Holiday reading recap

Just before the break I (along with some Twitter friends) blogged my holiday reading list. Here's how I did.

Non-fiction

I stayed bang on track here.

I finished Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, which I thought was astounding. I particularly enjoyed the way Lane shows us the process of science - the areas where things aren't settled, the places with scientists disagree, the ways that personalities can conflict with credibility. He sketches out both theories and the people who devised them. The last para of my GoodReads review:

With the idiotic debates that continue to be pursued around evolution and 'intelligent design', I think it is crucial that society understands that 'gaps' in the evidence, and disagreements among scientists, do not weaken the case for evolution (which should, really, not have to be made). Lane does an elegant and enjoyable job of laying out the current state of research, focused on topics he cares about and finds intriguing, and even though I'm going to have to read the book again in order to fully understand it, I am truly grateful to him for doing so.

I also read Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc2? - large chunks of it on Pakiri beach. Cox and Forshaw are on a mission to make the reader not just recognise but understand the equation:

If Marcus Chown is magical cellulite cream, this is physics bootcamp - no corners cut, no let's-take-it-easy-today-shall-we. Cox and Forshaw don't just want to explain this equation - they want you to understand it, to understand its power (predictive and descriptive) and understand how, despite being just a diminutive collection of letters and symbols, it underpins nearly a century of contemporary science, and captures some of the most fundamental characteristics of the universe.

I feel like the target market for this book - a person who gave up on maths in fourth form, and stumbled through sixth form physics before escaping the next year to classics class, my natural home. Cox and Forshaw are punctilious in their care for the mathematically challenged, to the point where even I wished they'd quit apologising for bringing the maths in to it - because for once, I was following it.

Somewhere between non-fiction and fiction, while at home I picked up a copy of James Herriott's The Lord God Made Them All. I read bajillions of his books when I was a young teenager on a dairy farm, and this was a rather lovely exercise in nostalgia:

Herriot's world is one where every person has a redeeming feature, and every day has a lesson that can be extracted from it. He manages this without preaching though, and his observations are utterly engaging. As an adult, the sameyness of the stories takes some of their shine off, but I also had a new appreciation for the theme of how his profession changed markedly during his career - where all the arcane knowledge drummed into him at university about diseases of the horse and mixing medicines from glass bottles etched with Latin phrases had to be replaced with post-war drugs and the shift of focus to domestic pets. Herriot, thankfully, is one of those people who is intrigued and delighted by change, not threatened and resentful.

Fiction

My prediction: "A buck three way - the first three books of Anthony Powell's Dance to the music of time in one chubby edition, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl."

I read the first book of Powell's 12-book series, 230 pages in which minutiae is minutely observed. Give me Evelyn Waugh any day.

Blood Meridian is wrenching - so visceral you almost have to read it through your fingers. If I had of read this first, I would probably never have dared to embark on The Border Trilogy (which I adore). Amazing, but utterly relentless.

I didn't make it to Bacigalupi, because ...

YA

... I went a bit nuts here. I also didn't make it into the final book in Patrick Ness's 'Chaos Walking' trilogy. Instead, I read:

Frances Hardinge's Fly by Night, a dense rich Christmas cake of a book, not original in its coming of age theme, but, as with The Lost Conspiracy, a lovingly constructed setting.

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's Dash & Lily's Book of Dares - a very professional, pretty engaging, rather irritating teenage-misfits-in-New-York story.

Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead - I blogged Jolisa Gracewood's interview with Healey last year, and was really impressed by this book, in the tradition of Margaret Mahy's supernatural teenage books, and Maurice Gee's halfmen of O.

Essays

50% here. I made it through E.B. White's One Man's Meat but not Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs. I put the White anthology down a few times, but it worried away at the edge of my mind and I ended up finishing it. I don't know if this was the right place to start reading White's essays; perhaps his New York essays, rather than his small farm in Maine essays, would have been a better launchpad. But this collection does add up to more than the sum of its parts - deep concerns and steady affections run beneath the small daily happenings.

Instapaper

I was blessed with an iPad for Christmas, and I put it to good use with dozens, if not hundreds, of saved articles using Instapaper from my own and friends' accounts. I'll round up some of the highlights here over the next week.

