So here’s a fun thing about me. Recording all of the books I’ve read this year has led to me, I think, reading a bit more, which is great! Hooray! Except I’m pretty bad at writing timely reviews, which means that now that we’re getting close to the end of the year that means I have a whole glut of books to tell you about. So instead of my usual, kind of lengthy review, here’s a list with some super short reactions (though some of these will get reviewed properly at Active Voice in the next few weeks).

#41: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld — this is YA steampunk, so I’m saving it for AV.

#42: Carter Beats the Devil by David Glen Gold

I loved this! I think by this point it’s pretty clear that I rarely read anything that isn’t either YA/MG or SF/F, so this was a bit of a departure for me. My sister handed it to me as highly recommended, somewhere between historical and literary fiction. It’s (sort of, roughly) about Carter the Great, a Vaudeville magician accused of conspiracy to murder President Harding.

The structure nerd in me loved this. It went back and forth through Carter’s life a lot, in lengthy chunks that painted pictures of his rise to fame and everything leading up to the show before Harding’s death, and then its aftermath. It’s incredibly rich, long enough to sink your teeth into, but with very little drag. I will say that the Mysterioso sub-sub-sub plot felt a little tacked on, but the climax was pretty great. I also wish there had been more women, as only two played major roles in the book (and the first was there for only about a third, and the second for only about half), but those are fairly minor quibbles. Overall, it’s probably one of my favorite reads of the year.

#43: Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi — it’s post-apocalyptic YA, so I’m saving this one for AV.

#44: Blue Fire by Janice Hardy — MG fantasy, so I’m saving this one for AV.

#45: Ash by Malinda Lo — YA fantasy, so I’m saving this one for AV. (I’m really, really behind on reviews over there…)

#46: Flygirl by Sherri Smith

Another of my favorites from the year, and another historical novel, although this one is YA. It follows Ida Mae Jones, a young, black girl during WWII. Ida is a pilot who hears about the WASP — Women Airforce Service Pilots — and because she’s fairly light skinned, she decides to try to pass as white so she can fly for the army.

This one is really, really good. The voice is really strong, and the way it deals with race is really well done. (For example, a heart wrenching scene where her mother has to come visit to deliver bad news, and she has to pretend her mother is her maid; or her general anxiety when a white man asks her to dance. She wants to, but she knows that she can’t have any kind of relationship with him in the future.)

The book is actually pretty light on plot, but I would happily read hundreds more pages about Ida’s missions during the war and what happened after.

#47: Goblins in the Castle by Bruce Coville (reread)

I’ve written pretty extensively about my love of Bruce Coville before. A few weeks ago I found myself in the mood for something spooky (no idea what brought that on) so I grabbed this off my shelf. It is, like all Coville books, pretty much delightful.

I definitely didn’t get the “My name is Ishmael, but don’t call me that,” joke as a kid. (I’d go so far as to say it doesn’t actually fit with the tone very well, even.) And while I love the worldbuilding, there was quite a bit that goes unexplained — not in a plot-not-wrapped-up way, but it feels like part of a much larger folklore. I’d love to read more about Granny Pinchbottom and Igor, and even where William came from, and lots and lots about Fauna — her life before meeting William, what she does after, and so on. (She’s so intriguing, but there’s so little about her!)

As a whole, everything about this is weird and funny and kind of spooky, but still infused with Coville’s usual humor. It practically begs to be read aloud and reread on Halloween.

So here’s the thing. I love boy bands. This shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise, given there’s a whole category to the right somewhere called “this must be pop.” (Which, aside from being about pop, is also an *NSYNC lyric.) So last year when my awesome BFF Jess suggested we should keep some sort of official look out for up-and-coming boy bands, naturally I was all over that. And thus, the Official Tweenage Wasteland Official Boy Band Watch was born!

Aaaand also not a surprise, if you’ve poked around here before (or spoken to me pretty much at all in the last few months), I adore the Nickelodeon show Big Time Rush, which is, of course, about a boy band named Big Time Rush, who have recently put out an album titled (just to be different)… “BTR.” And naturally, Jess and I had to rate it.

