recent reading

[psocoptera]

Dodger, Terry Pratchett. Not a Discworld book. Dodger is a tosher in Victorian London, someone who makes a living scrounging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers. He encounters (and inspires) Charles Dickens and various other famous Victorians. Had a few good, evocative bits, generally in the sewers, but mostly felt kind of flat and forced.

Liar & Spy, Rebecca Stead. Not as brilliant as When You Reach Me, but "not as good as her Newbery winner" still leaves a fair bit of room. Liar & Spy is a very competent, well-written middle-grade novel with some lovely vivid character detail and some powerful issue stuff that made me cry. I would happily recommend it to people who like middle-grade books. It did not have the amazingness that made me recommend When You Reach Me even to people who wouldn't normally think of reading middle-grade.

Machine of Death, anthology. Some good stuff in here. Thought-provoking. Free on the internet!

Every Day, David Levithan. Greg Egan's short story The Safe Deposit Box rewritten as a YA novel. Which is not a criticism! It's a great premise and Levithan is definitely putting his own spin on it, focusing on the emotional implications and questions of identity so genre-appropriate to YA, whereas Egan's story is more SFnal, investigative, mechanics-focused. And Levithan may have come up with the idea independently - he says in his notes that he doesn't remember what sparked the idea, so there's no way to know.

Anyways, it's mostly good! Sort of recommended with one big caveat, there's one chapter involving a fat character that was just full of fat-shaming and body hatred, which, ugh, David Levithan, why? It could have been really interesting - pretty much every other time Levithan shines a light on a way in which people get "othered", he does it with sensitivity and compassion, the gay characters, the trans guy, the drug addict, the "underage illegal maid" who is pretty clearly an undocumented immigrant, the diabetic, the variation in wealth/class/resources, there's a whole conversation you could have about race and the way Levithan shows it as a non-issue which is an interesting choice on Levithan's part (I have this whole theory that by experiencing a given racial identity for only one day at a time, A might be oblivious to being a target of prejudice except for the occasional major incident, because A wouldn't catch how individual microaggressions were actually part of a larger pattern - if that's what Levithan was going for, he needed to make it a little clearer though). But this one chapter is just so bad. But the rest is so good. So... read at your own risk, I guess.

Comments

[aryky.livejournal.com]

I read Every Day because of this controversial article, which just made it sound like a premise right up my ally (I love possession, right?). But I had really mixed feelings about it. It was reasonably entertaining for what it was, and I definitely enjoyed reading it, but I also found it kind of irritating even as I enjoyed it. I think part of it was that for the particular thematic message I thought Levithan wanted to convey, which I think had to do with the importance of both the universal truths that we all share as humans and also the individual idiosyncrasies that make us all unique, the former half of that ended up getting a lot more play than the latter half because I thought the characterization didn't work all that well - the only character I felt had any particularly distinct personality was Amelia, somehow, despite the fact that she appears on only three pages of the book (but I thought it would have been a much more interesting book if A had fallen in love with her rather than with Rhiannon). But part of it was that it wasn't the book I wanted based on that premise - it actually wasn't nearly as much about possession as I had wanted? Or at least not the aspects of possession that I find so fascinating.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think I would even have used the word "possession" in describing it, except if I mentioned the Nathan subplot I guess, although honestly that was the less interesting part of the book to me and would not feature prominently in my description.

I had to look up which one was Amelia.

Man, I could say a lot of things about that article, but they mostly boil down to "that article is dumb".

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Somebody takes over somebody else's body!

To be honest, I found my reactions to that book confusing enough that I actually (privately) wrote them up after reading it. That's the reason why I remember about Amelia ;-)

Sorry to link you to an annoying article. As annoying as it was, though, it did induce me to read a book which, even if it wasn't what I was hoping for, I did enjoy ;-)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, no, it's not crazy at all to call it possession, I just meant to agree with you that it's not really so much about possession as you might think.