On Sequels

I rarely read sequels. Who has time for that? (Says the person who has also posted about rereading books multiple times just ‘cause.) The truth is that no matter what I say about lack of time, if I really want to read something, I’ll make the time . . .eventually.  If I am being honest, I would say that I rarely bother with sequels because they are usually disappointing.

Usually is not always, of course. I recently reread a book and its sequel that I’d read years ago and wanted to revisit. It turned out that At the Sign of the Star was just okay, in my opinion. I almost skipped reading A True and Faithful Narrative even though I had Inter-Library Loaned both of these books since my library system no longer owned them. But I’m so glad I gave it a chance. A True and Faithful Narrative told Meg’s story as she grew into herself, into the writer she had always imagined herself to be despite the obstacles before her as a female in the 1680s. It was one of those very rare situations where the sequel was actually better than the first book.

All in my own opinion, of course. But there you have it. Not all sequels are terrible. Some of them are even really good.

Other YA sequels you might want to make time for:

Thunderhead (sequel to Scythe) by Neal Shusterman – Both Scythe and Thunderhead were rather outside of my usual choices, but I could not put either of them down.  Seriously, if you like dystopian novels that explore ethics and ideas while telling a story that is brutal and compelling, you need to read both of these books. Actually the School Library Journal called Thunderhead, “A rare sequel that is even better than the first book.” I’m not sure I’d go that far myself, but I will say that I will absolutely be reading the third installment as soon as it comes out, which is a super rarity for me.

The Empress (sequel to The Diabolic) by S.J. Kincaid – Perhaps a bit like Scythe and Thunderhead, this science fiction story explores big ideas (what is personhood, science vs. religion, etc.) in a world that is harsh and full of deception. But here the focus is on the political intrigue at the emperor’s court where Nemesis, a genetically engineered bodyguard, is sent to impersonate a Senator’s daughter to protect her. There are unexpected twists and turns in both books, and by the end of The Empress, I am not even sure what to expect for the third book.

I’m considering reading The Rose and the Dagger (sequel to The Wrath & the Dawn, which is excellent), and I’ve been saying I’ll get around to A Torch Against the Night (sequel to An Ember in the Ashes, which was an unexpected favorite of mine) for ages.

Sequels I plan to read for kids: Patina and Sunny (sequels to Ghost) by Jason Reynolds. If you have yet to read Ghost, start there. You’ll thank me, I promise.

What other sequels should I be sure to make time for?

October Book Pick: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

A “nerd power ballad.”  I really can’t do any better explaining this book than that New York Journal of Books did with that descriptor.  Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is a love story about a girl who was too busy writing fan fiction to see love in front of her face.  No, wait.  That sounds too cheesy.  I’ll stick with “nerd power ballad.”

I guess I am a little bit of a nerd still, and I related to Cath as she fumbled her way through her first love.  It reminded me of being in college.  I was not a fangirl, but I did spend a lot of time in my dorm room writing endlessly.  I couldn’t help but cheer for Cath, and I can’t help but recommend her story.

Find it at your local library or at an indie bookstore.

Miss last month’s Book Pick? Check out Flora & Ulysses

March Book Pick: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

When an ARC of Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel found its way to my desk at work, I almost passed it on without reading it.  When you work in children’s books, you get really picky about the general adult books you read because your reading time is a precious work-related commodity.  For most people, the name Elizabeth Strout (and the fact that it is attached to the words “Pulitzer Prize winner”) is probably enough to make the book a priority, but I am not most readers.

The extra push that put The Burgess Boys in my “to read” pile?  As usual for my reading choices it involved a local connection.  Like Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge, The Burgess Boys is set in small-town Maine.  Maine and Minnesota both have a large population of Somali refugees, and that sometimes results in some cultural misunderstandings–like the recent incident at Washburn High School in Minneapolis.

The incident that begins The Burgess Boys is only part of the story in the book.  It is a family story about relationships and motivations.  It was occasionally heavy handed in the don’t-assume-too-much-about-people theme, but not so much that it detracted from the intimate story of people trying to make sense of the world in which they live.

Highly recommended.

As a side note for those who know or work with teens, Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian addresses some of the same issues (Maine, Somali immigrants, tolerance) for a young adult audience.  Also recommended.

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Check out last month’s book pick: Just One Day by Gayle Forman

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Stories & Social Media

In the summer of 2001, I was sitting in a computer lab on the UIUC campus with my fellow Web Design for Libraries & Organizations students when someone piped up with a question: “Do you know what a ‘blog’ is?”