So here it is! OTWOBBW: Big Time Rush. (Bonus, we spruced up Tweenage’s layout a bit, so now the text isn’t squished into such a small column. Check it out!)

The Brooklyn Book Festival was a couple of months ago. I’ve meant to go every year since I moved to New York, but Brooklyn is far away and things come up and blaahhhh. Anyway, this year I finally did! And, as one does at such things, I bought a lot of books. The first one I tackled was Meet the Annas: A Musical Novel by Robert Dunn.

The book basically plays what-if with a fictional 1960s girl group, the Annas. It’s told from the POV of Dink Stephenson, one of their song writers, looking back at what happened years later. He was in love with the band’s front woman, Anna Dubower, and eventually proposed to her as the girl group era passed and they were desperately trying to manufacture a hit to bring them back. Anna didn’t give him an answer, and weeks later, was mysteriously dead. Now there’s a rights dispute over that last song, Dink has to go to court over it, and running into people from that old life stirs up old memories. At last, he’s determined to figure out what happened to Anna.

I was pretty ambivalent when I first finished this book. In the months since (I am waaaay behind on my reviews) the ending has festered, and now I find it enraging. I’m going to cut here because the book is sort of a mystery. I found it super obvious, but your mileage may vary. Read this article »

I don’t have a heck of a lot to say about this one. Overall, I really liked it! But I have one major quibble that kept it at 3.5 cupcakes instead of 4. The full review is over at Active Voice, though it’s maybe the shortest book review I’ve ever written.

My office is on the 16th floor. This evening, I left work, got in the elevator, and it went down, oh, fifteen and a half floors. Then it went kerTHUNK and stopped. I was stuck there for an hour.

The world of Wired (the third book in Robin Wasserman’s trilogy) is an eerie dystopia where the have-nots die young in cities, get sick from the nuclear fall out, and everything is controlled by mega corporations. Not a great place to live. On the other hand, the handful of wealthy people have technology advanced enough to put human thought patterns into a mechanical body. Presumably, their elevators never, you know, just stop between floors for awhile. So hey, silver lining.

An actual review is over at Active Voice.

Last week, mlawski at Overthinking It posted a graphic titled The Female Character Flow Chart. I saw it, thought, “Huh, interesting,” and that was that. Then a couple of days later one of my friends posted me towards some criticism of it, leading to discussion and more thinking on my part.

I was surprised to see so much commentary on it because it never occurred to me that the chart was aimed at someone like me, who already spends time thinking about the representation of women in the media. I don’t think good intentions (which I assume mlawski had) or intended audience arguments excuse all flaws (more on those in a second), but I definitely read the chart as intended for readers who hadn’t already thought about women in the media. I could certainly see someone running across this who hadn’t noticed those problematic tropes, the lack of dynamic female characters, or that many, many female characters are defined solely by their relationships to men and children could have an eye-opening, “aha!” moment.

Regardless of who it’s aimed at, I don’t think anyone’s wrong for reading it critically. There are two different braches of criticism that I’ve seen (though I haven’t looked around extensively; I haven’t even read the comments on the original post, since I looked at the post when it first went up, ages before the comment count rose). One is about the privilege and lack of nuance in the chart; the other is about the chart as reductionist when it comes to the characters in question.

The first, I can’t put any better than this post from homasse at deadbrowalking:

A wee bit down on this mess of a flowchart, you will find “Useless Girl” with the example being Uhura from Star Trek.

And why is this fail? Because, once again, feminism shows a woeful lack of awareness of race and the impact race plays.

Uhura was “useless” not because of her gender, but because of race–this chart ignores the political and social situation of when the show was made and the decisions made in regards to her character because she was Black: They couldn’t ever put her in charge of the bridge because people in the south specifically would have flipped out at a black woman being in charge (this was why Ensign Chekov was given the bridge and she never was even though she outranked him).

I’d also like to point out bossymarmalade’s post about Yoko Ono, someone who I consider awesome. It sucks to see people buy into the cultural storyline that she broke up the Beatles, when that is just false, and further, when she’s great.¹

So yes, I think there are some problems with the chart in that regard, and I’m glad people pointed them out. But I don’t entirely agree with the argument about the chart being reductionist, and diminishing the characters who are on it. Or rather — I do, kind of. The best way to put it was something said by my friend Jess: “Basically, if that one box ending in ‘strong female character’ wasn’t there, I’d like the chart a lot better.”

