Ready, Set, Read!

2011 is almost upon us, and that means it's time for me to start my 50 in '11 challenge. Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions; I've tried to take as many as possible, and of course my reading list for 2012 and beyond continues to grow thanks to your awesomeness. I'll keep you all updated on my readerly adventures in 2011, and I want to hear about yours as well!

Here's the final list for 2011:

feminism, gender studies and queer theory
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
The Feminist Promise by Christine Stansell
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers by Lillian Faderman

graphic novels
Blankets by Craig Thompson
From Hell by Alan Moore
The Sandman, Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Maus by Art Spiegelman

classics I haven't read yet
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

books I would normally scoff at
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Rampant by Diana Peterfreund (I know, I hear it's exactly my cup of tea, but killer unicorns, really?)
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (I don't know why I scoff. Maybe I just hate movie-poster book covers.)
A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell Hamilton

contemporary literary fiction
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

books I bought but haven't read yet
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Season of Secrets by Sally Nicholls (okay, I admit, this is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and it's not even out yet... but I worked on it as an intern, so I already know I'll buy it, and I won't be able to wait to read it!)
The Naming by Alison Croggon
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

books with people of color on their covers
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger
Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
Huntress by Malinda Lo
Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

literary journals and collections of poetry or short stories
War Dances by Sherman Alexie
What is this Thing Called Love by Kim Addonizio
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
First Lines

genre literature (sci-fi/fantasy)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacugalupi
Slow River by Nicola Griffith
Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee

trade nonfiction
The Great Typo Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy by Jason Eberl
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar

The question now is: which book do I read first? And what book are you reading to kick off the new year? Let me know in comments!

The WHY WRITE? Series Will Be Back Next Week!

Dear Authorlings,

I'm sorry to say that there shall be no post this week because:

1) If you're like any sensible publishing nerd, you're not at your desk this week anyway. You're off frolicking in the snow or celebrating your any-denominational holidays with your family-and-friend-type relations. Or with your favorite fictional characters--it's okay, I know how that works.

2) I am not always a sensible publishing nerd, exactly, but I'll be away from my desk this week one way or another because I've managed to crash my hard drive. You should be sensible right now and back your hard drive up, especially if you're an awesome writerly type and you have The Results of Your Hard Labor on your hard drive.

3) Let's face it: it's probably good for me to take two whole weeks to figure out how to say something more about the awesomeness of speculative fiction after The Rejectionist melted our faces with her Feminist Science Fiction Week in August. You're welcome.

Be back next week with more of the WHY WRITE?^TM series, plus exciting updates on the 50 in '11 challenge! If you are really, truly stuck at your desk this week without something awesome to read, try this fabulous interview with St. Martin's Press Editor Vicki Lame over at YA Highway. There's something for writers, readers and industry hopefuls!

WHY WRITE?: Young Adult Fiction

Thanks to everyone who voted on genres for the Why Write?^TM series last week! Voting is still open, so if you haven’t chimed in yet, head on over now to put in your two cents.

As for how the voting played out last week: literary fiction took the lead, followed by a tie between Young Adult fiction, sci-fi and fantasy (or speculative fiction), and historical fiction (who knew I had such history buffs among my readers?!). Romance followed that with just a few votes, and westerns and mysteries received a single vote each. I’m excited to dive in on those top four, and if you guys really like the Why Write?^TM series, let me know and I’ll tackle the extra challenge of dissecting romances as well.

I’m going to jump in at the middle here because today’s post flows pretty naturally from my recent post on why character transformation works so well in YA fiction. So—why write YA?

Because you want a welcoming audience. Teenagers who read do so voraciously. They read in school and out of it. They flock to blogs and message boards, they review the books they read on Amazon and in their own blogs, and they spend hours discussing their favorite books with their friends. From the droves of teens who dress up as characters from The Hunger Games or the Harry Potter series for Halloween, to those who flock to communities of writers and readers like John and Hank Green’s massive posse of Nerdfighters, to those who, hungry for more of their favorite characters, take to reading and writing fan fiction, I don’t know of any audience that more actively interacts with their books. Writers of YA, by and large, love to interact with their audiences—and how could they not, in the face of such devoted readers?