The response was mixed.

Eleven years later, “blog” is obviously a household word. As is “social network,” which I’m not sure I knew in 2001–if it even existed then since Facebook wasn’t around until 2004.

Three years before Facebook, in the fall of 2001, Jennifer Egan published the novel Look at Me in which a fashion model who has had reconstructive surgery after a disfiguring accident is invited to participate in a very Facebook-like project.  The book explores identity in a media saturated world in a way that feels more relevant now than it did in 2001. I found the book fascinating when I read it earlier this year.   I wonder what I would have thought of her version of social media if I would have read it in 2001.

It seems that Jennifer Egan still has an interest in social media.  Check out her latest short story written in tweets as part of the Twitter Fiction Festival.  It might seem odd to tweet a story or try to put any kind of fiction into 140 characters, but people are doing some very interesting things with the medium.  Plus, it’s participatory.  You can join in with a hashtag.  I love it.  :)

You can listen to Jennifer Egan talk more about the project on MPR here.  Tangentially, even if you’re not buying Twitter Fiction as a thing, consider what Egan said about empathy and judgment on Talking Volumes last year.  Seems to fall right in with this lovely headline: Reading fiction ‘improves empathy’ study finds.

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If you like… A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

I almost never listen to audio books, but I happened to listen to A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris.  It was assigned in my Young Adult Literature class as our example of adult fiction with teen interest, and in my book buying haste, I accidentally ordered the audio version.

I felt like I was “stuck” listening, but I was quickly engrossed in a story of family secrets and generational rifts to the point that I wasn’t stuck anymore.  I was hooked.

I recently read A Grown-up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson, and I was struck by the similarities in the stories.  Three generations of women telling their stories, keeping their secrets, and watching as their mistakes affect the people they love the most.  Honestly, I think I’m a sucker for these kinds of stories.   There’s something like a mystery buried in the bonds of family that keeps me reading as the stories switch from character to character, each revealing a bit more than the last.  I can never really get into detective stories, but give me a family saga with secrets and intrigue at its core, and I am there.

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Other books pictured that are also full of family secrets and multi-generational narratives: Learning to Lose by David Trueba, The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis, and The Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters

Want more reader’s advisory?  Check out previous “If you like…” posts.

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Now Available: The Year of the Gadfly

Reviews have compared The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller to Dead Poets Society, Heathers, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin (which you might remember from this post).  In the spirit of comparisons, I might add The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney to that list.

All that aside, Gadfly is a page-turner.  Pick it up when you have some time.  If your reading tastes are anything like mine, you won’t want to put it down.

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Reading the Afterlife

This morning I listened to Chuck Palahniuk talk with Kerri Miller on MPR’s Midmorning.  His latest book, Damned, is written from the perspective of a dead girl, and the first excerpt he read from the book took on the afterlife and how it feels to be dead.  Madison narrates the story from Hell, and it is interspersed with asides that start “Are You There, Satan? It’s me, Madison.”  Sounds like Palahniuk’s usual subversive self is at work again, and I can’t wait to read it.

Though to be honest, I guess I have a strange affection for books narrated from the afterlife.  I hadn’t noticed before, but when I started listing books in my head I realized that off the top of my head I could think of several: The Lovely Bones, If I Stay, Sum (which I blogged about here), and Please Ignore Vera Dietz.

I mentioned Please Ignore Vera Dietz briefly in this post about teen fiction that addresses addiction, but I skipped the the fact that among the book’s several alternating narrators is Vera’s late friend Charlie, “the dead kid.”  He describes the afterlife as such:

“You’re surprised? You had a different idea of the afterlife? This goes against your religion?  Well, what did you really know anyway? No one living understands dying, and no matter what they dream up–from harps and heaven to pickles and Big Macs–they can’t prove a thing until they’re on this side.”

I guess that’s it.  When we don’t know something, there’s plenty of room for making up stories about it.  Those of you who read teen fiction may want to check out some of the titles on this list for various takes on what the fictional afterlife.  Everyone else: listen to Chuck Palahniuk read from his new book.  Tell me it doesn’t sound intriguing.

Exploring a Possible Future

I actually left work a bit early to make sure I  could to the library before it closed when I got the notice that When She Woke was waiting for me on the hold shelf.  I’d been waiting for this book for what felt like forever.  It had been described as The Scarlet Letter meets The Handmaid’s Tale, and I was very interested in what that story had to say.

