You Can Never Go Back
So many wonderful lines in this amazing essay by Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, I can’t keep myself from quoting:
I’d trade sex and booze and wisdom—all the best parts about being Grown—if I could have back [childhood]. Colors brighter, smells stronger, days bleeding on forever, and oh . . . reading. In childhood, there’s almost nothing to keep you from reading.
Kid’s books are where I personally learned most everything important about the world: About rape and sinister men from Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck; about eroticism from Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen; about feminism from P.L Travers’ maverick goddess Mary Poppins; about loss and the unceasing progress of time from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web.
And lots more. Go read it!
Read MoreYou Can Never Go Back: On Loving Children’s Books as an Adult
My Best Catch
I’ve been proofreading a new manuscript lately–this is something I do on the side. It made me rememberer the best catch I ever made as a proofreader. I’m still proud of this, years later.
The text in question went like this.
Hero to bad guy: Are you afraid to die?
Bad guy back to hero: You should be the one asking that question!
Can you spot see the error?
Read MoreHappy Halloween!
A creepy tidbit from Mercy: The Last New England Vampire to give you the shivers today!
Our heroine, Haley, and her new friend/potential love interest/eager monster hunter companion, Alan, are exploring the house of a suspected vampire. Here’s what they find:
Read MoreChilly and dim. Filtered through shades and curtains, light couldn’t fill up the rooms, which loomed like caves, the old-fashioned furniture half-lost in shadow.
“Whoa.” Alan looked around appreciatively. “Very atmospheric. Very Stephen King.”
Everywhere, the familiar earthy smell teased at her nose. Cold and heavy and damp. The smell of wet clay—the smell of the grave. It seemed to cling to the air.
And no one was there.
Hallway, living room, dining room—all were empty. She’d never realized before how loud most houses were. A refrigerator humming, a furnace rumbling to life, pipes clanking, a floorboard creaking, a loose window rattling in its frame. None of that here. Haley could hear the air moving in and out of her nose. She could hear Alan breathing at her elbow. She could hear herself swallow.
Politics of the Nobel Prize
Venturing into adult literature, which is somewhere I rarely go (there’s just too much good kid lit out there). But this is an issue that turns over and over in my mind.
Peter Handke, who won the Novel Prize for literature this year, is…a pretty awful person. An apologist for genocide. A defender of a murderous dictator. They say he’s a very good writer and I’m not arguing; I’m sure he is. But should someone like this win the very highest prize we can offer?
Two editorials in the New York Times offer two different views. I was entirely convinced by both of them, which is kind of impossible.
Bret Stephens laments that “we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics” and affirms that Handke’s “art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” And I find myself nodding. Some people with vile beliefs have written excellent novels. I keep Roald Dahl’s work on my shelves, despite his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. I appreciate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s perfects turns of phrase and eye for landscape, even while I wince away from her views of Native Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon points out that a writer who denies genocide enables and upholds it and makes the next mass murderer that much easier. He asks us to consider whether “a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives.” How can I argue? Handke did not just vote for policies I dislike. He lied about slaughter. He lied about guilt and innocence. How can a man with no grasp of moral truth be even a decent writer, let along a great one?
If there’s a middle ground here, it’s a shaky one that I feel uneasy standing on. But let’s say there’s a line between censoring a writer’s work (nobody is advocating that, by the way, Bret Stephens, and you shouldn’t have implied it) and giving him the higher honor we can award. There also a line between being (say) a grumpy and unpleasant human being and enabling and applauding mass murder.
Those lines must cross somewhere. We won’t ever agree on exactly where. But it’s always my belief that there are multiple books and multiple authors, every year, who could win awards. The idea of the single best book of the year, of any year, is a fantasy. There are so many good books; there are so many great writers.
Do we have to give our highest award to one who can’t acknowledge that truth exists? That genocide happened? That Muslims died?
Really, there wasn’t anybody else?
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
I mean, now I have to go read everything else Meg Medina ever wrote. Because–well, it’s so hard to write about perfection without gushing. But she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Every emotion real and powerful without being overdone, and in a novel that touches on class, race, friendship, family, illness, loss, and growing up, that’s truly something.
When you’re a writer, there’s a fine line between work that is so good it’s inspirational and work that just makes you want to go bury your head in a sandbank and never try to write another word because why bother when it’s already been done so well? This book sits right on that line.
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
I was less pulled into A Heart in a Body in the World than I wanted to be, partly because it was just difficult to read about a young woman (very nearly literally) flagellating herself with guilt and long-distance running for…something undefined. I was impressed by the delicate rendering of a young woman, under intense pressure (internal and external) to be nice, tolerating toxic masculinity, trying to preform the impossible dance of being endlessly kind to an intense young man who can’t hear her no, who doesn’t notice her boundaries, who doesn’t care about her needs. Yes, this is a book that has true and important things to say about the dreadful, debilitating power of “nice” and what it does to girls who grow up learning that they must take care of everyone but themselves.
In the end, though, the book felt as if it was about these ideas rather than about Annabelle. (And the rhetorical device of leaving readers dangling–what did The Taker do? Who’s Seth Montgomery? What’s actually waiting for Annabelle in Washington, D.C.?) can be effective but it can also be overused. This time it was overused.
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
It’s just not fair for Angie Thomas to be this talented. That’s all I’m saying.
Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Thomson focuses on newfound connection, magic, and suspense to conjure a fast-paced, heartwarming mystery. Thomson’s world is populated by resourceful protagonists, fanciful creatures, and quirky supporting characters.”
—Publishers Weekly