When Alex wakes on a Saturday morning, everything seems different. His mom is calling for him to hurry, but she sounds odd. And why does he need to get ready for school when it's the weekend? The last thing he remembers from the night before is leaving his best friend's house and running through the street. Now Alex feels very unusual. His mom calls again.
"Philip! It's five to eight!"
Author Martyn Bedford poses an unusual question in his novel Flip: What would you do if you woke up as someone else? Despite the improbable chance of this ever happening, it is a query that I often asked myself when I was younger.
No doubt this was fueled even more by viewings of Being John Malkovich, in which people pay to enter the head of the enigmatic actor. But while that film played the scenario for dark comedy, Bedford manages to really ponder the realities of dealing with such a problem down to the last detail.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Flip by Martyn Bedford
Thursday, January 26, 2012
FEED by MT Anderson
Have you been inside a Barnes and Noble lately? When I walk into my neighborhood Barnes and Noble their YA sections look like a New York Publisher’s marketing dream. An entire large section labeled “paranormal romance.” Really? Even more disheartening is this fact: ninety percent of the books on their shelves are written and marketed for girls. Honestly, in that sea of Sarah Dessens and Stephanie Meyers and Lauren Olivers it’s hard to find books for guys. Even sports books are hard to find, buried in rows of love and vampires. This is not to knock those books or authors. They’re popular for a reason. People like them and they’re reading, and that’s a good thing. And there's certainly nothing wrong with some love and romance. Working in education I see firsthand that boys are just not reading books like girls, and that because of how our schools teach reading (and what they make them read!), they are literally teaching boys to hate reading. Rather than solving the problem our schools are perpetuating it and bookstores have become their partners in crime. But hey, we know there are lots of good books for boys and we know boys will read them. How about putting some of them out? How about making some of them visible?
So, I thought for this month I would go back a few years to the better days when bookshelves actually had some variety and a boy could walk up and rather easily find a good book. The book today will be the masterful Feed by M.T. Anderson. This is a dystopian novel published before teens knew what “dystopia” meant. We’ll call that BHGE: Before Hunger Games Era.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Night Flight is the story of three flights, from Patagonia, Paraguay and Chile, all headed to Buenos Aires to drop off mail for the overnight plane to Europe. The action of the story covers one night. Night flights were a new service because it was incredibly dangerous to fly at night, even in the best weather. And on the night this story takes place, a storm is coming. Not all of the flights are going to make it to Buenos Aires safely. Adventure, danger, tragedy -- Night Flight is the perfect story.
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Monday, January 23, 2012
Awards, awards, and more awards
The American Library Association's Youth Media Awards, honoring the best books for children and teens, were announced this morning. If you love youth literature and, okay, are a bit of a geek, it's always fun to watch the live webcast of the awards and hear the cheers as titles are announced. Or the quiet buzz as it's announced that the Schneider Family Award ("for books that embody an artistic expression of the disability experience") committee chose not to select a winner for the 0-8 years age range, and only two Newbery Honors were selected.
The full list of Youth Media Award winners can be found here. Some highlights:
Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley won the Printz Award for excellence in YA literature and the Morris Award for the best debut YA novel. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey received a Printz Honor, along with Why We Broke Up, written by Daniel Handler, art by Maira Kalman; The Returning by Christine Hinwood; and The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
The YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award for teens went to The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery by Steve Sheinkin.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and The Lovers Dictionary by David Levithan were among the Alex Award winners, given to the best adult books with teen appeal, and have been reviewed here at Guys Lit Wire.
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos won the Newbery Award, with Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai and Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin earning honors.
Brian Selznick's Wonderstruck received a Schneider family honor for middle school.
Some of the selected lists have already been announced, including the Rainbow List for GLBTQ books for children and teens.
Whew! I don't know about you, but my reading list just got a lot longer.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Mecha Corps by Brett Patton
Darn good mech action! That pretty well sums up how I feel about Mecha Corps by Brett Patton. I read a Gundam series awhile back, and the Robotech novels, and Starship Troopers, and Armor: all those had powered armor or mecha of one or another. Other science fiction I've read has had powered armor. They've all been good, but Mecha Corps just freakin' kills it! This book, apparently the start of series called the Armor Wars, is what all mecha fiction should be like.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Cape Books: Thoughts on the Nature of Genre
I read a lot of comic books. With some exceptions (Hellboy, Northlanders), most are superhero titles from the two major comics companies: Marvel and DC.
The superhero mold was stamped in 1938, with the first appearance of Superman. There have been highs and lows in popularity, but superheroes have largely dominated comics ever since. (As well as American culture in general. Superman alone has been featured in almost every medium popular in the last 75 years, from serial radio to over a dozen video games.) Despite this, or more likely because of it, people sometimes dismiss superhero titles as "cape books," or more commonly, "another f*cking cape book."