The story takes us into a near future in which the line between religion and politics has been lost.  It is a world where criminals are “chromed” and released to survive with their crime obvious to anyone who looks their way.  Hannah was once part of a religious family and active in her church.  Now she has been convicted of the murder of her unborn child.  She is a Red.

I could hardly put the book down from the very first page.  Some of the story is kind of expected. As the Washington Post review puts it, Hannah “has many adventures, of course, and learns to be a strong, independent person, instead of the compliant little church girl she was raised to be. ”  But there is much to discuss (religion, politics, women’s rights) and compare (Hawthorne, Atwood, etc.) that will draw readers in despite some weaknesses.  I was reminded, as I read, of a book that was set in a similar future from a different perspective.  The Misconceiver by Lucy Feriss looks at what happens after Roe v. Wade is overturned in 2011 (yikes!) to a woman who performs abortions despite the dangerous nature of her work.  One of the reasons these books are so suspenseful is that they don’t feel very far from the truth.  No, we are not to the point of marking criminals’ misdeeds on their skin, but the Personhood Movement would have us move in the direction of these fictional futures.

In the midst of reading When She Woke, I happened to listen to a radio documentary on the role of religion in government: The Politics of Faith.  It was a fascinating look at the struggle to draw the line between religion and government in various countries around the world, including parts of the world where they are transitioning to democracy.  It is well worth listening to for those interested in exploring this complex issue.

For those of you who want to stick to fiction, here are some more dystopian novels you might enjoy.

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See more posts about science, religion, and secular family life on my Secular Thursday page.

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Creating Something Out of Something

Speaking of mixed reviews, which I was last week when I posted about Steven Pinker’s new book, I’ve been meaning to post about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes for a while now.  Everything I have read by Foer has immediately found a place on my favorite list, so when I heard he had a new book coming out, I put it on hold at the library right away.  I didn’t know much about it except that he was doing something “unusual” with it, which was to be expected.

Tree of Codes is easily the most unusual of his books.  The concept here is that Foer has taken one of his favorite books, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and created a whole new story from within it.  As you might imagine, some people find this to be a brilliant way of showing rather than telling that the story is layered and there is much that we (readers & the characters in the book) don’t know.  Other people find it annoying and pretentious.  Here is a video about the concept:

 

It isn’t a completely new idea, though.  A couple of years ago, I ran across Nets by Jen Bervin in which Shakespeare’s sonnets are put through much the same process at Schulz’ novel to produce new poems.  I actually think it’s an interesting way to re-imagine the work.  Read an excerpt of Nets in Conjunctions to see what I mean.

I think that it works better as poetry than it does as a novel.  For me, the “erasure” format put a distance between myself (the reader) and the story.  It was hard to keep plot and characters straight, and I found myself wanting to wander through the book the way I would wander through a poem. The holes and spaces spoke as much as the words that were left, and I focused on the emotion and the language while the details of the story faded to the background.

That may read like a bad review, but it isn’t.  What was left was beautiful & interesting, and it makes me endlessly curious about the work from which it came.

I must confess, I was fascinated by this work.  Of course, Foer is a favorite of mine (as mentioned in this post), and I have also been long quasi-interested in cut-up poetry.  Perhaps I was predisposed to some sort of affection for this book.  Certainly that hasn’t been true for everyone.

If you like… Geek Love

I read Geek Love as a teenager, but it is not a book I generally recommend to teens.  This story of a sideshow family confronts that dark fringes of the human experience and insists on a new definition of “normal” in a way that spoke to the teenage me very strongly.  The book is a staple in Disability Studies courses, and it was a National Book Award Finalist in 1990.

Perhaps teens who aren’t quite ready for the quirky macabre of Geek Love might like Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando.  This novel, set on Coney Island, also addresses life as a sideshow “freak” but from a more comfortable distance.  Chasing Ray speaks highly of Dreamland Social Club in this post.

Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin proves that you don’t need a sideshow to address issues of pity and isolation. You just need a high school.  This novel, published for adults, is narrated by a 16 year-old dwarf, who is a very talented singer enrolled at a performing arts high school.  Judy’s first person narration reminded me a lot of Olympia’s in Geek Love.  Both are witty observers of human nature and sardonic commentators on their shared stature.  They both reveal the meat of their stories slowly, but they bring an extraordinary amount of emotion to what otherwise might read as a cliche.

I highly recommend Big Girl Small to readers (adults or mature teens) interested in exploring the vulnerability in being different.