News

Don’t get me wrong — I love the book reviewers. But I love the bloggers MORE, because they have no filters, and let’s face it, who do you want to sit next to at a party. Here are some lovely online mentions of the book over the weekend:

From Librarian Avengers:

If I suffered from Pageant-Mom syndrome and wanted to create an exact replica of myself from the raw material of some random pre-teen girl, I would begin my narcissistic experiment in literary manipulation by having her read all of the books celebrated in Shelf Discovery.

And from The Hoyden! (Exclamation point mine):

I also want Lizzie to be my friend because she is, under her full name, a poet with huge gifts with language (just making a gift package featuring her “Bells” to my long distance sweetie RIGHT NOW) and when I e-mailed her for real to beg that she come to my town on her tour, she e-mailed right back to ask if Louisville had good barbeque.

GIRL. AFTER. MY. OWN. HEART.

Thank-you blogosphere!

In my continuing campaign to use this flash link for everything audio I have ever done, I am placing below the thinger for my appearance on The Bob Edwards show, which has now been shortened so it is only me. To tell you the truth, I really liked the man who preceded me, James Lovelock, whose curmudgeonly view of the current environmental movement moved from merely amusing to completely delightful once he asserted that pesticides were not a problem because, “Of course, we’re living longer than ever! That’s the problem.” If you’d like to hear him too, which I recommend, go click this link to the full show. But if you are pressed for time and merely want to see me break the record for saying “period” within a 2-minute interval, just click below.

My wonderful Caketrain publisher Joseph Reed told me about this FLASH plugin so that I can put a player on the site! I am obsessed. I am especially happy as it allows me to easily link to all AUDIO, like this freakishly enjoyable interview I did with Kim Alexander of XM and Sirius’s Fiction Nation. After we talked about Neanderthal rape and mothers clasping sons to bosoms and smoked whitefish porn I WAS OBSESSED and almost followed her home so that we could talk forever and ever. There is also lots of lengthy explanation about my career and blah blah but just skip ahead to dirty parts.

This summer I’m toting around Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, which was excerpted in Double X in July. In it, Skurnick and a few co-contributors (though it’s Skurnick’s warm, sardonic voice that dominates) re-read and re-assess the young-adult books that they remember loving as girls: Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved, and dozens more. Shelf Discovery is like a mini-bibliography of literature for young women, annotated by your brainy best friend.

Dana….I’m buying! (No, really.) If Julie could come tonight, she could buy too.

I’m somewhat hamstrung because my issue didn’t get delivered and I can’t read it online, but thank you, Glynnis, for calling out the New Yorker for not crediting me. I don’t actually think Thurman knows I’m alive but it’s always fun to launch accusations:

Here’s the bigger question: why this piece now? And going in, the answer(s) actually seemed somewhat clear at least. Just last month Jezebel writer Lizzie Skurnick published Shelf Discovery, a collection of essays based on her enormously popular Jezebel column Fine Lines, which is devoted to reviewing Young Adult classics from the 70’s and 80’s. Shortly after publication the book came close to hitting a top 500 Amazon ranking. A quick look at the index reveals title like, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Tiger Eyes, Harriet the Spy, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Jacob Have I Loved, and yes Little House on the Prairie, which technically was published in the 1930’s but enjoyed renewed relevance thanks to the 70’s TV show (Skurnick refers to the LH books “As the Most Important Work of Our Time” – hence the title of this post). The other day at a Shelf Discovery bookstore reading I attended, Skurnick suggested that if she hadn’t started the Fine Lines column someone else would have, because it was just the right time for it. Which makes sense since the generation who grew up on these books is now at the age where they are having children of their own (or know a lot of people who are having children of their own, as the case may be). So classic YA books are in the air! And yet Thurman doesn’t mention Skurnick, or even spend any time in her piece dissecting why the books themselves were so popular, for that matter.

Read the rest here — there is an impressive segue to Sarah Palin.

I was away this weekend and I think I forgot to post this Q&A with the marvelous Teenreads.com, who I’m sure you all know but if you DON’T is a wonderful resource for teen literary anything. I’ll talk boys if you talk NED KELLY AND THE KINGDOM OF BEES:

TRC: Most of the titles in SHELF DISCOVERY feature female characters learning about themselves and their world. Do you think girls have a different relationship to books than boys? Can you recommend a “books for boys” equivalent to your book?

LS: I do think that for the most part girls become dedicated readers a bit earlier, so it’s not surprising that they’re the most active readers for teen books. (Or any other books around.) And women writers have often been shuttled into the YA or midlist market, which is more interested in girls’ and womens’ stories, and those books garner far fewer prizes, get less attention and have a shorter shelf life. When I started this column, I wasn’t really thinking boys/girls — I was writing about the books that were important to me. But I’m surprised at how many people seem to think it’s my responsibility to throw in some boys! When the publishing world starts to be ruled by books for and about women, I’ll be happy to throw them a bone. For now, any reviewer who thinks I’ve neglected boys or books for boys is totally welcome to get to work on a book like this for boys, which would be great, I think. (And did I mention NED KELLY AND THE KINGDOM OF BEES? I, ROBOT? Also, A LONG DAY IN WINTER, or A LIGHT IN THE FOREST…. Oh, maybe I should just do one for boys.)

Just did another interview with the lively Amanda Marcotte of RealityCheck.org, a U.N.-associated podcast that also does books coverage. Man, I have to say, if you ever have to do a battery of interviews, I REALLY recommend this morning thing. As the caffeine surges through my system I’ve found my ideas on vintage YA are eerily clear, like they’re about to plunge off a bridge and have to revisit all the high points. Also, I discovered if you mix the milk and sugar FIRST and then put in the French press it really does a nice thing to the emulsification. Podcast will post once available.

