Smart in a Stupid Way

We’re trying to figure out a way to start a small summer library for the kids associated with my work, so I’ve been really interested in Y.A. “boy” books lately. I have a top ten set of favorite books about teenage boys and I think it will be interested to see if actual teenage boys like them as much as I do. I picked up The Accidental Genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie the other day because it reminded me of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and I love those books. Accidental Genius is a mix of text and comic strip style illustration and it was fantastic.

Larkin Pace is in love with his best friend. He thought she was his girlfriend until she asked him one day if there were any girls at school he was interested in and he realized that she didn’t know they were dating. They weren’t. He has a great taciturn friend who never says Larkin’s name, or much of anything, really, but Larkin’s mission is to make Freddie say his name. Freddie’s sole interest is making wallets out of duct tape. His older sister is awesomely bad. She wears a bump-it and is in full scale teenage angst. She howls and rages against the indignities of life and demands rewards for having to suffer her family. The more I talk about this book, the more surreal it seems. I loved it.

If you know more boy books for me to check out, let me know. The kids will thank you this summer!

Can’t Always Get What You Want

I’m a few days away from a huge work project, so I’m not getting a lot of reading done right now. I’ve worked my way through 3 or 4 Mediator books in the last week, but they are super-quick reads. Meg Cabot’s Y.A. series focuses on a teenage girl who is able to see ghosts. She tries to help them right whatever wrong is keeping them anchored to earth, like not having been able to tell the kids where the secret savings was hidden or to make sure that a family antique gets to the right person. It’s not always that easy, of course, and some ghosts don’t want to go. They want revenge, or justice, or just a chance to come back and do it all over again.

I think there are 6 of these books and I’m missing #5, so now I have to decide whether to just read the end and then go back and fill in later or track down the missing link. I’m sure you’re all waiting with bated breath to hear what I’ll decide, so I’ll be sure and let you know.

I’m still playing with Goodreads and piling up the to-read stack. My friend Gina accused me of being too ashamed to rate the Amanda Quick romance novels I read, but I showed her! I also added the complete oeuvre of Judith Krantz and Tori Spelling to my list. Thinking about it now, though, I’m not sure that I didn’t fall into her trap to make her list look more literary in comparison. Gina likes romance novels, books about animals, and vampire stories, so we decided one day that her perfect book would feature a vampire dolphin in love with a human. I think we made a cover and everything. That still cracks me up to think about, but we should have gotten on the Twilight train and written them. We would be millionaires and we couldn’t have been any worse at writing than Stephanie Meyers.

Girl Next Door

I just finished Meg Cabot’s How to Be Popular, about a high school girl who finds an old book detailing how to be more popular and uses the tips contained therein to almost ruin her life until she realizes that she’s happier with her current friends and station in life. There’s a nerd boy who turns out to be just right for her and a popular boy who turns out to be a shallow jerk and the world rolls merrily along. I don’t mean to paint the book as boring – It’s not. Meg Cabot really could make a grocery list entertaining, and there are some really fun details in this book that set the lead character apart from generic leading women.  Cabot’s women/girls are smart and funny and well capable of getting along just fine without a man. They also aren’t immune to a nice set of abs, but they aren’t going to settle for cute without nice, funny, and smart.

How to Be Popular reminded me of one of my favorite books from when I was young, succinctly named The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations: A Novel, by Ellen Conford. Man, I loved Ellen Conford’s books. Just like Meg Cabot, Conford wrote Young Adult books that followed the standards of Young Adult, while twisting the genre enough to make you feel like more of a grown-up by reading them.

The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations: A Novel features Julie, a high schooler trying to get through the year. She’s a straight man in a sea of absolute lunatics.  The student handbook talks about the importance of joining school clubs, so she tries to get her poems published in the school literary magazine, but the editor dismisses her efforts as too sunny, too conventional. She finally manages to write some piece of drivel that gets him truly excited, (if I recall correctly, it was about black and death, and the torture of the soul.), and when he wanted to publish it, she snorted at him and took the poem back. At a time when most Young Adult characters were simpering saps, Julie was a real person you wanted to be friends with.

Cabot is always a fun read - I’ll stand in line to buy anything she’s writing – but you should try and track down one of Ellen Conford’s YA books. I’m going to start rebuilding my collection right now.