News

Click for Thursday’s event! That doesn’t quite scan to Partridge in a Pear Tree, but close enough. In any case! My world tour — i.e., Tri-state, mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and midday tour — now concludes where it all began: Word Books in Brooklyn, just two blocks from the breakfast spot where Jezebel EIC Anna Holmes and I decided to do Fine Lines, and where we wandered over in search of some vintage titles to start with. (There actually weren’t any. But still!)

I will soon put up a gallery of all of my travels, without doing any one, two, three, etc. this and that, because I am too tired. (Three emergency warm-weather purchases from Michigan Avenue Gap plus some Benneton boots, you hardy, lying, Chicagoans! Okay, done.) But thank you, thank you all who came and listened to me, asked me questions and, most important, bought the book. You don’t even have to read it, honest.

Frankly, my favorite bookseller at Newark’s Penn Station told me, unprompted, that I was looking very very tired and that I needed to eat something. (“Really?” “Yes — you are not looking fresh!”) I will be wearing some extra under-eye concealer. But I will be funny! I think. Hard to tell — they don’t really laugh in the Midwest.

Upcoming event at Milwaukee's Boswell books 9/29 (click image for info)....

AND next to my friend Amy’s book at Portland’s Powells!

Next to Amy Goldwasser's "Red" -- even colors are harmonious.

“Girls Club.”

My interview w/Nancy Pearl online here. Much McMurtry.

I am a little more excited than is strictly meet to announce I AM A SEPTEMBER PICK OF NANCY PEARL!

Here’s the whole review:

Lizzie Skurnick has a much-read blog called Old Hag, but Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading is actually based on her column Fine Lines from Jezebel.com. And reading Shelf Discovery is akin to spending time with an old friend talking about best beloved books from the past. Skurnick, with occasional contributions by Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman, Cecily con Ziegesar, Jennifer Weiner, Margo Rabb, Tayari Jones, and Anna Holmes, briefly describes and discusses many of the books that were hugely popular with girl readers from the 1960s through the 80s. It’s like a trip down memory lane. Here are Skurnick’s reactions to Are You There, God?, It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s classic tale of adolescence; John D. Fitzgerald’s hilarious The Great Brain, the story of a Catholic family growing up in Mormon Utah in the early 20th century; Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson’s 1980 weepy that can still bring me to tears when I try to talk about it; Homecoming, surely the best book Cynthia Voigt wrote in a career of writing outstanding teen novels; Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the essay written about it by Laura Lippman is not to be missed); Summer of Fear by Lois Duncan–which is still intensely scary after all these years. I could go on for pages (or just copy the index) listing all the books it was such a delight to find included. (A few more are Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, a thoughtful discussion by Tayari Jones of Judy Blume’s Forever, and more and more and more. The fun of a book like this is not only rediscovering old favorites (I hadn’t thought of the Zindel title in decades), but also recalling all the books that you wish had been included. For me, being probably a decade older than Skurnick, it was some of the older titles from the 1950s–the books by Rosamund du Jardin, Betty Cavanna, Lenora Mattingly Weber, and Mary Stolz, for example. But Lizzie (I feel by the time I get to page 345 of her book that we’re old and dear friends and I can therefore call her by her first name in this review) can still surprise me with her choices: She happens to include MY VERY FAVORITE Louisa May Alcott novel–An Old-Fashioned Girl, surely one of the best books you may not have read because you were too busy crying over Jo marrying Mr. Baer instead of Laurie in Little Women. Reading Shelf Discovery is like opening a space capsule: these were the books that made us what we are, and aren’t we lucky we read them?

I’m also appearing on WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd with Nancy (we’re on a first-name basis, apparently) on BlogTalk Radio. To call in, you have to register. This newfangled internet! I shouldn’t be ironic, because I actually DON’T know how to work it. But I have faith in you.

…must tell you I had an incredible time being interviewed by reproductive health advocate Amanda Marcotte, especially once we mutually confirmed that, yes, once the girls of popular culture were allowed to have sex and it wasn’t a big deal. Witness Robby Benson and Lynn Holly Johnson, who ALREADY had an affair with an older sportscaster, go off to do it, unmolested. This will not happen in the Taylor Firth remake.

You think Ice Castles has nothing to do with reproductive health. Ice Castles has something to do with everything.

I have been very slow and slothlike in updating the blog, and for this I blame a trip to Cape Cod, way too much country daintzing at my friend’s wedding and lots and lots expensive jar tuna with cornichons. HOWEVER. First of all, you can see that my events page has been updated with stuff coming up in ENGLEWOOD, NJ, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, and MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN. It will soon be updated with events in CHICAGO, ILLINOIS and NEW ORLEANS, ON THE BAYOU.

I also want to draw your attention to this recent Babble.com interview with the lovely Aimee Pohl. She used ALL MY BEST QUOTES:

You have written a number of books in the Sweet Valley High series. Would you recommend that series for young girls?