Just did an interview with the equally biblomaniacal Dr. Alvin Jones, whose website also posts conversations with my party-demanding compatriot Irina Reyn and Edie Falco. I am lying — (Edie Falco is not my friend but because a) I wish she were and b) I can’t find the interview of my actual friend and SD contributor Laura Lippman, she will have to do for the present.) I sort of wish Dr. Alvin Jones could interview me EVERY morning, as there is something bracing about getting your thoughts together for an invisible audience first thing in the morning. Anyway, clip incoming — and I’m doing another podcast in 4 minutes that will be incoming too.

….The book’s only shortcoming is that it lacks an index, which means that if you want to see how many of Judy Bloom’s books are included, you have to flip through the contents list and try to remember which books Bloom authored. But that’s just small annoyance and has the benefit that it forces you to dig deeper into the book.

The Lindsay Post has this very nice review which complains only that the book doesn’t have an index (something I would have liked too) but takes the Wilder-esque point of view that there’s no great loss without some small gain. I LOVE LIBRARIANS.

It is always a good and nice sign when there is so much press you can’t keep up with it, EVEN IF A GOODLY PORTION OF IT SEEMS TO THINK ONE DOES THIS SORT OF THING IN DEAD EARNEST. In any case, would love to draw your attention to all of these things and as ever am grateful for any attention at all, which is something I should probably bring up with my therapist:

* I had a UNSPEAKABLY fun interview with Kim Alexander of XM and Sirius’s Fiction Nation (that should be wrestled into one of those von und zu constructions) that she’s prepped for here. It will be online next week:

Want to make some instant friends on line at the grocery store or on the bus? Shout out “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” I promise you, you’ll find you’re part of a sorority of women readers. They’ll want to talk about how Judy Blume made getting their periods a little less mortifying, about their lifelong love affair with Calvin from A Wrinkle in Time (the first print boy I ever noticed who wasn’t an elf or an alien), and how everyone, no matter how snottily highbrow, read every single lurid page of Flowers in the Attic.  We read those books with an intensity I don’t think we can reach anymore…

* The very, very funny Anita Liberty did a very, very funny review on the website Book Club Girl:

When I heard about SHELF DISCOVERY from Book Club Girl, I thought for sure that I would be able to match Skurnick’s breadth of knowledge about YA literature from the sixties and seventies. I, too, was a ravenous reader when I was a nubile and impressionable teenager. So I flipped open Skurnick’s book to the Table of Contents, where she lists the titles of all the books that are covered in SHELF DISCOVERY and put checkmarks next to the ones I’d read. Turns out I’m not as well-read in this genre as I’ve always thought. Damn you, Skurnick. I hate having my inadequacies exposed.

* I like how Tablet manages to find the Jew-y Jew angle here to the extent of making sure other readers know I am a bat mitzvah. When other people overcompensate in their project of making sure others approve of me, it frees up my time:

Lizzie Skurnick…does not see herself as following in the footsteps of Rashi or Maimonides. Instead, Farah Fawcett provided a model for Skurnick, or at least for her hairstyle around the time of her bat mitzvah. But in parsing the nuances and resonances of classic young adult novels—including a few Jewish essentials, such as Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier, and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family—Skurnick…accomplishes for the preteen literary set more or less what Rashi provided for the Jews’ sacred texts, and a reading guide for a different, but no less perplexed, demographic.

* Ypulse did a really fun and lovely interview with me, then edited it to make me sound almost smart. Grumpy, tired, impatient with everyone, but smart. (At least I didn’t say “their little lives,” which I swear I did in my head):

YP: Do you think that reflected the perception of young readers and young people in general at the time? How, if at all, do you think that’s changed?

LS: I do think reading was generally viewed as a more transgressive activity back then. …Children were meant to be children, and these books showed them learning to assert their independence in an adult world….Today it’s just the opposite. We focus on children so much, I think we have a tendency to optimize them. Back in the day you had these stories about how parents can’t reach or don’t understand children. Now, parents are co-members of the narrative. We have to deconstruct their lives as well.

* And now here’s where I get peeve-y, although God knows a) one should never be peeve-y about one’s reviews and 2.3) a REVIEWER should never be peeve-y about being reviewed, as God knows I deserve what I get. That said, I have held my tongue about all the bitching about how often I say OMG (never, fyi, though there is one omigod) and WTF (ONCE) in the narrative, though I will take this opportunity to put forth publicly that I DIDN’T, and I am as ever bemused that PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND CAPPING IS MILDLY IRONICAL. This thinger from the LA Times, however, cannot stand:

Sometimes Skurnick’s explanations are too loaded with extraneous detail or slowed by efforts at cleverness. Sometimes her writing is just too breathless, sort of like she’s a modern tween who just spotted a Jonas Brother. That said, her enthusiasm is undeniable.

Oh. You know what? I do do that. I also missed this:

humorous musings about plots, characters and significance.

But everyone STOP saying “memory lane” PLEASE. I don’t even like it when people say that in real life.

* Okay, THIS thing from Good cannot stand, then:

Skurnick writes in jaunty, wink-wink prose punctuated with a heavy dose of all caps. It can get a bit cutesy, but the book offers a non-threatening, girlfriend’s-gabbing-over-wine atmosphere of nostalgia for the wistful tween days, when we lay around feeling ugly and fat, reading our first sex scenes. (Ralph shows up throughout the book. You know, that Ralph).

I’m not cutesy! I am jaunty and I wink and I talk in caps, but I am not cutesy! Call me ugly and fat, if you must.

More press is incoming, for which I have planned lengthy posts on black book covers and boy teen stuff, at least 1/45 of which may come to pass. Stay tuned!