'Sleeper'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Flea beat me to Kate Moss; she was marvelous.
I can also recommend PF Chisholm's Elizabethan-era mysteries. Those are quite fun, and rather more substantive, historically, than most historical mysteries. Chisholm is actually Patricia Finney, and she's quite a historian.
The porous line between "literary" fiction that plays with SF and the (much hated descriptor) "transcends the genre" science fiction writers.
Don't know how they missed Ballard on that list, though.
Also, it's terrible. (YMMV of course. I love Willis generally, but that book....ugh...)
Oh, shoot, I was going to ask if it was better written than Doomsday Book because the ideas sounds fascinating but I just loathed Doomsday Book . I can't even remember why exactly now. I wanted it to be so much better because the plot (at least in the beginning) was so intriguing to me. I do remember seriously wanting to throw it across the room by the end.
And I adore Doomsday Book!
Passages just draaaaaaaaaaaaaaged for me. By the time I got to the last page I was still waiting for the book to start.
We're in the Houston airport. our flight's been delayed for two hours. Mysteriously, it's been delayed to the same time as the later flight. Hmmmmmm.
::Waiting for Nilly to see the Willis talk::
Freakin' New Yorker's gone to town on YA literature. Their Book Bench Reads is full of some of the most asinine commentary I've seen in a long time with respect to young adult books.
I tend to think of young-adult fiction as sort of facile—a straightforward style, uncomplicated themes and morals—but this had a complexity, an ambiguity, that surprised me
It fit my expectations in terms of length and enjoyableness, though: I assume that anything branded “young adult” needs to have a plotline that captures a teen’s attention, and also needs to be not too long or challenging.
That was just within the first few paragraphs.
I tried to register to post, but the site hates me, so I had to rant in my blog. Bah.
What an aggravating article, Barb. Heaven forbid a book be challenging and complex. We couldn't let our kids read anything like that. t rolls eyes
It wasn't even the "we couldn't let our kids read anything like that" that made me nuts, sj, it was more the "we're shocked, SHOCKED, we tell you, that not only are these books good and complex and that kids would be interested. but also that they'd be able to ingest and appreciate such works."
When I was a teen-ager, I assumed that the label was synonymous with preachy and boring, a companion to sex-ed classes. I still can’t imagine kids Lily’s age actually reaching for this book over “Tropic of Cancer.”
Apparently this person has read neither young adult fiction nor The Tropic of Cancer, which is, at best, a difficult book. These people appear to be from another planet, one without teenagers or books. Who the hell reads Tropic of Cancer, anyway?
It's certainly a contrast with this week's article [link] about whether the Newbery-winning books are too complicated and depressing for teens.
A good book is a good book for every age. Young adult is just a label, one that generally indicates that there are young people in the book and it has a plot. Are the moral stakes low in The Giver?
I have run out of words on the subject and am now just making rude noises and yelling.