Holiday reading list

For the past few weeks I've been mentally tending to my Christmas holiday reading pile, adding and removing and debating over books. Here's where I'm at now:

Non-fiction

I'm still working my way through the 2010 Royal Society science book shortlist. I'm currently reading (and loving) Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution:

Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it's more engaging if it's seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthropomorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges, repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there.

From that shortlist, I also have Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc2? on loan from the library to take away with me.

Essays

Having recently been bowled over by this 1969 interview with E.B. White, I've collected a copy of One Man's Meat, a 1944 collection of his essays, written on his farm in Maine.

And left-over from last Christmas: Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs.

Fiction

A buck three way - the first three books of Anthony Powell's Dance to the music of time in one chubby edition, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl.

Young Adults

The last book in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men has finally arrived in paperback, so I could finally satisfy my obsessive-compulsive need to have a copy that matched my first two books in the series. In an act of great sacrifice, I lent my brand-new copy to a friend who I recently put on to the series. I'll be collecting it back on my travels.

Chance

I'm housesitting for an avid reader during my holiday, so all the good intentions above may be swept away by the call of their bookshelf.

Reading and writing

I still feel a moment of 'they're reading our books over there' parochial pride when I see New Zealand children's and YA authors getting mentioned in international magazines and blogs. In this piece on returning to reading YA fiction, American writer Elizabeth Bachner bookends her article with observations on Margaret Mahy's The Changeover

In the beginning of Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, a teenage girl in New Zealand, Laura, picks up a bottle of shampoo called Paris. There’s a picture on it, of a lovely girl with the Eiffel Tower behind her bare shoulder, but the label is forced to tell the truth in tiny print: “Made in New Zealand, it said, Wisdom Laboratories, Paraparaumu.”

Just for a moment Laura had a dream of washing her hair and coming out from under the shower to find that she was not only marvelously beautiful but transported to Paris. However, there was no point in washing her hair if she were only going to be moved as far as Paraparaumu. Besides, she knew her hair would not dry in time for school, and she would spend half the morning with chilly ears. These were facts of everyday life, and being made in New Zealand was another. You couldn’t really think your way into being another person with a different morning ahead of you, or shampoo yourself into a beautiful city full of artists drinking wine and eating pancakes cooked in brandy.

If I need a good blow-out, I pick up Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy's fatalism - his utter refusal to give you an easy ending - and his sparse, diamond-hard writing leaves me undone every time. So naturally, I'm inclined to disagree with Allen Barra over his argument that Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove is a better Western than McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Then I recall that I haven't read either book, and update my Goodreads to-read list.*

Lev Grossman, author and Time magazine's book critic, blogs about the two kinds of writers: soloists and thieves. I wonder if this applies to artists as well? I know some artists who are particularly porous, and going to a new show is an experiment in guessing what they've been looking at recently.

I don’t understand how the Soloists do it. It’s like they’re sailing across the Atlantic without instruments — coolly, no map, no reference points, just navigating by the feel of the tiller. The Soloists I know avoid other novels like the plague when they’re writing. It’s like reading them will pollute their pure bloodlines or something.

As a Thief, I don’t have that need for purity. But I would give anything for that sense of absolute direction. Like perfect pitch — Soloists don’t need to tune to anything. To go back to the navigation metaphor, I’m constantly checking my GPS and taking sextant readings and heaving the log and shooting azimuths and God knows what else, just to make sure I haven’t wandered off the map into some bizarre territory where I’ve forgotten that sentences are supposed to have verbs in them or something.

In the New Republic, Elizabeth D. Samet writes about using Sherlock Holmes to teach first-year students at West Point. Samet is trying to tell her students that the knowledge they already have is importnant, and that the knowledge that they pick up as they move through life will be useful in unexpected ways:

I’ve taken to visiting 221B Baker Street on the first day of class because I can’t think of anyone who leverages knowledge more effectively.