Because your readers need you. Middle school and high school can be nasty, and teens both yearn for connection and desperately fear putting themselves out there. I think that’s a big part of why so many teens become ardent readers. Like everyone, they want to open a book and see someone they recognize come to life on the pages. But even more than the adults who read, they need that character who’s just like them—to know they’re not alone, to know they’re not as strange as they feel, to know that if it’s bad, it can still get better. Affirmation and hope can be hard to find in the bitter wilderness of childhood, but a great YA author can give that to a teen.

Because you want to write something deep… Teens are smart and hungry to critique the world around them, including the books they read. Teens often get a bum rap for being addicted to video games, TV and Facebook, but the majority of teens I know are more tuned into the world than a lot of adults. Unlike so many tired nine-to-fivers, they can spend all day thinking at school and still not be ready to shut their brains off and veg when they get home. They’re not daunted by complex plot structures or layers of meaning, and they’re intelligent enough to understand and expand upon complex themes. If you have something serious to say, you might actually be more likely to be heard by a teenager than by an adult.

…But you also want to have fun with it. At the same time, teens are brutally honest and quick to call bullshit. They love to be blown away by a book’s deeper meaning, but they’re not as likely to put up with unnecessary frills. Books for teens are often more fun to read than adult books, without sacrificing the complex themes you find in literary fiction. Compare The Hunger Games or Feed to A Brave New World or 1984 and you’ve got similar themes being expressed in a more fast-paced, fun format. No one ever said that, just because you have something to say, you can’t have fun saying it.

Because you want to change the world. Teens are passionate, political and idealistic. Just as they’re eager to think critically about the world around them, they’re hungry for a cause to believe in—and, as Robyn pointed out a few weeks ago, they're quick to act on their ideals. If you’ve got a message, you might be better off imparting it on the young than on the old. Adults can be jaded or may have already decided exactly where they stand on an issue, but teenagers are still learning all they can, deciding what they think, and committing themselves to ideals. What’s more, teens are just a few years away from inheriting power. Given the right ideals, the next generation might be able to live better than we ever have.

Because you want to change a person. The books we read as teens are often the ones we remember best and love most fiercely, and for good reason. They determine the people we become, the ideals we adhere to, and the way we view the world. There’s a reason that the fight for people of color on book covers and for diversity of gender, sexuality and race in literature has been fought so much more loudly in the kid-lit community than in the world of adult fiction—we recognize that readers of YA are still forming their worldviews, and that books play a powerful role in that growth. The worlds teens experience when they read will help them, whether they are conscious of it or not, to decide what’s right or wrong and what’s normal or abnormal in the world around them. In some ways, picking up a pen to write for teens is (as one of the programmers in my office would say) your Spiderman moment: with great power comes great responsibility. When you write a book that hits home for a teenager, you help to form the belief system he or she will take into adulthood. You can literally have a hand in making that teen the person he or she is becoming.

Do you agree? Disagree? Maybe there are other genres that do some of these things better. Maybe I missed a few good reasons. Let me know in comments!

Introducing the 'Why Write?' Series!

So, a number of things in my life right now—from last week’s blog post (Why YA?) to a trip I made to the Science Fiction Museum (a.k.a. nerd paradise) in Seattle last month—have got me thinking a lot about why specific areas of fiction work, and when they work best. So I’m introducing a new feature on this blog for the next couple of weeks: the Why Write?^TM series!

In the series, I’ll explore a wide range of genres and try to dissect them to get at their inherent strengths. Of course I’ll talk about Young Adult fiction, Sci-Fi and Fantasy (how could I stop myself?), but I’m also interested in taking a look at some of the genres I’m not as quick to pick up. I hope this can be a chance for us to have a conversation about why you like the books you like, as well as an opportunity to learn about why writers choose their genres—because genre is a choice as much as it is story driven, and because the framework in which we set our plots does as much to determine their meaning as does any other element of writing.

