Follow-up to City Hall : the list and other comments.

[seawasp]

First: We can't blame this merely on tradition. The books on this short list are all (relatively) new, not hoary old classics.

Here's the list:

     Acceleration by Graham Mcnamee: This one seems the most promising of the group, and is the one Chris selected. Quick summary: Duncan (main character) failed to save a drowning girl when he was sixteen (one year ago). Working his summer job, he comes across the diary of a person who's showing all the signs of becoming a serial killer; the police pay no attention and so he and his friends try to track and trap the writer of the diary.
   This isn't so bad in overview, and has potential to be a decent read; I am however suspicious of it on general principles, given experience with the prior years' reading list. There are So Many Ways a plot like this could go terribly bad in the end.

     Crackback by John Coy: Easily described -- High-school football star finds out other people on the team, including friends, are using steroids. Has to decide what to do about it.
     Really, do we need to fill their summer reading with "choose to do drugs or lose your friends?"

     Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata: Cheerful happy younger sister makes everything seem kira-kira (sparkling). Then they move from an accepting Japanese community to the deep South, Georgia, and then younger sister gets terribly ill.
     Maybe the younger sister lives? I suppose she MIGHT. But this is a Newbery book, and I would find it very surprising if they allow sister to survive.

     My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult: Oooh, this one looks great. Main character was conceived as a bone-marrow match for her sister, and has spent her life being used as a source of marrow for her older sister. Then she rebels as a teenager and naturally we know what she does to prove her rebellion. Again, MAYBE things end well, but I'm not seeing the likelihood here. If older sis hasn't gone into remission in (minimum) thirteen years, what's the likelihood she'll do so NOW? Either way things suck -- either older sister dies, freeing main character from the need to be a living marrow culture, but socking her with eternal guilt, or main character has to make terribly sucky choice.

     Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult: Little town suddenly shattered by an act of violence (I'm guessing something like a school shooting, given the timeframe of nineteen minutes and the age of the main witness). Main character could be the best witness but doesn't really remember what she saw. The trial then begins to fracture all the lines of unity in the community, separating friends, families, and the young and old.
     Ms. Picoult gets a double-header in this list, and given there's only six books I think that's rather unfair. Surely there's some other author writing nice ambiguous or even depressing fiction who deserved a shot here.
 

     The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom: Wounded war veteran has job fixing rides at an amusement park; gets himself killed as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart, and arrives in the afterlife, to find that heaven is where you have your life explained to you by five people.
     I bet this one's supposed to be "uplifting" by showing that even an apparently meaningless life is meaningful and full of special things, but I'm not sure you need to demonstrate this by first killing your protagonist (and given the phrasing, possibly killing him trying to do something and failing).


I'll say that this is a somewhat less completely DOOOMy list than the one from last year, and at least one appears to be maybe possibly halfway decent, depending. Still, I'd rather be seeing lists of books that would make me LOOK FORWARD to my summer reading.

Comments

[eacole72.livejournal.com]

Having read My Sister's Keeper, I would most definitely not consider it appropriate summer reading for a kid, even a teenager. The end had me in tears, and that's hard for fiction to do anymore. Then, in the author's afterward, she talked about what happened in her own life that led her to write the book, and that was even worse.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

Didn't that get made into a movie? I suspect the Five People one was too but can't remember for sure. Didn't watch either of them as the trailers looked no more attractive than these book blurbs.

[eacole72.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it did. It was supposed to have starred the Fanning sisters, but the older one didn't want to have to shave her head.

I'm not saying it isn't a good book. The story is powerful, and the writing is good. It's just not at all something that most kids & teenagers are emotionally equipped to handle. I doubt most adults really are, for that matter.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

gah ok, they found updated books that are as bad or worse than the classic ones they used to push. I think this is a warped sense of what constitutes important 'literature' combined with some vague sense that it is important to teach literature to young people.

No it is more important to teach them to read and if you can instill a love of learning so much the better. leave the 'literature' for collage classes that say they will talk about such subjects where smart people can avoid it.

Not all of those would be bad if it is what you want in a book or if the subject interested you. But to arbitrarily say that this is the list of what is important to read? Gah.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I actually saw part of a dramatisation of The Five People on TV one night; I thought it a bit maudlin and packed with Chopra-isms, and didn't watch it to the end, but I didn't find it depressing.

-- Steve thought the theme was better explored in It's a Wonderful Life six decades earlier.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Oh c'mon, Seawasp!

