Archive | June 2014

Many Waters

First off, a bit of exciting news: Sparkers received a starred review from Kirkus! You can read it over there. I’m very happy!

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

It’s rained about a foot in Minnesota in the month of June, making it the state’s wettest June since 1874. It was quite the change going from parched Southern California to practically underwater Minnesota, where lately the first question people ask upon running into each other is, “Is your basement flooding?” Too often, alas, the answer is yes. Or if not your basement, then your in-laws’.

Last Saturday, I attended the Minnesota Peony Society’s annual picnic (for which I served as Dessert Competition Registrar). It was held in a park where the line between land and lake had blurred:

Mallards enjoying the swing set

Lake Cornelia Fishing Pier

A school of minnows on a walking path

Then, on Sunday, my family went to see Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis. The falls are on Minnehaha Creek, which flows into the Mississippi River. The creek reached a record high level last week, so the falls promised to be an awesome sight.

Minnehaha Falls, on Minnehaha Creek

A kayaker went over these falls on purpose a few days ago for a stunt. I heard he broke his nose.

The creek itself is looking equally impressive these days. It’s not the time to go canoeing.

Raging Minnehaha Creek, just downstream of the falls

Me and Minnehaha Falls

Northern Spark 2014

Jun18

I am on vacation in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and I arrived just in time for Northern Spark 2014. This is an all-night arts festival I’ve attended with friends for the past two years (I mentioned the 2013 festival briefly in my 2013 recap post). The first year I went, it was in Minneapolis, and we spent most of our time around the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi. Last year, it was in St. Paul, in and around the Union Depot railroad station. This year, it was back in Minneapolis, and it coincided with the opening of the Green Line, the new light rail train that connects the Twin Cities’ downtowns. The light rail line was in the midst of construction the whole time I lived in Beth Shalom last year, and whenever I walked down University Avenue to go to the library or to grab a meatball bánh mì, I would see the as yet unused rails and the empty stations and regret the fact that I would be leaving before the trains started running. In celebration of the opening of the Green Line, all Twin Cities buses and trains were free this past weekend–a public transportation fan’s dream!

Saturday was rainy and blustery, so I did not ride the Green Line to St. Paul as I’d hoped. Besides, we were hosting a garden party at home, which ended up being indoors due to the weather.

Some of my mother’s peonies

In the evening, as a thunderstorm rolled through, I took a (free!) bus to downtown Minneapolis and met some friends at the Convention Center for the opening ceremony of Northern Spark. After some taiko drumming and a welcome from Mayor Betsy Hodges, we headed to Orchestra Hall to hear the Minnesota Orchestra, conducted by Courtney Lewis, perform Kevin Puts’s Symphony No. 4. It was my first time in Orchestra Hall since it was renovated, and for the most part it didn’t look that different. It was also my first time hearing the Minnesota Orchestra since the lockout ended. The last time I heard these musicians perform live, they were playing independently as the Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra. And the last time I heard them at all was in October, in LA, when I listened to Minnesota Public Radio’s live stream of Osmo Vänskä‘s last concert as conductor of the orchestra. Now the lockout is over, and Osmo is back! So it was really meaningful to be back in that familiar hall hearing this orchestra again. The symphony was accompanied by a light show against the cubes embedded in the wall behind the stage. Some of it was rather pretty, but it felt a bit superfluous to me.

After the Minnesota Orchestra’s performance, we prowled around Orchestra Hall and the Convention Center seeing what else there was to see. There was a trebuchet out in the street hurling water balloons containing LED lights in soaring arcs over the pavement. There were some musicians playing unusual instruments (bowed banjo?) in the Convention Center arcade. We dashed through the rain to this seesaw that was supposed to do something light/sound-related, but it was hard to tell what it was doing, exactly, and we were getting wet.

Eventually, we rode the new Green Line a short ways to the East Bank of the University of Minnesota and ducked into the Weisman Art Museum. This is where I knew the local Sacred Harp singers were holding an all-night Northern Spark singing. The people I was with were very good sports about singing with me for most of the hour between midnight and 1 a.m., and it was rather fun to make my reappearance among the Twin Cities singers in the middle of a stormy night. We sang some tunes befitting the circumstances, like The Midnight Cry and Showers of Blessings.