As comics struggle to find their footing in the new millennium, a lot of the blame for shrinking sales falls on the superhero books. Detractors see all superhero books as the same, churned out for fanboys already invested in the characters. The thinking goes that industry will never find new readers unless it expands into new genres. I'm all for trying new things, and again, I do read non-superhero comics (American Vampire, the recently completed Samurai's Blood), but I also believe that the reason the superhero genre has thrived for so long is because it's an incredibly flexible genre, able to be bent and stretched to suit almost any taste.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Making Faces
The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Artistry by Ted Botha, just released in trade paperback by Penguin, chronicles the work of Frank Bender, one of the world's most successful forensic artists.
Frank Bender's work goes well beyond that of a typical police sketch artist. Bender creates full, three-dimensional sculptures of his subjects, forming heads with faces in clay and plaster from forensic evidence. Most often he works with the skulls of victims to create a likeness for identification purposes. Sometimes he creates a bust of the living from scratch, based on pictures to show how a missing subject would have aged and changed over time. His work has led to countless identifications and the capture of nine fugitives.
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Monday, January 16, 2012
Graphic Novels -- Sidekicks and Bad Island
Sidekicks by Dan Santat and Bad Island by Doug TenNapel are two recent adventure graphic novels that are great for younger teens.
Sidekicks is the story of Captain Amazing’s pets. As the superhero gets older he decides to hold auditions to find a new sidekick. Of course his pets, Metal Mutt, Fluffy the hamster and the household's newest pet, a chameleon named Shifty all want the job and begin training at night. The dog fares well with his powers, but that is not the case for Fluffy and Shifty. Luckily they meet up with Static Cat who used to be one of Captain Amazing's pets when he left under strange circumstances. The pets' complex histories are revealed as they embark on some ridiculous training sessions like removing an elephant from a restaurant.
As the intrigue builds leading up to the Sidekick Auditions, a new superhero, Wonder Man, has been dispatching villains with ease around the city and will surely be the front runner for the job.
This is a funny graphic novel with a much deeper plot than one would expect. Personally I think seeing a hamster, with one humorous super power, wearing a costume is awesome and easily worth the effort in picking up this book.
Doug TenNapel has been reviewed on guyslitwire before with Ghostopolis and others. Bad Island continues TenNapel's ease with telling fantastic stories with a thoughtful human element. In Bad Island, we follow the son of a great leader and warrior who yearns to join his people in battle. His father, however, is convinced he is not ready and bars him from fighting. The son goes forward anyway, jumping into battle and getting in over his head resulting in his capture.
Meanwhile, a family is getting ready to go on vacation. Dad is forcing them to take a trip on a sailboat, but Reese does not want to go and his sister Janie is more concerned about her pet snake. When they encounter a storm and end up on a strange island, the family has to bond together to survive. When they start finding strange artifacts and getting chased by odd and frightening creatures, Reese must step up and prove that he is becoming an adult capable of leadership. It is fun to watch the family work through the strange puzzles and learn what the island really is.
Fans of the Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi, Jeff Smith's Bone and anything by Doug TenNapel will enjoy these graphic novels.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Death and the Penguin
A writer, organized crime, and a penguin: these are the wild mix from which Andrey Kurkov forms his bleakly comic novel Death and the Penguin (translation by George Bird).
In the post-Soviet Ukraine, Viktor, a writer who has found no success in novels or short stories, obtains a job preparing obituaries for a newspaper’s files. When the subjects of his pieces begin dying off in suspicious circumstances, Viktor finds himself the entangled pawn of a shady power struggle that spans the celebrities, the mob, and the government. Lost in a maze of unclear alliances and loyalties, he attempts to discover the part he must play.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses
I'm always on the lookout for good nonfiction. Some of the best I find are in The Pushcart Prize. Editor Bill Henderson publishes it once a year, and includes short stories and poetry, as well.
My daughter gave me the 2011 edition in September, but immediately borrowed it. When I visited last week, I got to read a bunch of good stuff, but especially liked "Freaky Beasts: Revelations of a One-Time Bodybuilder." Here are some excerpts:
In the ... documentary Pumping Iron (1977), Arnold Schwarzenegger... likened a good workout pump to an orgasm... I cared more for what was permanent, for what I could carry through the day with me: the body armor that announced the arrival of a formidable opponent, a disciplined warrior... a man. Because, after all, being a man is the chief concern of any adoleswcent male, whether he recognizes it or not...
I needed another fifty pounds of lean mass, and it looked like anabolic drugs were the only route. If someone had told me then that in just over a year I would waltz across a stage in a frenzied bodybuilding competition, wearing only a blue bikini bottom, tanned an unnatural bronze, and mushroomed on three different anabolic drugs, I would have doubted it. My only focus at this juncture was to look like a genetically enhanced Atlas, to be the strongest eighteen-year-old guy in town.
