Summer Reading Assignments

I'm not really assigning anything, but school has ended for my young writers in Colorado and I'm sure many of them were sent home with summer reading lists. 

I don't like summer reading lists because, as I noted long ago, they are too often larded with classics the creator of the list hasn't read and that make no sense. 

Or "award-winning" books voted upon by teachers because they are important and meaningful, not because anyone would want to read them.

And if you click that column, please don't miss the link in the intro to author/educator Kate Messner's brilliant piece on summer reading lists. 

In any case, bless any adult who has the summer off to lie on the beach and wade through the books we feel we only have time for then. As noted in yet one more column, summer doesn't spell leisure nearly as much once you're out of school, despite the lingering sense that it should.

However, you won't need weeks of unscheduled personal time to read the two books I'm recommending today, so there's a reason to dive right in.

And, unlike some of those tiresome old warhorses on the Assigned Reading List, they're well worth your time.

I was particularly struck by Thoreau: A Sublime Life, which was written by Maximilien Le Roy and illustrated by A. Dan because it might have been created simply to refute the things I most hate about graphic novels and histories.

(Technical note: You'll see by the left edge of that cover scan that I bought the hardbound print version. Anyone who reads graphic novels on a telephone is missing the point of the "graphic" part.)

The two major things I have come to despise in graphic histories are, first of all, books that are researched with such lack of rigor that they tell me nothing I couldn't have learned at Wikipedia, or, worse, repeat apocrypha a competent eighth grader would have spotted.

Le Roy appears to have his ducks in a row on that count, and it's not so much that he presented new material as he selected text from Thoreau's own works and buttressed it with exceedingly well-chosen reports by his contemporaries. And then added footnotes.

I'm not a Thoreau scholar and can't say its presentation is historically bullet-proof, but nothing lept out and I suspect those who are such scholars might quibble with Le Roy's emphasis, since that's what scholars do, but not with his facts.

The other major objection I have with a lot of graphic novels and memoirs is the endless mood-setting in which our protagonist wanders through a page or two or six and nothing happens. 

Yes, it's mood-setting. It puts me in the mood of Yosemite Sam, screaming "I paid t'see the high divin' act, and I'm a-gonna see the high divin' act!"

Andy Warhol's "Empire" is a silent movie of the Empire State Building that lasts for eight hours and five minutes and good for him but I have no interest in sitting through the entire thing, and especially not if I had to pay for a ticket.

Nor do I want to shell out twenty bucks to watch some Emo adolescent wander a silent landscape in deeply evocative vacuousness.

That said, Henry David Thoreau was not some vapid, angst-ridden pimple factory, and when he walked in the forest, it had purpose and meaning, not simply because he was famous for that sort of thing but because Dan's artwork is backed up by Le Roy's sparse but well-chosen prose.

In other words, the prose does as much to set the mood for the art as the art does to set the mood for the story.

There is no point at which you suspect the artist is filling panels to make the page count into a multiple of four or eight, and, in fact, while there are many silent panels, the pacing of this book is impressively, enviably tight.

This is terrific stuff.

 

For Emmie, With Love and Squalor

Friend-of-the-Blog Terri Libenson has created "Invisible Emmie," a graphic novel primarily aimed at middle-schoolers that wades straight into all the anomie and confusion of adolescent relationships and self-image with an unblinking sense that Terri hasn't forgotten a whole lot about those years.

 

Possibly because she gets to relive them regularly in real life.

I think middle-schoolers will be surprised that she avoids so much of the well-intentioned blah-dee-blah-blah normally shoveled their direction.

But anyone writing for them, or working with them, or marketing to them, or buying gifts for them, would profit from the sharp and unforgiving Critique of Well-Intentioned Bullshit that Libenson -- or, more accurately, Emmie -- lays out in her prologue:

That's one helluva bold promise, but she sustains it throughout "Invisible Emmie" with the same gentle but unsparing vision she's brought to Pajama Diaries.

It's not that you have to be cruel to be kind. You don't.

But there are any number of people who will tell you what you want to hear, as long as you want to hear what you've been conditioned to want to hear.

I'm not calling this "an instant classic," because this level and style of kid-lit has to be ephemeral to be relevant.

It's more of an instant "Yay!"

But I certainly feel the directness cuts deeper than average in this genre because it's not wrapped in greater issues; The story is purposely sparse to lay bare the narration.

It's an uncondescending reflection on how life is, and, as suggested in that acerbic prologue, the sense of alienation is not couched in disability or disease or great tragedy, but in the fact that feeling different is -- paradoxically -- standard for people who feel at all.

Which doesn't mean it isn't real. Or that it doesn't matter.

Buy a copy, read it and then figure out who to give it to.

 

Variation on a familiar adolescent theme:

Comments

[Woodrowfan]

interesting cover. less depressing that "At Seventeen" by Janis Ian/.

[Mike Peterson]

Janis was looking back with bitterness and regret. Tori, and I think Terri, look back with empathy and affection.

Not to rank those styles of reflection.