For me, that sums it up. I think the chart actually branches out into a lot more specifics than I’d use if I made something like it — like, there are multiple slots for women whose motivations come entirely from their kids — but the main problem I have is that any one of these slots/archetypes/clichés/whatever you want to call them can indeed be written well. They can be thorough, three dimensional, story-carrying, awesome characters.

My go-to example is Sarah Connor. Sarah is listed the character representing “Mama Bear.” And when I saw that, I went “a-yup.” TV Tropes has her listed as both a Mama Bear and Action Mom. The first Terminator movie is based on this premise: Sarah Connor must live, because her son saves the world. Not “Sarah Connor must live because she saves the world.” While she’s the awesome character, the series is always about her (at that point unborn) son. When we next see her in T2, she’s had John, and devoted herself to preparing him for his fate — and keeping him safe. When he rescues her, an act that explicitly saves her life, she scolds him for putting himself in danger. She’ll do anything, up to and including sacrificing herself, if it saves John. While Sarah is the protagonist of the first two movies, her motivation — the entire premise of the series — is based on protecting John.

The thing is, though, that Sarah is awesome. In the first movie, she grows from damsel-in-need-of-rescue to bandaging injuries and learning to make bombs. She’s the one who finally destroys the Terminator. She has help along the way, but she’s still a character who learns skills and saves herself. In T2, she’s even more complex. She’s in an institution because people believe she’s insane, but we as viewers know she’s right. But being right doesn’t make her entirely mentally able, though — it’s clear she’s got PTSD or something akin to it (and understandably). She’s amazingly kick-ass (her escape is my favorite sequence in the movie) and morally complex. We know she’d kill someone to save John, but she isn’t able to kill Miles Dyson, though she thinks doing so will keep Skynet from existing — and though she expects herself to be able to do it. And that’s without even getting into the sadly too-short lived TV show.²

Sarah Connor is a great character. She’s three dimensional and dynamic. She’s capable of carrying a story. But as much as I’d be all over a the story about how Sarah Connor must live so she can lead humanity in the battle against Skynet, I don’t know that it would necessarily be a better story than Sarah trying to save her son. Different, yes; certainly unusual. But Sarah Connor is both an Action Mama Bear and a great character. (And further, just because Sarah Connor is great doesn’t mean there aren’t other characters who fall into that slot who aren’t poorly written, or that the Mama Bear archetype is never problematic.)

The way I see it, while there are indeed plenty of archetypes and tropes out there that are problematic simply for existing — racist and sexist stereotypes, for example, which come up all too frequently — once you’re beyond those,³ just because a character (female or otherwise) hits an archetype doesn’t mean the character is poorly drawn.

I’m sick. I’ve been sick for about five days, though recovering steadily for the last two. This is better for me. It isn’t better for my roommate, for reasons illustrated in this graph:

There are no units of measurement in this graph. How exactly would I measure whininess, anyway?

In short, as I start to feel better, I become insufferably whiney that I’m not all-the-way better yet. At my sickest, I dope up on cold medication and mostly sleep; as I get better, all I do is complain.

Translation: Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Today, it came as a relief that I had enough energy to do things like wash dishes and run laundry. And I hate washing dishes and running laundry.

Oh, and just barely enough energy to (almost) catch up on book reviews.

#33: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

See, this is how far backed up I am. I reread Catching Fire the weekend before Mockingjay came out, because I’d devoured it so fast the first time I didn’t actually remember anything that happened, or any of the new characters who’d been introduced. So I reread. This time, the book’s few weaknesses bothered me a little bit more, but overall the story and writing are so compelling that I once again devoured it. Luckily, I didn’t have enough time to forget anything, because Mockingjay came out the next week.

(Wait, you wanted an actual review? Last year, at Active Voice. Of course.)

#34: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

What is there to say about Mockingjay that hasn’t been said? I was at the release party and got to see Suzanne Collins read the first chapter; that was awesome. (BTW, did you know Katniss has an Appalachian accent? I didn’t! But it was cool.) I took the next day off work to read (because the awesome thing about being a grown up is that I can do that), and it took me a long, long time to gather my thoughts on the book. There’s so much there.