From the Weisman, we hopped from one U building to the next. The Gossip Orchestra was pretty cool, and in Northrop Auditorium we experienced the Fruit Orchestra, in which you hold an alligator clip in one hand and hit pieces of fruit (a banana, a lemon, a lime) with the other to make music. The tomatoes and cherry were in somewhat bad shape by the time we got to the Fruit Orchestra. (It strikes me that there are a lot of orchestras in this post.) Also in Northrop was a slideshow, projected on the wall, of the outlines of all the lakes in Minnesota.

As it approached 2 a.m., we decided we’d had enough of running around in the rain and exploring Northern Spark in wet clothes. For our final adventure of the night, we crossed the Mississippi using this former railroad bridge that I hadn’t known existed (according to Wikipedia, it is Northern Pacific Bridge Number 9) as the wind blew rain in our faces and thunder rumbled overhead.

One last thing! For helping to fund Northern Spark this year, I received this bit of plastic, which, believe it or not, is called a sparker (as are people who attend Northern Spark, apparently–that makes me a Sparker!).

My sparker

Why is it called a sparker? Because it does this:

Launch Party Date + A Mini-Rant

Jun11

I’m excited to announce the time and place of my release party for Sparkers: Friday, September 26th, 2014 at 6:30pm at Red Balloon Bookshop in Saint Paul, MN! I lived just a few blocks away from Red Balloon last year, and its proximity was one of the best parts of living in that neighborhood. Red Balloon is where I met Eoin Colfer (when I was…12?) and Maggie Stiefvater (when I was 21). Back in October 2012, as Maggie Stiefvater dedicated my copy of The Raven Boys, I couldn’t have imagined that two years later I would be celebrating the publication of my first book in the same store. The party is still a ways off, of course, but feel free to mark your calendars.

Now for the (entirely unrelated) mini-rant. Last week, Slate ran a piece about young adult (YA) literature, something to the effect that adults should be ashamed of reading YA books. If you haven’t already read the article and want to, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it (though in addition to the article itself your search will undoubtedly turn up scads of rebuttals–the piece hit a nerve). A new commentary lamenting the choices of the reading public and/or expounding on what’s wrong with YA literature appears every couple of months, so this wasn’t exactly surprising, but I think this deliberately provocative article particularly irked readers and writers of YA and middle grade (MG). Others have already responded to the Slate piece more deftly than I will be able to, but I can’t help sharing some of the thoughts I had as I read the article because it was so astoundingly condescending and at times so blatantly wrong that I was practically sputtering at my computer screen as I scrolled through.

First off, it alarms me that the author casually dismisses all genre fiction out of hand in order to focus on the only kind of YA books she is even willing to consider as potentially worthy of adult consumption, namely, YA contemporary. There is no reason why realistic fiction should automatically be elevated above science fiction, fantasy, etc. in either the adult or YA/children’s realm. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of genres. There are excellent books and less excellent books in every genre.

The author states that she didn’t cry when she read a certain bestselling YA novel about two teenagers with cancer. Great. Neither did I. She is entitled to find that novel occasionally eye roll-inducing, but there’s no need to be smug about it and imply that she’s more sophisticated than those adult readers who genuinely enjoyed the book.

The author sets up a clear dichotomy between YA novels, which have “uniformly satisfying” endings, and adult novels, which presumably have complex, ambiguous, or open-ended endings. This is kind of ridiculous. There are YA and MG books in which not every loose end is tied up*, and there are in fact whole classes of adult novels in which satisfying endings are de rigueur. Of course, it’s pretty clear that when the author talks about books for adults she’s only talking about serious, literary fiction (Literature with a capital L–however you define it), but if that’s the case, why single out YA novels for disparagement? Does she think adults should be equally ashamed of reading category romance or cozy mysteries (examples I give with caution, since I know very little about them)? My hunch is she does think so, but she doesn’t talk about it because it would undermine her argument that adults reading adult books = good and adults reading YA books = bad.