I ask my students to read a passage near the beginning of A Study in Scarlet (the detective’s first appearance), in which Dr. Watson vainly attempts to itemize precisely what Holmes knows: next to nothing about literature, philosophy, astronomy, and politics; “practical” but idiosyncratic facts of botany, geology, anatomy, and British law; the most minute details of chemistry and “sensational literature.” After concluding his list by noting that Holmes not only “plays the violin well” but is also “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman,” Watson throws it into the fire “in despair” of ever figuring out what kind of profession could possibly require this eclectic catalogue of “accomplishments.”

Finally, two medical memoirs:

• an incredibly moving piece by art critic Tom Lubbock on losing language to a brain tumour, from the Guardian
• a lengthy, fevered piece by Hilary Mantel on recovering from surgery from the LRB

*Has anyone else ever been put off reading Lonesome Dove because the title sounds too like The Thorn Birds and you're still recovering from the you-knew-it-was-wrong-even-at-the-time pleasure of reading the latter in your early teens? Anyone?

Absence makes the adventures better

In an interesting article this week children's book editor Leila Sales asked why dead parents are such a common feature of children's books, and suggested laziness was part of the answer:

Dead parents are so much a part of middle-grade and teen fiction at this point, it's not even the "in" thing. It's not "au courant" or "en vogue." It's just an accepted fact: kids in books are parentless.

But I don't accept it, because you know what? It is not believable that so many kids are missing one, if not both parents. Slews of them! Hundreds! To quote Oscar Wilde, sort of: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a parent in nearly every children's book looks like lazy writing." (I assume that is what Wilde meant.)

Of course, dead or removed or simply not-very-involved parents are almost the necessary ingredient in a good adventure or fantasy story (the Swiss Family Robinson aside). Sales's article did make me do a quick mental review of some of my old and current favourites:

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis) - absent parents, guardian figure who subtly encourages adventure

The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White) - obscured parental situation results in effective orphan status, one bumbling guardian figure, one guardian figure who subtly encourages adventure

I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith) - dead mother, obdurate (possibly mad) father, one of the best step-mothers in fiction. The Mortmains remain my favourite fictional family.

Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfield)- three orphans, collected by an absent eccentric, given two female guardian figures and a handy mechanic.

When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead) - absent father, father stand-in, mother. Less mad-cap than the Mortmains, but a beautifully drawn group of relationships.

Summerlands (Michael Chabon) - dead mother, grieving father (who needs to be rescued)

A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle) - absent father (who needs to be rescued), preoccupied mother

Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O'Dell) - girl and her brother left behind after tribe abandons island

His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) - secret parentage disguised as orphanhood; helpless mother and missing father

Tender Morsels (Margo Lanagan) - disguised fatherhood, close mother

How I Live Now (Meg Rosoff) - exasperated father, text-book stepmother, guardian figure hurriedly absents herself

The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness) - tragedy atop tragedy.

Web muster (YA edition)

Imogen Russell-Williams in the Guardian on swearing in children's books: thank goodness soemthing else found the faux-cussing in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan brought it down from a near 5 star to a 4

Another favourite of mine, Scott Westerfeld, whose ear for invented language is usually sound, grated on me a bit with Leviathan, a steampunk alternate history of events leading into the first world war. "Clart" is a good coinage for "shit" – it sounds appropriately dirty – but "bum-rag" just gets overused by the heroine-posing-as-hero in her attempts to swagger convincingly, and "Barking spiders!" is frankly rubbish. There are loads of better authentic early 20th century swear-words. Even "damn" would do nicely for a bit of variation.

Two of my favourites for children's book swearing (not, on reflection, that I should have such a category): Melvin Burgess's Bloodtide and Michael de Larrabeiti's Borribles series.

A new biography of Roald Dahl is out: (heartrending) extract here; Guardian review here; Telegraph review here.

And the last book in Suzanne Collins' Mockingjay series has hit the shelves. In a New York Times review Katie Roiphe observes:

THE 17-year-old girl at the center of the revolution is a great character without being exactly likable. Katniss is bossy, moody, bratty, demanding, prickly. She treats the world with an explosive aggression that is a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. ... In short, she belongs to a recent tribe of popular heroines: the small, difficult teenage girl who manifests enormous physical and moral strength. She is both murderer and victim, somehow representing female strength and female vulnerability all mingled and entwined, dangerously, ambiguously, into one. She is Pippi Longstocking. She is the girl with the dragon tattoo. She is mesmerizing in her way of defying authority, antisocial, courageous, angry, self-involved and yet somehow sweepingly sympathetic.

