Books for... July? So far? And the end of June. Or... something.

I spent the last ten days of June staying at my grandmother's house, taking my turn helping to take care of her, and OH THE READING. I read FOUR WHOLE NOVELS while I was there. (Granted, they were YA novels BUT STILL.) (Also, there was KNITTING.) And then, well, it's summer break, and July has been SO MUCH SANER than June was even though I don't have as much time to sit with a book in my lap. Reading words for fun is even sweeter when I know that in thirty-two short days I'll be back in the throes of academia wherein all reading is required reading and the concept of "free time" evaporates.

(bolds are first-time reads; ratings are out of five.)



Will Grayson, Will Grayson -- John Green and David Levithan -- 4

I've been on a bit of a John Green (of vlogbrothers fame) kick lately and I have to say the guy writes some really readable, likable, thought-provoking young-adult books. I'm not familiar with David Levithan aside from his contribution to this book but the character perspective he wrote was just fine so he gets my stamp of approval as well. This novel is a book about two people with the exact same name who meet by accident just as one of them is having a major personal crisis and WHY didn't I think of this and write it first WHY WHY WHY? The writing, especially in the parts that I'm virtually certain were John Green's, was HILARIOUS (one character -- who is fixated on writing an autobiographical musical production while he is still in high school, which is something only an author who had actually been a teenager could come up with -- is described as "the world's largest person who is really, really gay" and "the world's gayest person who is really, really large" in a sentence that had me muffling my laughter so as not to wake my sleeping grandmother, whom I was caring for at the time) and also quite Deep and Important. Green's main point-of-view character reminded me very much of my own son in some ways -- self-contained, determined to go through life without drawing attention to himself or getting excessively invested in any emotional endeavors, which is not a trait with which I can identify personally, to say the least. (I know this will shock you.) His development over the course of the story gave me interesting insight into what might be going on in my boy's head and in his life.

Young Adult as a genre is very different from what it was when I was in its target demographic and it was, as far as I can tell, in its infancy. (Example: I lost track of how many books about girls reuniting with their adoptive mothers I read as a preteen. THEY WERE EVERYWHERE. I do not miss them.) Now the theme-of-the-decade is, understandably, the struggles and victories of kids who are marginalized (or not) as a result of their sexuality, and while this doesn't bother me in general the way it would have ten years ago, the fact that a book follows the current trend - any current trend - can make the story just the teensiest bit tired before I even open the cover. But Green and Levithan take the not-terribly-original thematic material and pair it with an original story and highly capable writing to produce a result that is well worth reading.



Looking for Alaska -- John Green -- 4.25

I will never forget what my dear friend Jenn said to me once about writing -- that everybody's first book is autobiographical. And whoo boy is this ever John Green's first novel. (I don't mean that in a bad way. I gave it a 4.25 out of 5, after all.) In it, a skinny (check), shy (check), intelligent (check) young man named Miles leaves his childhood home in Florida (check) for a boarding school (check) in Alabama (check) where he becomes a notable prankster (check). (Thank you, Internet. Prior to say 1997 I would have only been guessing here.) (I'm gonna go way out on a limb and surmise that John Green also made memorable, quirky friends and gained an affectionate nickname when he went off to school.) The thing is, this story really works. The characters are memorable and (mostly) knowable, the boarding-school pranks are generally hilarious (and inspiring), and the heartbreaking parts are suitably heartbreaking. If you like YA and/or boarding-school stories, give it a go.



Jellicoe Road -- Melina Marchetta -- 4.75

I saw this book at B&N back when I had a Christmas gift card to spend and I almost bought it based on its jacket-flap description, but I didn't (I, um, bought something by John Green instead. But I'm not going THAT far back in my reviews. OK, OK, Paper Towns, really good, go read it, and yes The Fault In Our Stars is also wonderful), so when I saw it in the YA section at the local library while I was wandering around over there looking for books that might spark my son's interest* (I failed) I grabbed it up and took it home -- er, to my grandmother's -- and devoured it. It's another boarding-school story, which was a total accident; it's set in Australia and centers (at first) on the unofficial hierarchy among the students there, and their rivalry with the "townies" who live nearby and the "Cadets" who come from a military school for two months' worth of exercises every spring. The first chapter or two didn't grab me, but I'm glad I kept going. As the cadets' annual visit carries on, the protagonist, an orphan named Taylor who is the leader of the boarders, discovers things about herself, her town, her friends, and her missing mother that she never knew, in a way that keeps you as the reader guessing. (I actually made a chart to keep things straight and see if I could figure things out before she did. Now THAT's a good book.)

*Getting NSLT interested in a novel happens about once every two years and requires just the right combination of post-apocalyptic grittiness and fantasy. Yes, we read The Hunger Games trilogy before you did. ;-) He also liked the Chaos Walking trilogy and the Artemis Fowl books but now we're kind of stuck and he only begrudgingly reads the stuff I assign him for school. He takes after his father, who reads maybe a novel a decade, though he listens to them much more often now that we all have iPods and he commutes for over an hour a day.



Slumdog Millionaire -- Vikas Swarup -- 3.5

I didn't know this book existed when I watched the film adaptation, which meant that I unintentionally violated my firm policy of always reading the book first. I loved the movie, and I liked the book. The two are SERIOUSLY VERY DIFFERENT from each other, and if I'd read the book first I'd probably have spent so much time yelling at the screen during the movie (which I watched at home, so that would have been OK, really) that I'd have missed out on its good points. The very basic idea is the same but the details, except for a few, are drastically altered, from what I can remember of the movie. The book reads like a series of short stories, some of which broke my heart and made me laugh, some of which made me want to skim and skip around (though I didn't).



The End of California -- Steve Yarbrough -- 2.25

The other day I was in the library just wandering in the stacks waiting for something to jump out at me and say READ ME*, and I guess maybe because of the word California in the title, this one did. And I don't quite wish it hadn't. It was written by a guy who is (or was) apparently a creative-writing professor at Fresno State, just down the highway from me, one of the two places on my I'll-probably-go-to-nursing-school-there list, and it was about a doctor/football player who moved from Fresno back to the town where he grew up in Mississippi, which is actually where Yarbrough lived before he moved to Fresno, if you can follow that. There's a murder and a teen romance and an affair or two and some deep forgiveness moments and far too many paragraphs of high-school football play-by-play, and I kept reading not so much because I was hooked on the story but because I kept thinking, this has got to get really good sometime. It was a story with a lot of potential but it ended up just feeling sparse (and not in a good artsy way; more like there were more pages than there was story to fill them) and a bit... boring, really, and much too footbally oh my gosh. (It doesn't take much.) I'm always terribly afraid of authors googling their names and finding my negative reviews so Mr. Yarbrough, if you're reading this, I'm sorry and it's nothing personal and I'm sure you're a lovely creative-writing instructor. At Emerson College (I just looked you up), in Boston, which is probably at least much cooler than Fresno is right now.

*related: I cannot tell you how many books I have taken home from the library because their spines looked interesting and their authors happened to luck out and have a last name that came just before or after the name of a really famous writer. I've discovered some great ones and some graah ones this way. I guess if that one girl who ALWAYS sat in front of me in junior high because her name started with G-O-R-G and mine started with G-O-R-H ever hits the NYT bestseller list, I'll have to see if maybe I really do have a book inside me waiting to come out because I could never have a better opportunity.