Well, I certainly had fun reading it as a girl. I think sometimes series like that are useful to let you know your culture’s preoccupations, as long as you don’t completely absorb them and feel like you have to walk around being a size six and wearing a gold Laveliere necklace. They’re like Cliffs Notes for the subconscious of your particular society and I think kids pick up on how true and untrue they are way more than you would think. I think a lot of this terror over Twilight is just a reflection of how stupid we think girls are, like, “Girls are very stupid. God knows what will happen if they read something stupid!” It’s like they’re all dangling on the precipice of idiocy, or something. But they get it. They have fun with trash, just like we do.

I really want to know why that photo says “5-minute timeout.” I’m sure I deserved one.

Skurnick’s essays on young adult novels fill you with a deep longing for a time when your biggest concern was that pimple that refused to vacate your left cheek.

I am glad to be a trend. And I hope no one else mentions acne in reference to my book.

….although I did not discuss THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF THE BUSINESS on NPR.

HERE’S my piece on Jaws on NPR’s Guilty Pleasures series!!!!!!!!!!

Actually truly the best book ever.

Please recommend it. We’re going to need a bigger book review.

Washington Post, why are you not content with one publication? Why must you bring forth blogs like some kind of web-based hydra? Nonetheless, thank you for your nice mention in whatever this thing is:

Skurnick even thinks to include risque fiction by Jean Auel and V.C. Andrews, which was intended for adults but nonetheless got passed around at recess. Shelf Discovery may not hold universal appeal, but for anyone who got excited about library visits as a child it should prove an enjoyable excursion down memory lane.

WaPo, are you feeling insecure about this universal appeal thing? I’m not sure rolling out a new publication every time 500 people express an interest in things is the answer. But I will start reading Express Night Out, if it makes you feel better.

I have been keeping track of sightings of Shelf Discovery because I am, you know, a new author, and it’s neat. (I love my book of poetry, but it gets shelved in a lovely bookstore called Paypal.) But I must share with you my absolute FAVORITE photo of the summer, which comes from the blogger Jackie W.:

I love this photo, but I love it especially because the poolside read is so central to my life it even makes it into the title poem of my collection, Check-In (PDF).

Jackie also wrote a wonderful remembrance of her own teen reading, AND made a hilarious observation about The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which should probably now be titled America’s Next Top Witch of Blackbird Pond.

Whether Skurnick is searching for common themes in Lois Duncan books or wishing she had a boyfriend straight out of Madeline L’Engle’s imagination, Skurnick is a champion of young heroines.  Strong, pretty, smart heroines.  Heroines that are hard to come by these days in the pages of “Gossip Girl” or “Twilight.”  Not to knock those books, at all, you should see my copies of them, I ADORE those books.  But the books from Skurnick’s young adulthood were more authentic.  Maybe the girls had ESP or could travel through time and inhabit other people, but they were girls that were normal until this other thing happened.  And the magic of that is that this girl in this book facing all these challenges could be you, the reader, sitting in the library or on your bed reading about her.

As much as I have dreamed to be as gorgeous as Serena or have a boyfriend as undead as Edward, I know it probably won’t happen for me.  I’m 26.  I’m not a teenager.

Read the rest here.

More books on tables! Maybe I’ll just buy a table at home, and lie on it. The first of these is from Jackie W., who made the most marvelous display I have EVER SEEN:

SAD the wondrous Miss Judy is getting disembodied treatment, though I can’t decide which is worse, the lower-body or this new half-face thing! It’s like Phantom of the Menses.

Brooklyn's Court Street B&N

Snapped by my marvelous friend Casey.

Newark Penn Station's Hudson Books

I asked the nice lady who works here to stock my book…and she DID. Since I have given Amtrak approximately $6,789 this summer, I don’t feel all that guilty about this.

Recently, I once again shared airspace with the lively and fun Ed Champion of the Bat Segundo show, who, amidst much chatter about redheadedness, was one of the many men who have challenged, in RANK FINGER-POINTING outrage, my alleged needless gender focus, to the tune of half a show. (Over coffee I had brewed for him, I might add.) Ed’s objection to my book was along the lines that he a) once had long hair and b) was not a violent mill-worker, and had thus somehow become the object of discrimination. I will simply direct all further inquiries here.

Oh, whatever. I will do one more pick, from Levi’s otherwise nice write-up:

My biggest problem with Shelf Discovery involves its unnecessary gender focus; which Michael Orthofer also recently wrote about. Teenage boys read books too. Why leave half the world out?