So, not exactly Matilda or Tiffany Aching or - as Laura Miller observes on Salon - Bella Swan. (Although if you were going to make comparisons between the eminently infuriating Bella Swan and another YA character, I'm be picking Grace Brisbane in Maggie Stiefvater's Wolves of Mercy Falls soon-to-be trilogy).

I just picked up Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia yesterday, and am thoroughly enjoying it; I'd really recommend the bibliography on her site for reminders and recommendations of great YA fantasy (you can't link directly, so just hit the Books for Kids link in the left-hand side navigation).

Books For B.

I talked to someone over the weekend who is reading Ursula Le Guin's classic Earthsea series for the first time, with intent.

In the interest of sharing, a few books I recommend if you're starting your YA fantasy reading a little late (or just looking for some good storytelling)

Kelly Link Pretty Monsters

The stories in Link's first collection for YA readers are generally more traditionally told than her stories for adults: they all have a proper ending. The stories are dark, inventive, and involving; a race of people living in an old lady's handbag, a dead girl who follows a boy home, a girl who becomes a servant to a magician.

Reviewing the collection for the Guardian Tom Lee concludes

Ultimately, [the stories] play to the experience and fertile imagination of the bookish, cultish teenager rather than those looking for the next Kafka or Borges.

... I didn't see the problem with that, myself.

Margo Lanagan Tender Morsels

If YA writing was chocolate, Lanagan would be the 90% cacao bar - dark to the point of bitter, smooth but not at all sweet. I had to read this book - a retelling of the fairytale of Rose Red and Snow White, and exploration of just how much a parent will do to protect her children - in small, slow doses, completely unlike my normal rip-through-it style.

Meg Rosoff, writing for the Guardian (the best source of YA reviews I've found, their reviewers are tremendous), notes

From the first paragraph we are transported to an authentically dark place that hums with cruelty and perversion; it seems only right to warn those tempted to buy the book for precocious young readers that the early chapters of Tender Morsels are filled with acts of sexual violence - the sort that feel more, not less, terrifying for being presented in folkloric style.

Meg Rosoff How I Live Now

I've blogged about this book before - a masterpiece as much in what Rosoff leaves blank as what she describes for the reader.

Rebecca Stead When You Reach Me

For younger readers than the three books above, but a lesson in taut writing and clever plotting nonetheless.

In this love-letter to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (which should be read first, but should really have been read when you were 10), among many things Stead evokes that feeling of passionate attachment to your favourite books:

'I was getting annoyed. The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my book. It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.'

PS: If any of you are on goodreads, let me know ...

Father figures

Andrew Martin's recent article on the ways fathers are depicted in popular culture and particularly children's and YA literature is an interesting read.

While I strenously disagree with his take on Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle' ("Cassandra's father borrows his daughter's coloured crayons in order to plan his supposed epic; and she solicitously provides him with glasses of milk. He is completely broke, in spite of that castle, which he doesn't own, but only rents.") he does nail the point that absent or ineffectual parents are almost necessary to children's fiction, particularly the fantasy-tinged variety. After all, when does anything interesting happen when your parents are around? From the piggish parents in Roald Dahl's 'Matilda' to whoever the parents are in The Famous Five, from Harry Potter's dead, heroic, parents to Mr and Mrs Darling, lack of parental oversight is integral to adventure.

Often however there's the stand-in adult, the adult who seems more on the side of the child than the grown-ups. From Merlyn in 'The Sword in the Stone' to Mary Poppins, or the great uncles of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' and the 'The Dark is Rising', these characters are shaman-like figures, guiding children between worlds.

There are though some books that draw warm, insightful relationships relationship between parents and children, Roald Dahl's 'Danny, Champion of the World', Rebecca Stead's 'When You Reach Me', Michael Chabon's 'Summerlands', and the most searing account of parenting I've ever read, Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'.

Mistopia

Laura Miller's review of Suzanne Collin's Hunger Games trilogy in a recent New Yorker has got me thinking.