If it isn't a novel about a middle-aged professor gazing into his own navel and learning how depressing life is, it HAS to be a downbeat book teaching you that life is solitary, nasty, brutish and poor...or it ain't LITERATURE!

That happy ending stuff may be okay in, you know, GENRE fiction, where they don't have Our Standards (tm), but it just won't do for shaping impressionable young minds.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Except these aren't elitist literary titles, but middlebrow pulp. They have limited vocabularies and make few if any literary or artful references - heck they barely use metaphors.

Jodi Picoult is a top selling author of weepies and legal thrillers which are ready for the Lifetime Channel. "Five People You Meet In Heaven" is an tepid faux-spiritual book. I can't see teens liking any of them.

The three young adult books are dull, but only one is one of those pretentious historical books - the others are a genre thriller and a sports novel with preachy morals.

I expected depressing books, I didn't expect ones which are boring and not very smart.

[seawasp]

I think boring is pretty depressing to begin with, and these look pretty depressing even in their general subject matter.

The problem isn't the depression, but the absurd banlity.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

What the hey?

When you said depressing, I thought it was a list of only Robert "The Chocolate War" Cormier books.

Forget downbeat, that list is just banal and unfocussed, like someone went to an airport book store and grabbed things at random from the discount tables. At least the 3 young adult titles seem vaguely interesting. Who thinks a 10th grader is going to find Jodi Picoult compelling once, let alone twice? "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is to philosophical novels that Thomas Kinkade is to landscape painting.

I can think of hundreds of titles with age appropriate language that are better than those, depressing or not. Also, how hard is it to exclude books which have been made into movies? There's at least two on that list.

Re: The problem isn't the depression, but the absurd banlity.

[seawasp]

None of the ones I see there, except the mystery, look even vaguely interesting. They look like standard Newbery Award material, which generally means generally depressing and faux uplifting at the end, with a cheap poison-candy moral involved.

[kateshort.livejournal.com]

Here because I skimmed the list while working on aardy's computer. And because I'm a middle-school librarian who always reads stuff from our state library group's HS list. -grin-

Kira-Kira and Five People are the only ones in my middle school library. Kira-Kira is definitely middle-grades stuff, and several of the elementary libraries have it. Heck, the Newbery is for stuff that's aimed at kids "under 14" so... yeah. Haven't read it, but from the reviews, it's definitely tragic.

Five People is in 3/4 of our middle schools and in the HS. One professional review said it was a sweet book that made you smile. A girl from another middle school gave it 5 stars and said that she reread it FIVE TIMES. *blinkblink* I guess she liked it. It was a 2008 Abe Nominee. [The Abe Lincoln award is a young readers' award-- books are nominated by HS students / teachers / librarians and a panel of librarians and HS students picks 22 titles to go on the nominee list for the year.]

Acceleration is in one of our other middle schools and in the HS library. I've debated getting it, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. It sounds GOOD to me. It won the 2004 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery. It was an Abe Nominee for 2007.

Never heard of Crackback. Two middle schools and the high school have it. Lexile is only 490; one of the middle schools has it in the Quick Reads [Hi-Lo] section. One review said that it took a good long look at adults (his father and his coach included) who demand respect but don't really deserve it. Probably there for the sports jocks who hate to read.

My Sister's Keeper is at one middle school and at the HS. I'm pretty sure it was an Abe Lincoln nominee... yeah, it won the Abe in 2006. Haven't read it, but I've heard it was excellent.

Nineteen Minutes is the only one I've read, and I really couldn't put it down. It's tragic, horrifying, and sad. But it really can make students think about the effects of bullying, teasing, and taunting. It was an Abe Nominee in 2010, which is why I read it last fall.

I do agree that these are pretty dark and/or depressing overall. The thing is... that's a huge part of YA lit, isn't it? You end up with SO many books about orphans and abandoned kids and such, because the whole thing is about getting away from the parents and doing things on their own. And I think it's a backlash against the Happy Perfect Ending that kids always get in books they read in elementary school. Many of these are described in reviews as gripping page-turners, which will hook some of the students who normally wouldn't read anything during the summer. And while they aren't challenging in language, many of these are books that (supposedly) Make You Think once you're done reading them.