I’ll sum it up like this: I wanted to like it more than I did. It does justice to the first two books in the series, for sure. It was fairly well put together, definitely. But getting that isn’t the same as liking it. More on this one, too, is over at AV.

#35: Bloom County: The Complete Library (Volume Two) by Berkeley Breathed

Oh, Bloom County. I grew up reading collections of the strip, over and over, even though I was pretty young when it was canceled. I’ve occasionally joked that everything I know about 80s politics, I learned from Bloom County, but it’s not actually much of an exaggeration. What was really brilliant, though, is that the rhythm and the characters of the strips are so great that even as a kid, not getting about 65% of the jokes, I found it hilarious anyway. So I had not only read a lot of these before, I’d memorized them.

Getting a look at some strips I’d never seen before was great. I also enjoyed Breathed’s commentary. In fact, that was one of the reasons I liked Volume Two better than the first. The first had a lot of annotations about the events of the time, and very little commentary from Breathed; the second had fewer annotations and more commentary. (Don’t get me wrong, having some of the context for stuff that happened when I was a toddler was useful, but a lot of it was also pretty obvious just from reading the strips.)

#36: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This book, sigh. I’ve mentioned in a few other reviews that I often have issues with classics, because I’m so accustomed to (and more easily engaged by) modern pacing. This is the sort of book that shows just how much that limits me: it took me awhile to get into it, to pick it back up when I put it down, but it would have been a real shame if I had let the pacing put me off. The book is lovely.

It’s the journal of Cassandra, a young woman in the 1930s, living in an English castle (but also living in complete poverty). Her goal is to be a writer, so she strives to record all of her encounters and emotions honestly — to capture the castle in writing, you see. The story of the book also takes you through Cassandra’s first love (and the first time a boy likes her) and her family relationships, in a way that’s so real it’s almost painful. The prose is beautiful, but above all, it’s the emotions that the book gets right.

(Are those all the books I’ve read? No! But is it time for me to go take some more medicine and whine some more? Yes! So that’s it for now.)

I’m still way behind on book reviews, but here’s #32. I read the first in this series book earlier this year, and liked but didn’t love it. My feelings on this one were similar: I liked the narrator better, but felt the story wasn’t as strong. My full review is over at Active Voice.

I ran some errands during my lunch break yesterday. I had some checks to deposit and the most convenient place is a cramped ATM vestibule near my office. It has four ATMs, but no space for anyone waiting to stand, and when I got there they were all busy. I stood near-ish to the last one, with a line of people who came in behind me, so it was pretty crowded; I was wearing my headphones and listening to my iPod, which is true of about 90% of the time I’m outside my apartment.¹

I was endorsing a check, writing on the back of my book (because I always have a book in my purse, duh). I had a vague sense that the woman at the nearest ATM was flustered, inserting her card again and again. I heard her say something in my general direction, but thanks to the iPod (and noise-canceling headphones, I hate earbuds) I didn’t hear what. I took off my headphones and moved maybe a half-step forward, and said all of, “Hm?”

And then she yelled, “You’re too close, Jesus!”

I got as far as, “Sor — ” before she stormed off.

So I used the ATM and walked off grumpily. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had been attempting to apologize. And frankly, rudeness irks me pretty badly (don’t even get me started on the guy who walked into the vestibule from the other side and cut the whole line, something that is never, ever acceptable). It wasn’t until I was down the road on my way to the post office that the situation flipped in my brain.

From the perspective of Grumpy Stranger Lady, she was using the ATM and clearly having some sort of issue with it. Some stranger was standing too close, making her uncomfortable, and was off in her own world wearing headphones instead of paying attention to what was happening around her. Maybe she was having a bad day, or was just easily flustered, or short on patience for whatever reason. Regardless, it occurred to me that if she were to tell the story of our very brief encounter, she’d be the reasonable one, and I’d be the rude one.