Miller writes:

Collins’s trilogy is only the most visible example of a recent boom in dystopian fiction for young people. Many of these books come in series, spinning out extended narratives in intricately imagined worlds. In Scott Westerfeld’s popular “Uglies” series, for example, all sixteen-year-olds undergo surgery to conform to a universal standard of prettiness determined by evolutionary biology; in James Dashner’s “The Maze Runner,” teen-age boys awaken, all memories of their previous lives wiped clean, in a walled compound surrounded by a monster-filled labyrinth. The books tend to end in cliff-hangers that provoke their readers to post half-mocking protestations of agony (“SUZANNE, ARE YOU PURPOSELY TOURTURING YOUR FANS!?!?!?”) on Internet discussion boards.

I read the first in Westerfeld's Uglies series, and wasn't that taken - I much preferred his more recent Leviathan, written for slightly younger readers. But while I'd disagree that the dystopian theme is a recent phenomenon (and Miller herself points to a number of earlier books that show that this is a consistently popular genre - and leaves out terrific examples like Melvyn Burgess's Bloodtide) I can't help but admit I've been sucked in.

I have about 12 YA titles on order at the moment - half through the Children's Bookshop in Kilbirnie, and half through Amazon.

Among my Amazon orders are the impulse buy of the Hunger Games trilogy. This breaks my own rule of only buying books I've read and loved. But I've heard so much the trilogy that I couldn't resist it (Miller's review isn't altogetherly positive, but at the same time I'm not sure I agree with her take on some contemporary YA fiction). In the same way, with the friendly nudge of a voucher, I bought the first two books of Mandy Hager's Blood of the Lamb trilogy on the recommendation of a trusted reader.

Part of the reason for buying the two series is to compare them to two others - Maurice Gee's Salt/Gool/Limping Man, and Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy (yes, it appears I am getting a wee bit serious about this YA caper). All four series have similarities of adventure, danger, social collapse, and the struggle of young people, who are affected by the society that they live in, but are largely unable to affect society back. Not to mention the spun-out narrative that has to hit two crescendos before resolution in the third volume. (Mind you, Gee's 'Salt' stand alone nicely.)

For a totally different take on dystopian future society however, there's New Zealand author Bernard Beckett's Genesis. It's a coolly told, taut little story, that bucks many of the trends described above. Here's what I wrote after finishing it a few weeks ago:

Years ago I did a research contract which included, for some reason, digging out a Cold War-era government report detailing plans to stockpile iodine tablets in the events of a nuclear disaster. The theory was that New Zealand was sufficiently distant from international events that our major concern would be nuclear fall-out, and taking iodine tablets would protect the population (yes, I had flashbacks during the Tamiflu debacle too).

Distance has been a defining part of the European/...more Years ago I did a research contract which included digging out a Cold War-era government report detailing plans to stockpile iodine tablets in the events of a nuclear disaster. The theory was that New Zealand was sufficiently distant from international events that our major concern would be nuclear fall-out, and taking iodine tablets would protect the population (yes, I had flashbacks during the Tamiflu debacle too).

Distance has been a defining part of the Pakeha conception of Aotearoa New Zealand. Bernard Beckett takes this is the leaping off point for a story that could have easily been written as a thriller, but is instead told in a measured, dispassionate tone that is nonetheless gripping.

The first decades of the 21st century have not gone well. Plague sweeps the world. A wealthy business-man - who styles himself Plato - removes himself to the islands of Aotearoa, building an enormous sea fence around what becomes known as the Republic, freezing out the rest of the planet from the 2030s.

The action (if that's the right word for Genesis) takes place an undefined number of years later. Anaximander is a citizen of the Republic. In her late teens, Anaximander has been rigorously preparing for the entrance examination for The Academy - a 5-hour interrogation by three examiners on her chosen topic.

Anaximander's topic is Adam Forde, a young man who died in the early decades of the new Republic, and has become something of a folk hero. Adam is a member of the Philosopher class, the top level of the Republic's society, who effectively govern the state. Adam's rebellious nature sees him demoted to Soldier class, and he is sent to man one of the towers overlooking the Sea Fence, with orders to destroy on sight any vessels or people he sees approaching the Republic's sea borders, to keep the threat of plague at bay. Until one day a small boat carrying a teenage girl floats over the horizon ...