I'm trying to think of what would be good to add to the list... Maybe something like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, in which a HS girl secretly takes over the direction of pranks carried out by her boyfriend's all-male secret society. Maybe I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You, in which a HS girl attends a spy-training school for girls. Both of those had some funny bits. Maybe Heir Apparent, wherein a HS girl is trapped in a virtual-reality video game in which she's the secret heir to the throne, and must figure out the solution to the game before her brain is fried due to the machine being broken. That one is one I recommend to guys and girls often, since it's got medieval, futuristic, adventure, and mystery all in one.

What titles would you like to see on the list? My administrators always are more willing to listen to me talk about a problem if I've got a couple of suggestions for solutions...

[seawasp]

I would like to see books that don't look like anvils of education being dropped on my head, so to speak. Phrases like "It really can make students think about..." are instant aversion triggers. A book can't MAKE you think about anything, and if it's clearly assigned with an anvilicious moral in mind, it's more likely to teach cynicism.

I'd like books that make the kids happy to read them. Not depressed, or "oh, jeez, I have to read this THING." I see no reason every book has to have a *REASON* for being on the list, besides "DAMN, that would be fun book to read". I see reading as fun, I want my kids, and other people's kids, to learn nothing more or less than that: reading is fun. Anything that books have to teach will come NATURALLY once kids decide reading is something worth doing for its own sake.

I personally try to write books exactly in that vein. I want people to think "hey, reading this made my life a little brighter".

(Also, for Gog's sake STOP assigning Shakespeare's TRAGEDIES. The comedies, please, or The Tempest, but not four years of death, stupid choices, more death, humiliation, death, Pyrrhic victories, death... is there a pattern here?)

[aardy.livejournal.com]

(Note: the following is written without having read any book on that list, so I can't speak directly to their content or appropriateness for the average high schooler.)

If it weren't for the fact that many/most high-schoolers go through a phase where they are utterly enthralled with depressing books that have depressing endings, Lurlene McDaniel wouldn't have ever gotten her *second* book published, let alone her *60th*. Reader demand for doooomy stories among that age group is through the roof (in general, and exceptions are frequent, of course) and has been for a long time. So it's very possible that a large portion of the student body *could* look forward to that sort of book being their summer reading.

That's probably also a big reason why Shakespeare's tragedies get assigned so frequently, particularly Hamlet & R&J with their high levels of "teenage angst". (Another reason being, "Hey, they're interested in depressing stories anyway, lets point them at some capital-L Literature that's really similar in content & tone to the stuff they're reading for 'fun', and hope that some of them get hooked on the 'good' stuff!".)

As they get older, they generally grow out of that phase--often into the "women's book club" phase with such happy, uplifting, fun, escapist stories as "Brokeback Mountain".

That said, enjoyment of fun, escapist literature is also very common at that point--part of the "trying on new hats" and "living vicariously through fictional characters" of mid- to late adolescence, which I suspect also explains a large part of Twilight's popularity--and people don't grow into and out of the phase in universal lockstep, so it's wrong to assume that that's the only sort of book students'd be interested in. And I think a leaning towards reading only fun books is also much more common among truly voracious readers than occasional or average readers, for various reasons. I almost certainly would've hated--or at least been so leery of that I would've avoided--every book on that list when I was that age, even though I might appreciate them if I read them now; so I wish there were more fun, escapist books on the list, besides or in addition to the currently omnipresent Hunger Games, so that it'd be much closer to having something for everyone.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

Ugg. Much as I might complain about the boringness of much that is considered "classical literature," they're at least part of common culture so at least serve some function in getting literature references the rest of one's life. A list of books where I haven't heard of half of them and that don't sound that good seems inherently worthless in all ways.

The only times I've seen stranger reading lists have involved the logic "what books are they practically giving away in bulk that the school can acquire?" and even then this is a pretty pathetic list in my experience. On the other hand, I recall that growing up I rarely did more than half of my summer reading because I hated it so much, and I read voraciously of my own volition.

[saintonge.livejournal.com]

Of the six books, I've read one, MY SISTER'S KEEPER. It's one Hell of a good novel. It does not end happily for all concerned, but it ends well. And the writing is fine, the characters interesting, and the story is great.

[e-t-1.livejournal.com]

Donate some books, enough for at least one class period, for them to read (average of 30). Or if you want, enough for all of that one teacher's classes (average 30 * 6 classed/day = 180). Or go whole hog and get enough for the whole department. Don't forget to donate extras so that any lost or damaged books can be replaced. Add one for the teacher(s), too

OR, to get around the paper cost, get everyone a kindle/e-reader and then just copy the one file.