A long-time best-friendship between a teenage boy and a girl is tested when the latter comes out and their school makes a stink about her wanting to wear a tux to the prom with a girl as her date.
After a summer of subsisting on the literary equivalent of carbs (i.e., genre fiction), I started the school year off with Jeanette Wintersen then dipped close to chick flick territory, followed that with an international memoir and then feminist essay collections back-to-back. Not that I don't love my vampires and young adults, but it's satisfying to get back to spending some time in the minds of smart grown-up humans for a change. It helps that Jennifer Baumgardner is so damned likable in F'em.
From an interview with Ani DiFranco
Also from Ani (everyone calls her Ani, right?)
Disclosure: I'm friends or friendly with about half of the contributors to this book, for which I also wrote a chapter. I think I'd have loved it even if that weren't the case, but then again it couldn't have not been the case because the world of feminist archivists isn't as big as you might imagine--or hope!
I loved reading DeWoskin's two novels, and I also love memoirs, especially about being caught between two cultures, so I was jazzed to finally get around to Foreign Babes. Usually that's a set up for disappointment, but although I didn't find FB quite as dramatic as her fiction, I still read it with great interest.
At first I was put off by Howrey's clever self-conscious self-mockery, but I was patient (because I'm a sucker for dance stories) and rightly rewarded with a mature story of sibling love and rivalry in a chick-littish wrapper where the heroine SPOILER doesn't end up with a man.
When I left [my dying friend] Wendy's I walked across the park. The path I took when I was a student, when none of what has happened had happened.
"The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection." So yeah, Jeanette Winterson had a rough childhood, but somehow managed to keep her optimism and sense of humor. Why Be Happy reminds me of Are You My Mother?, but without comics and run through a Joan Didion filter.
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior -- benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's own chaos was also brought under control.
'Whenever I am troubled,' said the librarian, 'I think about the Dewey decimal system.'
'The what happens?' asked the junior, rather overawed.
'Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course -- as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of the unconsciousness.'
Jim Wellington, aka "The Duke" of Waterloo and Harvard goes to the Berlin Olympics to run the 1500 meter. I used to love this book, and now I don't know why. The Duke is a dullard. Plus, written in 1939, Tunis has an inkling what German fascism is going to look like, but he's a bit of a dick about the "colored boys" and doesn't give much attention to Jesse Owens (who he refers to by another name, Washington, maybe).
After becoming enamored of Ms. McGuire's Newsflesh trilogy (written as Mira Grant), and to keep me busy until NYPL got around to acquiring the final installment, I was gaga to bury myself in her October Daye series, about a half-fae detective. As usual, my high expectations ruined things for me. Or, pretty likely, Toby just isn't half as interesting as George and Shaun.
This is an old favorite, that I ILL'd partially for Eric's benefit because it's about a runner. It's 1930s young adult sports fiction. Our protagonist, "The Duke," is an Iowa boy struggling to find himself at Harvard University, which is full of prep school snoots who won't give him the time of day until he accidentally becomes a sports hero. His best buddies, football star Mickey McGuire and the urbane Faugeres Smith, are more interesting than Duke. Even if Duke is a little hayseed, his story is compelling, and I like the way Tunis gives it to Harvard.
I was stoked to pick this up at the library after waiting several weeks for it and after having read the short story that launched the Alpha and Omega series. I bet you know where I'm going with this. Cry Wolf was a disappointment. It did a lot more telling than showing and was overly impressed with the Omega wolf magic of radiating calm. I've found Briggs to be a creative and intelligent writer, but this one felt like her apprentice wrote it based on Briggs' outline and characters.