In the interest of having the best conversations possible, I want to know what genres you most want to hear about. What genres do you love? Which ones are you curious about, or which ones have you thought of trying? Which ones puzzle you—which ones make you ask yourself who thought that up? If you want to vote for something you don’t see up here, hit me up with it in comments.

I don’t really feel like having rules tonight, so I’m just going to be honest and say I’ll pick the top however-many-I-feel-like to discuss. So get voting!

Why YA? Are Teens Just Better at Saving the World?

In response to my post about character transformations, Julie commented that, more often than not, the characters she sees featured in epic fantasy novels are teens. She also asked several good questions:

Obviously writing about teenagers has a lot of merit as far as all the physical/emotional/maturity changes people face at that stage in life, but can character transformations be just as effective when the character is older? And is it the same for someone in their 20s-30s as it might be for someone who is 40-50 or 60-70? Is there something else that makes adolescence such a special (and popular) time to showcase in a novel of epic proportions? Is this a recent trend?

It's possible that this seems like a recent trend because (1) Young Adult (or YA) fiction is a relatively new thing in and of itself, with publishers having only started to market specifically to teenagers in the last 40 or so years, and the genre has been growing ever since, leading us to (2), the fact that the Young Adult market is booming right now, while a lot of other markets for fiction remain somewhat stagnant due to the recession, changes in the industry and other miscellaneous Doom and Gloom. But I don't think the trend Julie noticed is a fluke—there are some very real advantages to featuring teenage characters in your novel, and/or to marketing it to teens.

I do think that character transformations can and often are handled extremely well in novels intended for and about adults. The Kite Runner is a great example. Though a good portion of the novel is narrated in retrospect and some of its most important moments feature Amir and Hassan as children, Amir’s transformation does not occur in childhood. In fact, he very deliberately avoids it until well into his adulthood. Having lived with and loathed his cowardice and selfishness for years, it is the adult Amir who finally transforms into a man willing to accept the personal cost of standing up for others. Despite that, I think that the emotional journey of that novel is every bit as effective as that of a well-written YA novel.

But I do think that YA as a genre has its inherent benefits when it comes to staging an important character transformation or an epic journey. I often see novels for adults, like Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen and Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill, taking advantage of those benefits by allowing a childhood story of transformation to be narrated by an older character who looks back on his or her youth. In both books, the narratives allow their readers to feel the immediacy of the characters’ growth the adulthood, but the ever-present knowledge that the tales are being related by characters who have had the opportunity to reflect on these experiences keeps them solidly in the realm of adult fiction.

So what are YA’s inherent advantages when it comes to building change?

Julie nailed one of the major ones, which is that, quite simply, teenagers are already changing drastically. On top of changing physically and emotionally with puberty, teens find themselves outside of the supervision of adults for the first time ever and begin discovering their own power to act independently. This is one of the defining characteristics of YA literature in comparison with books for younger readers. Often Middle Grade novels focus on conflicts which are confined, like the characters themselves, to a family unit—or, in the case of Middle Grade novels in which the characters do go on an epic quest, like Gregor the Overlander or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the adventure cannot begin until the adults are out of the picture. Teens, however, are typically given more freedom and are quick to begin pushing boundaries.

Secondly, it’s a fascinating time to write about, because when faced with a problem teens don’t have the benefit of experience to draw upon. As a character in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas says, “Bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.” Teens experience failure after failure and, for the first time in their lives, they aren’t protected from it. And whereas adults often have the experience to recognize plans that are doomed to fail, and enough cynicism not to pin all their hopes to their next plan of attack, teens are passionate, often impulsive, and extraordinarily resilient—so with each new approach to an obstacle, they throw themselves into the fight, certain that this new approach will change everything. All those idealistic forward motions and devastating failures are incredible devices for building tension, and teenagers’ transformations are usually all the more intense for the fervor with which they approach every challenge.