The thing is, she isn’t wrong; that was reality as she lived it. I’m not wrong either; she was pretty rude. In objective reality, we probably both could have done better, with me paying more attention and her being less snippy. Whatever, it was an encounter that lasted about two seconds, and didn’t have any lingering after effects. But it was a tiny moment of eye-opening for me.

I’m bothering to write this down because I’m someone who reads all kinds of blogs where people share very personal experiences (not to mention I work at a website which features personal stories in a major way). You can see some of my favorites in the link sidebar, but I read a lot about feminism, anti-racism, GLBT activism, anti-ableism, and so on — lots of people examining and trying to figure out how to dismantle societal privileges and *isms of many sorts. I don’t tend to say much, because I rarely feel like there’s anything I can add to the conversation other than “thank you for sharing”/”I agree with you”/etc. And generally, the conversations aren’t about me. What is me talking about my experiences as a white person going to add to a post where a person of color is talking about her experiences with racism? It’s not that I don’t have thoughts, it’s that they aren’t necessarily relevant and there’s no need for me to hijack a thread about someone else to talk about my own junk. It’s a conversation I can learn from but not one I feel like I can add much to, so I am a serial lurker who is glad the big, wide internet has so many people brave enough to talk about their lives.

Back a bunch of years ago, when I first started this blog, I wrote a not-very-well-articulated, but none the less honest, post about some sexism I’d run into at the bookstore where I worked.² It was the first thing I wrote that got read, let alone linked to, by anyone other than my close friends; I wasn’t quite prepared for that, but who is? I followed a few track back links and ran into some other people’s discussions of my post. One stands out in my memory; the thrust of the post-about-my-post was, “Well, she says that, but I think she was misreading it. It wasn’t about sexism, it was just an in-group, out-group thing.”

At the time, I was really upset by that and didn’t know why. I get it now: the post was about my experiences, things I knew were true because I’d lived them. It isn’t fair for someone to say that wasn’t what happened and I was misreading the situation (let alone someone who wasn’t even there, but that’s not even close to the point). I knew what my experience was and didn’t understand that what bothered me was someone saying no, my lived experience was incorrect.

It was a pretty minor life experience. Blatant sexism, but nothing with long-lasting consequences on my life. (I learned someone was an asshole. I avoided him after that. The end!) If I was that unsettled by being told my life experiences were wrong in something fairly minor, I can only imagine how people who share significantly more personal experiences must feel.

This is probably the most no-duh-worthy thing I will ever type on this blog, but: privilege is a huge part of what makes that kind of dismissal possible. It allows people to be oblivious to the very fact that there’s another perspective to consider, let alone the validity of that experience. It lets people ignore the whole concept of empathy, of taking a few seconds to realize that other people may have experienced a situation differently, and their experiences are legitimate — even if it’s just why someone is rude at an ATM.

It isn’t just about reading blogs. It’s about being polite, because there’s a good chance the rude person you’re encountering is having a shitty day. It’s about letting things roll off your back when they aren’t personal, and it’s about respecting people when they say things are personal. It’s about having empathy and realizing you are not the center of the world, and other people have thoughts and feelings and experiences, too — and doing your best to treat them that way.

And it’s about never, ever cutting people in line.

Normally this would be a Lazy Sunday post, but as I actually did a book review yesterday, and today is a holiday, we’ll fudge it just a little. Here’s some miscellanea:

#32: Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey

This is a really good book. It’s YA fantasy that takes place in New Zealand and centers around New Zealand’s native mythology. Healely went out of her way to make the cast diverse and inclusive — including characters of color and characters with non-hetero sexualities — and she also went out of her way to be respectful of the mythology she used. (Well, okay, that shouldn’t be going out of her way, that should just be How Things Are Done, but sadly, that often isn’t true. Either way, she wrote a really interesting blog post about working with cultural consultants.)

Since this is YA fantasy, of course, you may be expecting a link to a full review over at Active Voice… and there is one, but I didn’t write it. It just seemed silly for me to write a whole review of a book when I could basically sum it up as, what Jess said.

Link Dump

I’ve had some of these links saved for ages, so… uh, apologies for the out of date conversations? All still interesting, though!

Yoko Ono: A Feminist Analysis

And realizing that Yoko wasn’t to blame for the Beatles breakup makes you ask a question. Why does the myth persist?

