Kids today, vol. LCXVIII

I am way late to this particular dust-up but thought I'd weigh in anyway. Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece bemoaning YA (that's young adult) literature as too violent, degenerate, disturbing, etc. etc. I might agree there are a few too many vampires -- thank you, Stephenie Meyer! -- but the notion that we're damaging fragile young minds with upsetting content ... oh, PUH-LEEZE. Which is a point many others have made very well, mainly on Twitter through a hashtag called #yasaves (you don't have to have a Twitter account to search it, did you know?).  There has been a lot of response, from writers and others -- accounts of the dust-up here and here and one I particularly like, by Linda Holmes from NPR's blog Monkeysee, here (my favorite line: "I also took an entire class in high school where we read books about killing your family, double suicide, drowning, being murdered in your bed ... it was called 'Shakespeare,' I believe."). Another funny piece about trends in YA lit by writer David Lubar dating from 2002 is here. And now the formidable Sherman Alexie, whose YA book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, was singled out for censure in the original essay, has responded in the WSJ.

Literature about adolescence, aimed at adolescent readers, often deals with turmoil. It's a turbulent time of life, even if you're not dealing with abuse, cutting, anorexia, vampires or other trauma. And that's OK, even the realistic turmoil that is the most upsetting, in my experience. I still shudder when I think about the books that upset me the most as a young reader: The ones where they have to kill the animals (The Yearling, Old Yeller). Anything by John Steinbeck. One I can't remember the title of for the life of me but it was about a family of kids were trying to stay in their house after their parents died; it was set in the '30s, I think, and the oldest sister was being pressured to marry a creepy neighbor guy. All of these were assigned to me in my wholesome rural public school in the 1970s.

Like many of the commenters on this subject, I also read a lot of adult literature with graphic content when I was pretty young, like in junior high school  -- Fear of Flying,The World According to Garp, Wifey, other, various paperbacks I somehow got hold of at friends' houses. I read The Outsiders, the book that the Wall Street Journal writer considers the founding text of this evil trend -- and its sequel, That Was Then This Is Now. Conservative family types take note: that book effectively scared me off ever trying LSD.

And even though some of those books were disturbing and upsetting, I'm glad I read them. I would hate to have somehow made it to 18 thinking the world was the one depicted in Anne of Green Gables or Narnia or the Little House series -- books I loved and kept reading as into adolescence, by the way. What a terrible shock it would have been, on reaching adulthood, to learn the terrible truth at such an advanced age.

This idea that childhood should be extended through adolescence, and kept in some kind of bubblewrap of niceness and good behavior is delusional and I don't think you're doing kids any favors, either. As Judy Blume put it, kids are pretty good judges of their own reading. If they don't like it, they'll put it down. That was always my reaction to the insanely popular -- and disturbing -- Flowers in the Attic series by V.C. Andrews. Same thing with the works of Stephen King.  I took a look and decided they weren't for me. Then I went back to reading Jane Eyre and Jane Austen and the gentle sex-free romances of Georgette Heyer that we had around the house. Sounds like a conservative family values book reviewer's dream, right? Except for the Garp and Wifey parts, I suppose.

Last rant: the aspect of the WSJ piece that REALLY irritates me is their recommended titles for young readers -- separated by gender! What the hell!??!!! What is this, 1952???? One of the truly great things about reading is that you can learn about all kinds of experiences from anyone. Pigeonholing kids and their recommended reading, by gender or any other division, is stupid. And, I might add, pointless.

Reading about a Revolution

Biographies of the Founding Fathers have been all the rage for well over a decade -- and I don't think I've read one of them. Neither of McCullough's big hits, John Adams or 1776. Not Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin. Not the works of Joseph Ellis or the many others too numerous to mention. Not for of lack of interest but ... I guess lack of enough interest. I plan to give Ron Chernow's Pulitzer-winning Washington biography a read, if only because Titan, Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller, is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books. I've owned his Alexander Hamilton book in hardcover since it was published for the same reason (even if I still haven't read it). But I recently realized that I have been reading quite a bit about the Revolutionary era -- all of it in fiction. Which makes sense since, for the last couple years, my reading has veered heavily fictional -- especially historical fiction (blame that on the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar). And if you asked me what period I mostly read in, historical fiction-wise, I would have said Tudor or maybe medieval England. But looking back, and recently, it seems an awful lot of the better stuff has been set in Massachusetts, just prior to the Revolution.

Maybe I am drawn to these books because I was born and brought up in Massachusetts. Although the first of these books I read, The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, is set in New York and the Pennsylvania frontier. But since then it's been all Bay State and it's focused largely on women: Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, set in Boston, and Sally Gunning's excellent trilogy (so far; I'm hoping there will be more): The Widow's War, Bound and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke. The first two of Gunning's books are set on Cape Cod but the third takes place in Boston, mostly, and includes a firsthand view of the event we know as the Boston Massacre as well as a couple cameos from our future second President, John Adams.

I recommend any and all of these as fine works of historical fiction that should both entertain you and give you an idea of what living in those times was actually like. They are not history tracts; The Whiskey Rebels is set after the Revolution and the first two of Gunning's books touch only glancingly on the tensions between England and the Colonies. But they all meet what, to me, is the primary test of historical fiction set in times about which we know a lot -- they make you forget the known outcome of events and experience the tension and uncertainty of the people who were living through them.