With all that boundary-pushing and newfound independence, teens are also discovering the consequences—both good and bad—of their actions. They keenly feel the importance of everything they do, from how they dress to where they sit in the cafeteria. Plunged into a social hierarchy which is quick to remind them of any trespasses, most teens become hyper-aware of their every action as a choice made within and critiqued by that hierarchy. And every action and emotion within that environment is heightened, dramatic. Maybe the teenage years seem like such an ideal setting for an epic adventure because they are a time at which every challenge we face really does seem epic, every love feels like true love, and every obstacle seems like it could be the last.

And I think the realization of a social hierarchy, coupled with that newfound independence, does something else powerful—it awakens in teens a constant awareness of a world that is larger than them. Up until their teenage years, almost all of their choices and actions are filtered through the adults around them before reaching the outside world. With their newfound freedoms, teens are just discovering that their choices can create change in the world around them, and they take to that like wildfire. Every teen seems to be an activist.

So teens aren’t just changing themselves—they’re changing the worlds around themselves, they’re actively looking for change (and they fervently believe in it), and they’re molded by each of their endeavors. These are juicy, defining years, ripe for transformation. How we deal with the conflicts, challenges and heartbreaks we face as teens determines the adults we become—and who doesn’t want to take part in recreating that experience?

Questions? Have your own theories as to why this trend exists? Let me know in the comments!

Step Right Up and Get Your New Year's Resolution Here! That, Or Tell Me What to Read.

As The Rejectionist reminded me, tis the season to get those New Year's resolutions ready! My resolutions are as follows:

1. Rock the knee-high argyle socks off my job, and rock 'em good.

2. Complete my version of the 10-10-10 reading challenge, to which I linked at the end of Amanda's awesome guest post from last week. The challenge is to read ten books from each of ten different, self-selected categories by October 10th.

100 books in ten months is an ambitious goal, but what I like even more about the challenge is its focus on diverse reading. The challenge pushes readers to tackle writing styles which challenge them, explore new categories of books with an open mind, and discover new reading interests.

I'm not sure I'll make it to ten books in each category, so I'm striving for a modest five instead. And that's where you come in! My categories are below, but I need suggestions.

feminism, gender studies and queer theory
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

---> I could use more suggestions, particularly of a well-researched history of feminism in the U.S., definitive texts in these fields or good overviews of contemporary thinking in these areas.

graphic novels
In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe by Jonathan Scott Fuqua
From Hell by Alan Moore
The Sandman, Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman
Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan
Maus by Art Spiegelman

classics I haven't read yet
The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Connor
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

---> What else should I have read by now?

books I would normally scoff at
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

---> Okay, this is the category for anyone who wants to torture me, or force me to change my mind about a book. What do you think -- should I read the autobiography of Justin Bieber? Some crazy conspiracy theory? Lay it on me!

contemporary literary fiction
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

---> Did I make the right choices? What books have changed you or made you think recently?

books I bought but haven't read yet
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Season of Secrets by Sally Nicholls (okay, I admit, this is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and it's not even out yet... but I worked on it as an intern, so I already know I'll buy it, and I won't be able to wait to read it!)
The Naming by Alison Croggon
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

books with people of color on their covers
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Shine, Coconut Moon by Neesha Meminger
Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
Huntress by Malinda Lo

---> What are your favorites? I'm looking for fiction here, but that can be adult, children's, genre -- whatever!

literary journals and collections of poetry or short stories
War Dances by Sherman Alexie
Things You Should Know by A.M. Homes
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

---> I really need to add some poetry or a literary journal to this list. What are your favorites?

genre literature (sci-fi/fantasy)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Scar by China Mieville

---> Okay, genre mavens -- what are your favorites? Bonus points for subversive themes like gender-bending and addressing issues of discrimination.

trade nonfiction
The Great Typo Hunt by Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar

Hit me up in comments with your suggestions!

Better yet, I hope some of you will join me for this challenge. Feel free to post your categories in comments. I'll be happy to send some suggestions right back at you -- and hopefully so will my other readers!