It’s not yet at arguing with the dining room table level, but I just — I just do not follow the logic here. My book, last time I checked, was not a Valediction Against Boys Reading. If the argument is that boys DID read these books, I have said nothing to the contrary and, as my grandmother would say, Enjoy!. If the argument is that I have not written enough about books FOR boys or BY boys, though in fact I wrote about many, I direct the critic to his own typewriter, where I have not placed a ONLY FOR WRITING ABOUT GIRLS!!!!!!!!!! sign, the last time I checked. And if men are worried no one is paying attention to them, I direct them to NPR, which created a male-only companion piece of a kind to my TOTN interview by devoting the response segment to a man, talking about books he read as a boy, none of which appears or has anything to do with my book.

If the argument is simply that I wrote about a period of books mainly by female authors, often featuring female heroines, and read mostly by girls — hello. I did. Now go iron my shirt.

Amid the truly amazing (to me, at least) response to this book from creatures great and small has been one teeny sadness: a noticeable lack of hometown love.* (Brian Lehrer — seriously? Why don’t you think women should be allowed to read????) Still, I could not have chosen two more echt-hometown organs, nor more wondrous writeups, than those with Newsday** and THE POST!!!. Excerptry:

From my interview with Newsday’s Carmela Ciuraru:

What do you think about parents monitoring their teenagers’ reading habits? Many parents have slammed the “Twilight” series. I take a dim view of telling other people what to read. What I liked so much about this period of reading in my life is that no one was paying any attention to what I was reading, or why I was reading. People don’t give teens credit for being able to enjoy a book while still seeing its flaws.

And from Sara Stewart’s writeup in The New York Post, w/ONE of my favorite parts:

At her best, Skurnick alternates between reveling in the familiar details (like the time Nancy lied about getting her period in “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret”) while layering in edgier interpretations: ” ‘The Big Woods’ lays the groundwork for all the sublimated sensuality that comes thereafter,” she writes of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first novel, “including Mary and Laura’s epic, savage rivalry . . . Laura gathers too many rocks by the shores of a lake and tears out her pocket — Mary is clean and neat and keeps her hands nicely folded in her lap. (Of course she does, the f – – – ing bitch!)”

Thank you hometown! I may live in Jersey City, but I was BORN in the Bronx.

* This psychological process is actually true: positive attention begets complaint! Fascinating. I asked for yellow M&M’s only, goddamnit!

** Apparently there is a picture in the print version, which I haven’t seen yet. I had coincidentally had my hair done at the House of Curl Expertry, the Devachan salon, that day, so I am glad to have a record of the amazing HAIR, despite what else happened, because I have of course been unable to replicate it.

I wrote a brief intro to my Jezebel essay on The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More about boys and Shelf Discovery that I meant to go on for three sentences and of course went on for 65. (That’s what happens when you drink three coffees and get on the Acela w/computer.) It is mainly an excercise in un-peeving myself so I can turn to one of my FAVORITE BOOKS in the world without feeling like I’m handing over the Sudetenlands. I’ve posted all 19 paragraphs here. To get back to the far less militant Jezebel essay, click on link at bottom.

A brief – in true Dahlian fashion – note on the text:

Since the publication of Shelf Discovery, I have been cheered and amazed by the lovely and wide-ranging response to the book. Slightly surprising, however, has been the mild rebuke I have received from various quarters for not including books quote unquote for boys. (If I do not mistake myself, I lost a whole actual star for it here!) When I started Fine Lines, I did not conceive of it as a column quote unquote for girls, though it a) appears on a women’s web site and b) does, in fact, involve books mostly read by girls.

But, excuse me – so what if I had? While I am not inordinately bothered when I am asked if I also have book recommendations for boys – that is, after all, a natural enough question, though does ANYONE ask Chuck Klosterman if he has music recommendations for women? – I am quietly outraged at how apparently it is against the law to not talk specifically about boys and what they might need/enjoy/prosper from for five seconds.

Because I would like to point out – pointing! Pointing! — that the YA and midlist markets are dominated by women because that is, in the main, where the publishing industry has slotted women. In the corner of worthy literature, you found what I was made to read grade school to high school: Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, The Red Pony, The Old Man and the Sea, The Pearl, A Light in the Forest, Black Boy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ethan Frome, Native Son, Moby Dick, and Hamlet. Worthy books all – but, you know, most of the women in them wind up dead.

Shelf Discovery is a memoir of my particular history but it is also a memoir of an actual history, one in which when I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Bluest Eye, Jacob Have I Loved, or Me Me Me Me Me, I found them on my own, whether from my mother’s shelves or the teeny bookstore that thank God stocked most of the works found in SD. As I know from your letters, many of you also read all the books we can, if we must, consider books for boys as well as the summer reading list canon you find above, but no one has forgotten about I, Robot or Dandelion Wine or The Outsiders, and that’s why you don’t find them in SD. My general mission is to write about books no one (allegedly) remembers, or that never receive (in my view) enough credit. Any perceived discrimination is not a reflection of my bias, but a bias visited on me.

Or you could just put it like Nomie did.

Click here for column.