The rest of Adam's story could easily be told as a typical futuristic dystopian thriller, centred on the struggle of one clear-sighted individual against the State to which almost all have blindly or gratefully subsumed themselves. However, Anaximander's tells her story as a scholar, albeit a scholar with strong views and personal attachment to her theory and her subject. As she is grilled by the examiners on points about the Republic's history and social structure, and her explanations for Adam's behaviour, the tension is relocated to Anaximander's attempts to second-guess the increasingly bewildering actions of her examiners.

Genesis might be a slim book, but its ideas are weighty. Like Jostein Gaardner's Sophie's World it introduces philosophical questions about how society should be ordered, and in particular, what makes us human, through the form of a central character who is constantly prodded to answer and explain situations. Modelled - unsurprisingly - on the Socratic method of reaching understanding through slow questioning and answering, Beckett achieves an effect which is almost like watching a play compared to sitting through a blockbuster. I have no idea whether teens would enjoy this, and I don't think it's a book I *love* as such. But it deserves a lot of respect.

Face value

I'm in a somewhat privileged position. I'm not reliant on exhibition branding to get me into a show (in New Zealand at least). Most of the time, when I see that such-and-such an artist has a show coming up, I either already know their work well, know their work a little, or know the place that they're showing well enough to make a stab at what kind of show it will be.

As a result, I pay little attention to exhibition branding, and it only really sticks out to me if it's particularly attractive, or seems at odds with the show (the title & font used in City Gallery's current 'Ready to Roll', for example, has a kind of Gen X nostalgia that doesn't seem to sit so well with the artists in the show).

I was mulling this over this morning in relation to book covers. The above rule tends to apply to authors whose work I already know. I'll pretty much ignore the cover design (unless it's gorgeous/ugly, and yes, occasionally I'll splurge in the hardback just because I like its looks) because I already have a feel for the content.

But like so many readers, when it comes to unfamiliar authors, the cover and blurb are crucial factors (along with a quick Google for Guardian or LRB reviews). Which is scary if the 0.8 second rule really does apply. Sometimes even a book with a really good reputation will pass me by, because I'm so put off by the cover and blurb.


Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now is a case in point. Here's the blurb from the inside cover flap:

It would be much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love at an Extreme Time in History. But let's face it ...

Daisy is sent to England from New York to live with her cousin's for a perfect summer.

There are four of them: Osbert, Isaac, Edmond and Piper. Three boys and a girl. And two dogs and a goat.

Daisy has never met anyone like them before. Especially Edmond.

This summer will change her life. It will change the world too.

I've been picking this book up and putting it back down for about 6 months now. Everything about it screamed teenage girl coming of age bittersweet love affair small-but-titillating amount of impropriety country idyll weird relations. It felt like the kind of book Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm still takes the piss out of (with some late-20th-century concerns thrown in).

And it's not. I finished the book on Friday night, then picked it up and read it straight through again. Daisy's voice - like that of Todd in Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go - cuts you to the quick. The irregular writing - muddled tenses, emphatic capitalisations, sprawling sentence structure - makes you aware of the way you're reading, as well as the driving narrative.

Re-reading the book, I was struck by how much Rosoff leaves out. Only weeks after Daisy's arrival England is occupied by an unnamed invader, and social structures rapidly collapse - the family is split up, and the story rapidly moves from one of typical teenage introspection and rather atypical first love, into a desperate fight for survival. But the conflict is described only from Daisy's perspective - and she's not all that interested in the details. Somehow this makes the story more compelling, not less - rather than being an all-knowing narrator, she's a normal person, not altogetherly sure about the whos and the whats and the therefores.

I sometimes think a key to being a great painter is knowing when to walk away from the canvas. How I Live Now made me think of this. Like Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me there's no backfill, no extraneous detail. Just extraordinary writing and a haunting story.

Pick a path

Best of lists always create antagonism (unless the list in question is this year's Turner or Walters prize finalists, both of which have pretty much disappeared without creating a ripple).