Then I got to this: “These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.” At this point, it became obvious that the author simply didn’t know what she was talking about. She can’t have read many books for teenagers or even for children. Because this sentence is flat-out false. When I read it, the first work that leaped to my mind was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I am fascinated by these books in large part because they’re practically the epitome of “the emotional and moral ambiguity” that the Slate writer claims doesn’t exist in YA. A Series of Unfortunate Events isn’t even YA, it’s MG, which means it’s for even younger children.

For those not familiar with it, A Series of Unfortunate Events is about three siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who are delivered into the hands of a villainous guardian after their parents perish in a fire. The first few books chronicle their woes as they move from one incompetent guardian to the next, always being pursued by their first guardian, who is after their parents’ fortune. Part of the charm of the books is the narrator’s constant warnings to the reader that this tale is not a happy one. Many installments in the series end in the Baudelaires’ failure to accomplish what they had hoped. The guardians who love them die; their new friends are torn from them or betray them. As the series progresses, the line between heroes and villains blurs, and what previously seemed black and white collapses into murky gray. The Baudelaires find themselves making choices of dubious morality and even hurting others to try to escape their enemies and save themselves and their friends. They doubt their past decisions and are no longer proud of or comfortable with themselves. I’m afraid I’m making this sound very dry; the books are not, and you should read them! The point is, A Series of Unfortunate Events is rife with moral ambiguity.

I also point to this series to refute the claim that all books for young people have neat, satisfying endings. As I read Books 10, 11, 12, I wondered how Lemony Snicket was going to end things. He couldn’t come through with a happy ending in the final book because the whole premise of A Series of Unfortunate Events was that it was an unhappy story. An ending in which all was resolved would destroy the integrity of the series. But surely he couldn’t end with the Baudelaires’ ultimate defeat or even death because he had legions of young fans who would be crushed, right? I seriously wondered how Lemony Snicket was ever going to pull off a fitting conclusion to the series. But guess what? He did. The last volume ended not happily, not unhappily, but ambiguously. He left so many unanswered questions. And it was so right. It was the ending the series called for, and it proves that not all children’s books have simple endings.

When articles like the recent one in Slate come out, people sometimes respond by quoting Madeleine L’Engle (“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children”) or Philip Pullman (“There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book”). This makes me uneasy too. Not the quotes themselves, but the way in which they’re sometimes used, defensively, or sometimes even smugly. In such a context, these quotes imply that, actually, it’s books for young people that are superior. This strikes me as playing the same game as articles that exalt adult literature and denigrate YA or MG literature. Why should we even have this debate?

I read books for adults and books for children and teenagers. Admittedly, the vast majority of what I read is YA or MG. I feel like I never really left the teen section of the library. When someone tosses out that statistic about how half of all YA books are bought by people over 18 (some of whom may be buying the books for teens, of course), it usually takes me a second to remember that, oh, right, they’re talking about me. I’m one of those adult buyers now.

The thing is, reading YA doesn’t prevent you from reading adult literature too, and neither is inherently superior to the other. Why don’t we just respect everyone’s right to read what they like? If a sixth grader wants to read War and Peace, let her. If adults enjoy books for young people, more power to them. If you’re having snide thoughts about someone else’s choice of reading material (I know I have), that’s okay, but maybe keep them to yourself.

Did I say this was going to be a mini-rant? I guess it wasn’t so mini. Ah, well. Happy reading to all.

*Incidentally, School Library Journal‘s recent review of Sparkers counts my book among these when it says that “[n]ot everything is wrapped up neatly” in it. I was honestly a bit surprised, but I’m delighted someone might consider my novel a counterexample to the Slate piece’s claim that all YA and children’s books’ endings are tied up in a bow.