RIP, belatedly

Recently I learned that two writers I admire - very different from each other - had died. Embarrassingly, it seems they died months ago but I somehow missed the news in both cases. Despite the fact that I try to keep an eye on literary news in all kinds of media. In my defense I can only say that I had good reasons to be a little distracted and disconnected early this winter. The first I heard about was Diana Norman - a writer better known in recent years and on this side of the Atlantic as Ariana Franklin. She wrote a series of historical mysteries generally known by the title of the first book in the series: Mistress of the Art of Death. And as I learned from this obituary in The Guardian, she had a long and interesting writing career, both as a journalist and a writer of historical fiction, before that series. The Mistress of the Art of Death books helped get me started on what has become a three-year (so far) jag of historical mysteries; set in the 12th century, they follow a female physician who winds up in Henry II's England. I have no basis on which to judge their historical authenticity but they are enjoyable reads. Now I'm going to have to track down her earlier novels, several of which are set in Revolutionary America.

The other, who actually died a few weeks before Norman, was Wilfrid Sheed. I came across the news while browsing through Slate's cultural coverage a couple days ago; here's Timothy Noah's appreciation and here's the New York Times obituary. Sheed spent quite a bit of time in Key West in the '90s; I may have met him once or twice but I certainly didn't know him. But I did really enjoy his writing, coming across his book Essays in Disguise when I was living in Miami right after college and my entire life, outside of work, consisted of buying books at Books & Books and reading. Sheed's essays, as the title indicates, were exactly the kind of literary journalism I like most -- intelligent, clear, appreciative, and written for readers, not the academy.

I am grateful to both of them for writing books that enriched my reading life. We have all four of the Mistress of Art of Death series in the library collection; unfortunately, we only have one of Sheed's books, his most recent, The House that George Built, about American popular music in the 20th century (the titular George is George Gershwin). For people who like literary essays I highly recommend Essays in Disguise and The Good Word. And for people curious about Sheed's Key West experiences, here's a Key West Diary he kept for Slate in 2001. It's a little name-droppy, to be sure, but not all the names are famous literary ones and it's definitely a picture of one slice of island life.

Simon Winchester: A (re)consideration

More than a decade ago, when Simon Winchester's book "The Professor and the Madman" came out, I was excited. This was exactly the kind of narrative nonfiction I love -- historical (set in the 19th century), literary (about two collaborators on the Oxford English Dictionary), written for laypeople. It got great reviews, both in the press and word of mouth. I bought a copy of the book. And I ... hated it. I had such a strong reaction, pretty early on, that I didn't even finish it. Which is very unusual for me. Since then, I've watched Winchester's career with regret because he continues to write about the kind of stuff I like to read about -- Krakatoa, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, brilliant oddballs who made major advances in our knowledge of the world. But I resisted, based on my bad reaction to that book.

Recently, a friend who reviewed Winchester's recent book Atlantic recommended that I reconsider. And it was just about then that a new, slim volume came across the library circulation desk: "The Alice Behind Wonderland." In that Winchester tells the tale behind the famous photograph of Alice Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson, better known to us as Lewis Carroll. The photograph is haunting and disturbing and especially famous since it was taken around the time that Dodgson entertained his young friend with a story that eventually became "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

So I picked up the book. And ... I liked it. I wish there had been more illustrations of other photographs discussed in the text (though fortunately in this age of the internet you can nose around on Google images and see almost anything). But whatever it was that I had a bad reaction to last time, it didn't happen. So I decided to go back to the Professor and the Madman. I can't remember precisely what turned me off so strongly though I remember it came around the time of the description of the Civil War service of one of the protagonists. Cautiously, I started reading.

And ... it's fine. I'm about a third of the way through and for the life of me I can't figure out why I had such an incredibly strong reaction the first time. Obviously the text has not changed so it must be me. Which is a relief, really, because now I can go back and read all of Winchester's other books about those subjects that interest me. I've noticed before, primarily in fiction, how reading the same book at different times of your life can make a huge difference ("To The Lighthouse" is a totally different book at 32 than it is at 19, for instance). So sorry about that Simon, but glad to have met up with you at last.

Best of the best of the best lists

Once again, the good librarians at the Williamsburg (Virginia) Regional Library have performed a public service and compiled all the best lists, awards and other honors for books published in 2010 for their annual megalist -- available as an Excel spreadsheet. The fiction winner is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which is kind of interesting since it hasn't won the Big Name awards (though it still has a shot at the Pulitzer, which is announced this month). And I was delighted to see that three of the eight writers in the Speculative Fiction category (Gary Shteyngart, Charles Yu and William Gibson) will be here for the 2012 Key West Literary Seminar, Yet Another World (check out the rest of the amazing line-up: still room to register!).  So, by the way, will the author of the No. 2 in fiction (and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner), Jennifer Egan. And yes, we have the vast majority of the top books listed here in the library collection.

BTW, for those of you who follow books more than basketball, that other big tournament is getting ready to wrap up -- The Tournament of Books -- and the championship round features the top two novels on Williamsburg's list, Freedom versus A Visit From The Goon Squad. The best part of this tournament is you can go back and read all the different rounds in whatever order you like. I suppose some might frown on this sort of competitive literary exercise, but it's all in good faith and good fun -- I've never seen cheap shots or nasty takedowns here. And any time I get to read anything by Elif Batuman, I'm happy. I wonder if they'd consider adding a nonfiction category?

Update: And the winner is ... A Visit From the Goon Squad! Which I'm delighted to hear, not only because I happen to have a copy of the book in my house (though I'll admit I haven't read it yet -- or Freedom, either) -- and because Egan will be here in Key West, in January, for the Key West Literary Seminar -- still time to sign up!).