These lists of the Best Children's Books Ever by Lucy Mangan for The Guardian certainly raised ire as well as endorsement in the comments section. But debate's part of the fun, right? Why pick Matilda over Danny, Champion of the World (or Boy) - and so on, and so on.

I can't speak for the books for wee kids, but I think the lists for 8-12 and 12 and over are real gems. I particularly like the way recent books (Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, for example) are mixed with the often-snobbishly-overlooked (come on, what girl didn't feel secretly relieved upon reading Are you there God? It's me, Margaret) and the classics - The Borrowers, I Capture the Castle.

Sure, if I were including a saccharine morality tale for girls I might have gone for A Little Princess over Little Women (only because I still resent Jo's decision - why, Jo? For the love of god, WHY?) . I would have liked to see either Ursula Le Guin or Madeleine L'Engle in there. And naturally, I'm pissed that The Sword in the Stone - hands down best children's book ever - doesn't feature. But nonetheless, you should check the lists out.

Score!

So, turns out Friday is book day round here right now.

I saw a bunch of news stories today about Puffin's 70 best-ever children's book list. I couldn't figure out why none of them linked to said list - then I realised you had to go to the Puffin site, navigate to their anniversary sub-site, go to Downloads, and then open a (slow-loading in NZ, just a warning) Flash file to read what is actually an entire, and rather wonderful, book that covers babies to teenagers. So, my Friday gift to you ... The Puffin Handbook (open with care, and whatever you do, don't click the circle beside the left-hand arrow, it takes you back to the homepage).



One of the nice things about the book is the way it mixes classics and recent publications, and the small recommendation lists. [YAY! The Guardian has published the list as a list]

I read a lot of YA, but I tend to read classics, or stuff that falls into the fantasy sci/fi category. I think I do this because YA set in this everyday world is often shallow, or modeled on the same dreary stuff that adult fiction is - so what's the point?

But I'm trying to self-medicate, and I'm starting with Mal Peet's Exposure. You might argue it's fantasy, but I don't care.

Exposure is the third in Peet's series of books about football (that's soccer to us NZers), set in a imagined South American country with one continuous character, leading sports journalist Paul Faustino.

This third book is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello. Othello is a superstar soccer player, bought in from the North for fifty million dollars to play for Rialto. 'Born in the North, and famously proud of his African heritage', Otello comes to Rialto at the cost of the transfer of one of their white players, doesn't endear him to his team mates. All hell to break loose when Otello and americana (white) pop-star Desmeralda fall in love and marry - especially with Desmeralda's rich, powerful father, who is also a part-owner of Rialto, who objects to the colour of his new son-in-law's skin. Throw in Iago in the form of Otello's janus-faced manager Diego, and boom - you're off.

The story of Dezi and Otello - of paparazzi, charity auctions, and controversial product endorsements - is intercut with that of three street kids, living under the threat of the 'Rat-catchers' (government employees clearing the streets prior to an election campaign) and vague rumours of deaths and disappearances. There's something about the narrative structure that reminds me of the tv series The Wire - slices of society that rub up against each other almost unknowingly, but whose actions have flow-on effects, sometimes immense. And awash, of course, with corruption and emotion.

My favourite review of the book was a no-stars write-up on Google Buzz, with the reader complaining that "The story is improbable". Well - duh. Shakespeare is. People fall head over in heels in love after two sentences and a bit of merry gender confusion. With Exposure, you just need to accept it - of course two young hot kids from different side of the social divide are going to fall drastically in love - and then roll with it.

Exposure is a rollicking good tale. But the quality of the writing sets it apart. I'm half-way into the book and I know we're about to enter the 'murder mystery' storyline, and the slightly hard-boiled tone of the writing is perfect. One of my favourite passages so far:

Walking back to his car, Diego smiles. It's like walking on eggshells, talking to Otello about drinking. Diego likes the way they crunch beneath his feet.

So, sport. And life, death, love, and betrayal. If you want an equally gripping non-fiction take on all this, I highly recommend H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, about high-school football in Odessa, Texas, and the origin of the terrific (and scandalously badly-programmed) tv series of the same name.