My Three Favorite Authors

Jun4

I draw a (possibly pedantic) distinction between my favorite authors and the authors of my favorite books. Some authors in the latter category are Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Catherine Jinks (the Pagan Chronicles), Cornelia Funke (Inkheart), and Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events). I like each of them for a particular book or series they wrote, but I haven’t necessarily sought out their other works. When I count someone among my favorite authors, though, it means I will read anything they write and I have gone out of my way to try to read their entire oeuvre. By this definition, I have just three favorite authors. I actually discovered all of them thanks to required high school reading, so hooray for our curriculum, without which I might never have stumbled upon them! In chronological order, I give you…

Chaim Potok

Our summer reading book before 10th grade was Davita’s Harp, by Chaim Potok. This novel tells the story of Ilana Davita Chandal, a girl growing up in New York City in the 1930s and 40s. Her Jewish mother and Gentile father are radical activists. After her father is killed in Spain during the Civil War, Ilana becomes deeply drawn to Jewish practice. The book chronicles her political, religious, and literary explorations as well as the changes in her family life. I loved Davita’s Harp. It was one of only a handful of books I brought with me when I first went away to college. I’ve read about eight of Potok’s books now. His most famous novel is The Chosen, about a Hasidic boy and an Orthodox boy in Brooklyn who meet after the former hits the other in the eye with a baseball during a heated game. Their relationship is one of the most beautiful friendships I have ever read. Potok’s novels opened my eyes to the richness of Judaism, especially it’s tradition of study. (I guess this shows I like my religion academic?) He makes textual interpretation so exciting. I’m not sure anyone else could make a rabbinical ordination exam (in The Promise) so riveting and suspenseful.

José Saramago

One of the books I had to read the summer before my senior year of high school was José Saramago’s All The Names, translated from the Portuguese. I remember liking it, and my copy has copious margin notes I made in it that summer, but I don’t quite remember when or why I sought out more Saramago. I’ve now read sixteen of his books (mostly translated by either Margaret Jull Costa or Giovanni Pontiero), and he died in 2010, so his body of work is complete. Some of my favorite novels of his are The Stone Raft (in which Iberia breaks off of Europe), Blindness (which was made into a movie not that long ago, though I haven’t seen it), and Baltasar and Blimunda. And The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a powerful and subversive book which I’ve reread once and would eagerly reread again. I can’t quite describe what I find so compelling about Saramago’s fiction. He has a distinctive and unmistakable voice (even in translation), but that’s true of all three of these authors. He often starts from a bizarre or fantastical premise (like Iberia breaking off of Europe or an election in which most of the populace casts blank ballots) and then plumbs the lives of ordinary people caught up in these events. I don’t know, his books are just addicting.

Orhan Pamuk

During my senior year of high school, we read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely) in World Literature. I remember reading way ahead of the class schedule because the book was so good I couldn’t put it down. (It didn’t hurt that it was about, well, snow; I’ve already mentioned this novel as one of my favorite snow books.) Snow remains my favorite Pamuk novel, but I’ve read all his other novels which have been translated into English, as well as his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, which I read while visiting Istanbul in February 2013. A lot of Pamuk’s characters have an almost painful level of self-awareness that I find appealing for some reason.

Pamuk is the only writer on this list whom I’ve seen in real life. In October 2009, I visited my friend in Boston during my fall break. At the time, Pamuk was the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, and he was giving the Norton Lectures, one of which occurred during my visit. I heard him talk in a theater on Harvard’s campus. I really wanted his autograph, but I was afraid to approach him, and I also didn’t have anything (like a book) for him to sign. So I just kind of hovered as he talked to other people, and then when he left the theater I sort of followed him and whoever he was with across Harvard Yard for a ways… I mean, that’s not creepy at all, right? The funny thing is, a day or two later, walking around Cambridge, I came upon one of those used book sales where someone leaves a table of books out on the sidewalk and a box for you to put your money in. There was a copy of Snow in the collection, so I bought it (the copy I’d read in high school belonged to the school). Too late for the author’s autograph, alas! But it’s still special because I acquired it more or less on the same occasion that I saw Orhan Pamuk speak.

By now, you might be thinking, Hmmm, her favorite authors are all men. That has not escaped my notice. I take it as a sign that I have more reading to do!