Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Meg Medina, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass

So, I kind of have a problem with problem novels about bullying where the answer is to just stand up for yourself, because realistically, there are a lot of times that doesn't work. And on the other hand, the more realistic happy endings -- like the one in this book -- often take the agency out of the hands of the protagonist. It's the way the world works, but it's a little unsatisfying at the same time?

Nevertheless I have to say that while it's a bit of an issue book, it's a very good book, and it's one of the few books I've read that really manages to convey what it's like to live in fear because of bullying. Also, there are a lot of good Latina characters. The relationship between Piedad and her mom's friend -- sort of a surrogate-aunt relationship -- is very well done and not something I've seen before. And the not-quite-romance doesn't present sex as all about True Love, and doesn't pathologize it either -- this is still pretty rare in YA!

Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

Eminent Outlaws covers gay male American writers from World War II onward, starting with Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, and Gore Vidal, and moving forward to roughly the present day.

I want literary histories to be full of entertaining anecdotes and sparkling prose, and a good balance between literary criticism, biography, and cultural history. This is all that and an excellent introduction to some books I'm largely, sadly, ignorant of.

(I'm embarrassed to say that I have read exactly one of the books Bram discusses, even very briefly -- Peter Cameron's excellent YA Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You. It doesn't count that I watched A Single Man on a plane trip, I guess, but at least now I know I like the book ending better. It seems like most people get some Tennessee Williams in high school, at least, but I didn't!)

So full of quotable bits and "Oh no they didn't!" moments -- I guess that sounds flippant, but really, when someone says that James Baldwin is too charming to be a major writer, what do you call it?

I never thought about how difficult it was, until quite recently (not that it is easy even now) for these writers to write books that reflected their own hearts, and life as they knew it. And I feel strangely less alone to know a little more about all of these writers who spent years on books that didn't quite work, who couldn't quite figure out what to write or how to write it. Writing YA, you definitely get the feeling that you write a book a year (at least!) or you're just being lazy, and I don't know that I'll ever manage to be a great or ambitious writer, but it IS kind of comforting to think -- even if you work really hard, you're lucky if you manage one great book in your whole life. One great book in your whole life is a lot.

Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire

OMG POETRY.

Um.

This is a book about creating beauty and holding onto hope in circumstances that make it almost impossible; about bearing witness to history; about living with trauma, living with the knowledge that some things will never be fixed but it is still worth patching together a life for yourself. Also there is poetry in it. Good poetry.

You would think that there should be a lot of books out there that make an earnest and compelling argument for simple things like courage, and kindness, and paying forward the privileges you've been given. There should be, but there aren't; so when you meet one, you hold onto it.