I had come to believe that most Beatles historians and true, educated fans had wised up enough to see the Yoko charade for what it is. So imagine my disappointment when proven wrong. Earlier this year, I finished Bob Spitz’s biography The Beatles, which is arguably the most comprehensive Beatles biography in existence. The book starts out amazingly, but about halfway through inexplicably begins to decline rapidly in the number of details provided once the Beatles become famous. That was annoying. But far more so was the unabashed, unapologetic and shameful smearing of Yoko Ono — made even worse by its presentation as fact when so clearly Spitz’s personal opinion. And this opinion is indicative, I think, of the opinion of most Yoko haters ….

So who is the main purveyor of the Yoko myths? Can we pin it on historians like Bob Spitz? Certainly, they hold part of the blame and need to be called out on it. But no, I blame someone else entirely for the bulk of the treatment and misogynistic cultural perceptions of Yoko Ono, as did John. In the first/next part of this series, they are the people who I’m going to discuss. And their names are Paul, George and Ringo.

Indeed. It was heartbreaking for me to realize, as I went through my Beatles Phase, that they were actually kind of dicks, and definitely abusers. Trying to reconcile that with my emotional investment in them, and their historical significance… well, I still struggle with that. It sucks to realize that people you idolize aren’t perfect, and can be outright nasty.

Anyway, all the Yoko hate out there started to bother me a few years ago, and it took awhile for me to twig to why. This pretty much sums it up — plus the cultural narrative that women ruin and destroy (see also: Eve, Pandora). Definitely worth a read.

The War on Critical Thinking and Evolving Social Mores

Talk about out of date. Apparently last October, some jackass wrote an essay about how scifi is being feminized and that’s ruining the genre and also the world! Because science! You see, if girl cooties get into genre fiction, no boys will want to be scientists, and then there will be no scientists. If only the BSG remake hasn’t made Starbuck a woman!

Need I say that the Smart Bitches takedown is great?

Why I’m Team Katniss

The thing is, I can’t get past the feeling that focusing on the love triangle somehow dismisses the central point of the series. Sure, it’s a very commercial, mainstream series that is clearly meant to be a page-turning, engrossing experience. But it’s also about war, violence, mortality, and inequality. I’m a fan of The Hunger Games because of the way the books deal with these issues in such a readable yet thought-provoking (and gut-wrenching) way.

I’ve been trying for ages to put my finger on why “team” terminology bothers me when it comes to YA fiction. I don’t care, like, at all about Twilight, but that actually is a romance, but for series like Hunger Games and or Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties, both series in which I’ve seen this (and I’m sure there are more), it’s really bothered me. I know romances are compelling and even necessary for some readers (I enjoy them but don’t find them necessary to enjoy a story, personally) but to me that feels reductive. These stories aren’t about which guy the heroine ends up with. In life-or-death adventures, it really bothers me that the narrative around girls is romance, no matter how much ass they kick.

Basically, Malinda Lo says that. But way more eloquently. Totally worth a read.

Contest! That I’m entering!

The last time I entered a contest by linking from here, I won! So what the heck, I’ll try it again for the giveaway of an ARC I really want to get my hands on:

Part fugitive, part hero, fifteen-year-old Nya is barely staying ahead of the Duke of Baseer’s trackers. Wanted for a crime she didn’t mean to commit, she risks capture to protect every Taker she can find, determined to prevent the Duke from using them in his fiendish experiments. But resolve isn’t enough to protect any of them, and Nya soon realizes that the only way to keep them all out of the Duke’s clutches is to flee Geveg. Unfortunately, the Duke’s best tracker has other ideas.

Nya finds herself trapped in the last place she ever wanted to be, forced to trust the last people she ever thought she could. More is at stake than just the people of Geveg, and the closer she gets to uncovering the Duke’s plan, the more she discovers how critical she is to his victory. To save Geveg, she just might have to save Baseer — if she doesn’t destroy it first.

Buy it online at: Barnes & Noble   Amazon     Or These Fine Retailers.

(In case you are wondering, I loved the first book and highly recommend it.)

Okay, y’all. That’s all I’ve got. Happy Labor Day.