Off topic

I don't usually post about what I'm reading, but over the past 6 months I've fallen back in love with YA fiction, and like anyone who's full to the gills with dopamine, I feel the need to talk about my loved one.*

Sometimes you open a book and the voice grabs you on the first page and doesn't let you go until the last. These three are like that:

Patrick Ness The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first book in the Chaos Walking trilogy)

A good fantasy (I've reclaimed that word too) writer creates a world that is totally believable. Todd Hewitt's world is a settler colony, where humans have beaten the indigenous population into submission, but somewhere in the war suffered a terrible loss. As a result, there are only men in Todd's world - men whose Noise, their every thought, is broadcast for all to hear.

Rebecca Stead When You Reach Me

A slim, perfect book about love, death, friendship, being 12, and time travel - and a love letter to Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' to boot.

I ordered Stead's book through the public library after finding out it was the winner of last year's Newbery Medal. When I picked it up and saw the big print, I felt disappointed; I'd been excited, but thought that even with my growing passion for children's and YA novels, this was going to be too simple. It wasn't. Stead gradually reels out and satisfyingly ties up (but not too tightly) a complex story with a minimum of verbiage.

Margo Lanagan Tender Morsels

If The Knife of Never Letting Go is dark at times, Tender Morsels is midnight. An often unsettling re-telling of the Grimm story of Rose-Red and Snow-White, this is some of the best writing I've read in years.

When Neil Gaiman spoke at Wellington Town Hall earlier this year, the thing I was most struck by were his comments on CS Lewis.

Like me (and many, many fortunate people) Gaiman didn't get the Christian references in the Narnia series until quite late in the series (me, I had to wait until my born-again uncle told me). He observed, sweetly, that as a Christian allegory, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was obviously a bit of a failure. He felt instead that Lewis crammed into TLTW&TW all the things he loved from Christian, Greek and other mythologies.

The next few books aren't quite as astounding as the ones above, but each has, in Gaiman's sense, a Lewisian aspect.

Lev Grossman The Magicians

I'm not usually a fan of the 'Like a mixture of X and Y with a dash of Z' although I would make an exception for Luca Turin, who described a perfume as embodying the child Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller didn't have. But the reviewer who described The Magicians as the missing link between the Narnia books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History was on to something.

As soon as I read the opening page of 'The Magicians' I felt like I was reading along to a New Romantic soundtrack, all cutting observations and floppy fringes. Brilliant and unloved, 17-year-old Quentin Coldwater is still secretly yearning for the imaginary world of the British 1930s fantasy series he read as a child - and still covertly re-reads - to be real. Quentin would trade in his real existence for a magic wardrobe any day. And then it happens.

Scott Westerfeld Leviathan

Philip Pullman had daemons - Westerfeld has a alternate world where Darwin didn't just figure out evolution - he also invented genetic engineering. As a result Europe is poised on the brink of an equivalent to World War I, with the cultural lines drawn between the Clankers (the Austro-Hungary alliance which has developed a mechanical culture) and the British Allies who power their society with genetic splicing. Occasionally clunky writing (and terrible terrible fake swearing) is overcome by the sheer awesomeness of this vision.

Frances Hardinge The Lost Conspiracy (alternative title: Gullstruck Island)

When I read Elizabeth Knox's YA duo - the Dreamhunter books - I felt she'd failed to provide a sufficiently detailed, sufficiently strange alternate late-colonial New Zealand. The books just didn't have that lushness of imagination, that wealth of detail that you sink into, that The Hobbit or TLTW&TW have.

Hardinge is not short on invention. In fact, this book is relentlessly, overwhelmingly inventive. As an adult reader I felt occasionally overladen, but have you ever heard a kid who loves reading complain about a book being too long, or too full of remarkable things? I can't actually even begin to tell you what the books about - try the link above instead.


*Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle - first read when I was in my early teens - remains one of my favourite books. Writing that sentence reminds me of the part in the book when Thomas tells Cassandra that he knows Rose is not really in love with Stephen, because she never talks about him - people who are in love stop going on about the object of their affections. I Capture the Castle is, of course, a classic coming of age tale, and on reflection, that's the thread that binds all six of these books together.