s The Chocolate War. Right now I’m working on a presentation on a challenged book, and I found myself returning to this one. When I first read it, I was a pretty typical teen. I was a mystery to myself.  I didn’t understand what I was feeling or why I was acting the way I was, and no one else seemed to understand me either.  It didn’t help that I’ve never liked to talk about my problems and there was some bullying going on. I’ve mentioned this before, but this book meant a lot to me back then; however, I don’t ever want to read it again.  In the novel, bad things happened to good people and evil triumphed… or did it? Maybe life wasn’t that simple. Maybe there were other options. It was comforting to hear about the dark things, things that sounded like part of my life and not have it banished from the story.

                I was sad when Robert Cormier died and when Monica Hughes died and when Madeline L’Engle died. I'll be sad when other authors die too. These people mattered to me because they helped give me an emotional vocabulary. Maybe not new words, but new stories, new phrases that helped me recognize myself and others. Sometimes you need to be shown that what you feel is real, that you are not alone in feeling this way, that other people have it worse, and that you should help them if you can. Maybe today sucks, and maybe tomorrow will too, but that doesn’t mean that something better won’t show up someday and you have a role to play in that. Yes, adolescence is a time for melodrama (and oh what melodrama!), but that doesn’t mean that the feelings aren’t real. And sometimes a book can help you figure it out.

CB #8 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

 I love a good mystery, especially one by Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie. They both wrote ridiculously British mysteries with oddball detectives, and if it’s one by Sayers, then you learn about something completely unrelated like the architecture of Oxford University, or about the complexities of bell ringing. Sayers translated Dante so I’m certain that she’s researched  the facts that she presents. I think that Bradley was aiming for something along the same lines (even if he's Canadian). This mystery was supposed to teach me about chemistry, stamps and a certain period in British history, and maybe it did. Mainly, I just wanted to punch Flavia in the face. However, since the police detective seemed to feel the same way, maybe that was the point.

  Sweetness is set in 1950’s Britain in a small town that is very like Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead. Flavia is the youngest of three daughters (the other two are Orphelia and Daphne), living in a grand old (decaying) house with her father. Her mother died in Flavia is extremely precocious. Her obsession is chemistry, poisons in fact, and she spends most of her time terrorizing and being terrorized by her sisters. One day, a dead bird ends up on their doorstep with a stamp in its beak. The next morning Flavia watches a man die in her garden. Now she has to solve the mystery, or her father could be charged with murder.

                I’m confused about how I feel about this book. On one hand, I enjoyed the 1950’s setting and I liked the writing style. There was a richness to it that I really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the way the sisters plot against each other. On the other hand, I found Flavia to be a bit too precocious. She felt unreal. I might have believed it if she was a bit older, or a bit younger and had a less strong vocabulary, but she felt like a character in a book, and not like a real person.  As well, I didn’t feel the urgency of the mystery, though I know that Flavia did. I guess that this is just a case of a disconnection to the book. I know lots of other people loved it, so it might just be me.

CB #7 Pandaemonium

Pandaemonium by Christopher Brookmyre

                I loved my exchange year in Scotland. Sometimes I get homesick for it… well not exactly homesick, because it wasn’t really my home, but I start to miss mountains and that particular shade of green that only comes from daily rain. I miss Scottish accents and taking the train everywhere. I miss seeing the Wallace monument in the distance. I also miss the nightly cage around the William Wallace statue that prevented locals from decapitating it because it looked like Mel Gibson. I was feeling morose over Christmas so I picked up a book by someone who gets the accents  and the Scottish attitude right. I have found Brookmyre hit or miss in the past, but I thought that a darkly comic thriller involving the US military’s secret facility in Scotland, physics, possible demons from a Hell dimension, the Catholic Church and a group of high school students who are going on a retreat to  deal with the murder of a classmate would keep my attention. This book definitely bends genres.

 At the beginning of the novel, there’s a chart that names all of students at the retreat and puts them into little groups, like the Hard Team, Heidthebaws, the Beautiful People, and the God Squad, so that you have some understanding of the group dynamics. It was essential with about 33 characters including the teachers. Oh, and that was only the school narrative. There’s also the people in the top secret military facility who are studying the demons, until of course the system is sabotaged and the creatures escape.

I loved how Brookmyre portrayed the relationships between the high school students. I liked the  group dynamics, as well as the way that people struggled with how they are perceived both inside and outside the group. They were worried about sex and friendship and the aftereffects of witnessing a murder, but that they also just wanted to drink and have fun as well. It felt pretty realistic. Not all the students were focused on, obviously, but those that were, were distinct individuals who I cared about.

Now my problem with the book is this. I started it on January 4^th and read most of it in 2 days. Then I stopped and I only finished it today. Part of the problem is that I often read two or more books at once and sometimes one falls to the wayside, but the other part of the problem is that after all that set up, I wasn’t very interested in having these kids battling for their lives. I just wanted them to figure things out and have some fun.  I didn’t care at all about the people in the military facility and could have used less of that (even though it was incredibly important to the plot).  A final factor was that after reading two chapters I remembered one of Brookmyre’s particular interests and realized how exactly the novel would have to end. If you haven’t read any Brookmyre then it will probably be surprising, and you might love it more than I did.

Overall, I did get my Scottish accent fix, and the teens felt real. I even loved some of the fight scenes (there was a chainsaw!) but I felt that it went on a bit long and could have been tighter.