A few weeks ago I was participating in an online chat with some fellow Elevensies, and the subject of book blurbs came up. I said something along the lines of never having read a book based on a blurb that appeared on the cover of the book. I now have to eat those words.
The other day at the library I was randomly perusing the graphic novel section, when I pulled out a copy of Fun Home by Allison Bechdel and read the following blurb on the back cover:
If David Sedaris could draw, and if Bleak House had been a little funnier, you’d have Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.
- Amy Bloom author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
Obviously the book went straight into my library bag.
Amy Bloom’s blurb is spot on and this graphic novel memoir is a must read for anyone who is a fan of the genre. It concerns the author’s early years growing up in a non-traditional family (the ‘fun’ in fun home by the way is short for funeral) and dealing with her father’s somewhat confused sexuality while also coming to terms with her own sexual identity. Good stuff.
First an interview with Kim Harrington and now I learned that Heather McCorkle has featured me as her Twitter Tuesday author, even if I am an inconstant Twitterer? Tweeter? (see, I don’t even know the proper terminology) at best. Thanks, Heather!
I better watch out or all this fame will go to my head!
Please visit Kim Harrington’s blog to read her interview with me as part of the Pay It Forward Interview series.
For more Pay It Forward interviews visit these other YA author blogs: Elana Johnson, Lisa and Laura Roecker, Beth Revis, Leah Clifford, Victoria Schwab, Kirsten Hubbard, Susan Adrian, Dawn Metcalf, Carrie Harris, Amy Holder, Kathy McCullough, Gretchen McNeil, Tiffany Schmidt, and Suzette Saxton/Bethany Wiggins.
Here’s a quick update of what I have been doing this weekend in the order of occurrence.
1. Yelled at a DVD
I watched the movie Adam Friday night. It was a sort of Asperger love story. In general it was a good movie. My yelling didn’t come until the very end.
Rose Byrne plays Beth the love interest of Aspergian title character played by Hugh Dancy. Beth is a teacher who dreams of being a published children’s book author. So far so good. At one point she tells Adam about her hope of someday winning a Newbery award. I was impressed that the moviemakers at least had some familiarity with children’s publishing.
That all fell apart at the end when we finally got to see the book that Beth had been working on in published form. The problem? It was a picture book, and as anyone familiar with children’s books and their awards knows, picture books win Caldecott awards not Newbery awards, thus my yelling.
2. Met author Josh Berk
Debut author Josh Berk was in town at the Clinton Book Shop signing copies of his novel, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin. Josh let me in on a little secret, his dad has proved to be a very helpful amateur publicist. I had gone down to the store with my parents, and on the walk down my father was talking about his plan to get everyone he knows to buy 10 copies of my book when it comes out. So, my dad and Josh’s dad had the chance to talk some shop, and hopefully Dad picked up a few pointers.
3. Made some website updates
It started out as just a few quick updates on my website. I wanted to add a little to my about me page and clean up my contact page because the formatting was weird on there. I succeeded in making the formatting worse, fought with it for at least an hour, and then ended up redoing the entire contact page with vaguely appropriate photos. Since this all took far longer than I anticipated that cleaning project I began this morning will have to wait for a rainy day. Well, another rainy day.
What did you do this weekend?
I just finished Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me, the latest Newbery Medal winner. The book is great. It’s easy to see why this book was selected as the winner. What I did find kind of cool was that the book referenced another Newbery Medal winner. It was more than a reference, in fact. It was pretty much an essential part of the book.
Miranda, the main character of When You Reach Me has a favorite book. It is A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and she reads it over and over and over again.
A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as well, and I definitely read it more than once, but not quite as often as Miranda.
I’m not sure how many times I read The Westing Game (another Newbery book) by Ellen Raskin, but it was definitely a minimum of three times. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton was read at least twice, but probably three times. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh was reread a few times. I’m not even going to get into the various picture books and easy readers that were read so many times that I pretty much had them committed to memory.
Did you have any books that you read more than once when you were growing up?
I took this during my travels last week. Actually, it was on St. Patrick’s Day appropriately enough. I would like to point out a few things in case they are not obvious from my somewhat grainy photo. This is a dump truck. It is not royal in any way that I can discern. It is also not green. I’m not even sure what royal green is. I mean, I’ve heard of royal blue, but royal green? I guess, though as names go, it beats Dumpy Brown, which would certainly be more appropriate. Well, if it’s true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet I guess a dump truck by any other name would still stink. Have you stumbled across any inappropriate names?
Like Dirk Gently I love the interconnectedness of all things, and especially love when the different things I am reading seem to connect with one another.
Over the past week or so the audio version of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers kept me company on my travels. This non-fiction book tells the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a resident of New Orleans who chose to stay in the city during Hurricane Katrina to look after his home and business. Six days after the storm hits he suddenly disappears and his wife, who has evacuated the city desperately works to piece together what happened. It’s a gripping and disturbing story, which I highly recommend.
At the same time that I was listening to Zeitoun I was reading a short story anthology. At first glance a non-fiction book and a science fiction anthology, might seem to have
very little in common, but Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams collects a 22 outstanding post-apocalyptic tales, and there was something about these survivors living in these wildly altered and often hostile landscapes that reminded me very much of Zeitoun’s own real life story.
It’s a truly impressive anthology. Sometimes themed anthologies can be a bit iffy, but Wastelands doesn’t really have any duds. The stories in this collection range from good to great. If you like science fiction or short stories in general, you’ll definitely want to read this one.
Thursday night I took a trip into the city for a party kicking off the official launch of the Sourcebooks Fire YA line at Books of Wonder. Entertainment for the evening was provided by Tiger Beat:
You might recognize the band’s lead singer as the multi-talented Libba Bray.
The best part of the evening for me, though, was getting to meet some fellow Elvensies as well as some other up and coming YA authors.
It’s always nice to get to meet online friends in the flesh. I had the opportunity to meet Kiera Stewart whose debut novel Fetching is due out in December 2011 from Hyperion.
I also got to meet Lisa and Laura Roecker, the sister writing duo, whose debut novel The Haunting of Pemberly Brown is due out from Sourcebooks next spring.
The other nice thing about real world events is that you get to meet completely new people, like author illustrator Stephanie Ruble who is brimming with publishing savvy. Check out her website, it’s awesome. Plus she is working on a YA zombie romance novel that sounds very intriguing .
For awhile now, I’ve been trying to keep up with participating in a weekly group blog in which we all share what we’ve read over the past week. Well, being busy I missed last week’s blog, and then today turned out to be pretty busy as well. So, I am just now getting around to getting something posted.
In light of this, I think instead of trying to post a weekly summary, going forward I’ll just try to highlight what I’ve been reading one book at a time.
In the past two weeks I’ve read . . .
two very different graphic novels: French Milk by Lucy Kinsley which is a sort of travelogue done as a graphic novel and (Tammy Pierce is) Unlovable by Esther Pearl Watson which was based on a teenager’s diary from the 1980s that was found in a gas station bathroom, and that description alone was enough to make me pick this one up – I was glad I did;
two very different young adult novels Stop in the Name of Pants by Louise Rennison part of the ongoing Georgia Nicolson series which is loaded with hilariosity and Handcuffs by Bethany Griffin which is a much more serious novel about love and obsession that would make for a great book discussion. I also thought the bit about the blogger who bullies her classmate was very topical and lends itself to additional discussion questions.
Right now, I am in the midst of reading a short story anthology filled with post-apocalyptic stories, Wastelands edited by John Joseph Adams and listening to the audio book of Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.
Douglas Adams would be 58 today, but sadly he left us too soon. I can remember as a teenager discovering Douglas Adams thanks to an omnibus collection of the Hitchiker’s Guide novels that I received as a birthday gift.
It was love at first page. I can distinctly recall sitting on our kitchen floor (I honestly have no idea why I was sitting on the floor.) forcing my mother (here, Mom, I’m writing something about you, and there’s no picture, but you won’t read this anyway since you are in Hawaii) who was busy cooking dinner to listen to me read passages aloud while tears of laughter streamed down my face.
It was a few years later when I accidentally discovered the Dirk Gently books in a bookstore. I hadn’t even known of their existence before. (Young people, information was not so easy to come by before the internet age.) I bought them at once, and was not disappointed.
Since I am busy being a back-in-my-day sort of geezer I’ll point out that there used to be no such thing as GPS or Mapquest and many people, Dirk Gently was one of them, used to get around by following someone who looked like they knew where they were going. I still pull the occasional Dirk Gently while driving.
Douglas Adams was not a super-prolific writer, but what he did write was awesome. I wish he could have hung around a bit longer. I, for one, really wish there were more books in the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency Series.
Do you have a book that you wish one of your favorite authors had the chance to write?
A few weeks ago I was participating in an online chat with some fellow Elevensies, and the subject of book blurbs came up. I said something along the lines of never having read a book based on a blurb that appeared on the cover of the book. I now have to eat those words.
What I'm Reading | Alissa | 
March 31, 2010 9:47 am | 
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