A post about John Green’s books

Reading several works by the same writer does pay off with at least a little insight. I blasted through An Adundance of Katherines in just a few days. Earlier this semester, I also enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars and the co-written Will Grayson, Will Grayson. While I won’t pretend to be a John Green expert, I can at least state the following:

• Green’s characters are smart, self-aware, and chatty. They are people I think I could talk about anything with.
• Plotting in Green’s books is careful, even meticulous. While there are unknowns to solve in the three books I read, I wouldn’t call them mysteries, but he leaves smart clues for readers to follow.
• Green’s male and female main characters are not superheroes, not supermodels . . . but they aren’t exactly Joe and Jane Average, either. Green seems to be writing smart young adult books for smart young adults, and his characters are smart and attractive.
• Young adult relationship in Green book include a physical/sexual component that the characters do not struggle with.
• In film, members of the supporting cast are often the most memorable and interesting. The same thing seems to be a truism in a John Green book with sidekicks. Think of Hassan in An Abundance of Katherines; of Tiny Cooper (although calling Tiny a sidekick may be incorrect)in Will Grayson, Will Grayson; and Isaac in The Fault in Our Stars. These characters are all out of the norm and fascinating.
• Being what society would call a traditional outsider in a John Green book is presented as no big deal, just part of the make up of today’s world of teens. See the point above – John Green creates young adult characters who are semi-devout Muslim slackers, very gay, and cancer patients. No one, it seems, in the books gets worked up over these differences.
• Parents in a Green novel are off to the side and, sometimes, negligible.

What I would say specific to An Abundance of Katherines is that I can tell this is a book from earlier in Green’s writing career. ABK came out in 2006, four years before WGWG and six year prior to TFIOS, and while the story and plot flow along, it’s not as intricate the later works. Colin and his friends more or less stumble into learning about what’s really going on in Gutshot, Tennessee. Compare that with the core feature of TFIOS – learning about a reclusive author and the real story behind his book.

If there was more time in the semester, I wouldn’t mind grabbing up like Looking for Alaska or Paper Towns a bit.  As it is, I’ll be looking for the movie version of TFIOS.  John Green is an author I’ll be on the lookout for from now on.

 

Chapter 8 of Book Love made sense to me

I admire Penny Kittle.  I think the passion she has for getting young people to enjoy reading is admirable.  With that said, reading Book Love has often left me saying to myself “Well, that idea would be great, but it can’t work in the real world . . .” or “Nice goal, too bad school administration won’t buy it . . .” or “That reading plan might work if a teacher never slept . . . ”  Especially in the early chapters, while I liked how she underscored the importance of reading, I found myself seeing potential roadblocks and problems to her methods.

Chapter 8 was different.  I could see how class-wide, year-to-year topic notebooks could be compelling and interesting.  Quarterly reading reflections reminded me of “turning point” essays I did for an experiential honors course as an undergrad, which worked extremely well.  The idea I found most intriguing of all was the creation of an “order map” where book titles and authors could be linked by topic, time, relationship, etc.  Putting that information on the back wall of classroom to show how ideas and books connect to each other is just good teaching . . . no high technology (or even batteries) required.

The chapter also made me realize that the biggest idea that runs through Kittle’s method is simply asking and asking and asking students about what they like, how they are reacting to what they are reading, and what ideas and questions they have.  It’s easy to forget or minimize, but an adult taking a young person seriously and talking with them about their thoughts is important.  The teachers that made the biggest impact on me did so by getting me to express myself, and those conversations were meaningful.

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And happy Easter

If you ever encounter censorship, well, go to an expert to fight it . . . enter Judy Blume

Judy Blume has been writing since I was a kid.  So I wondered if she had a website.  She does  — http://www.judyblume.com/

A big part of her website is all about censorship.  The topics covered:

• What to Do If it Happens to You
• Book Censorship in School Resource Guide/Toolkit
• Introduction to “Places I Never Meant to Be”
• Is Harry Potter Evil? From the NY Times, 10/22/99
• Judy Blume: A Leader in the Anticensorship Movement, By Mark I West

It’s worth checking out.  This comes from Blume’s censorship web page (and I hope it was written by her) —  “I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen. . . .  But it’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”

 

Thought on Ch. 7 of Book Love, but on a Saturday . . . or re-reading is good for you

Chapter 7 of Book Love surprised me. What Kittle is describing in the section “Analyzing the Craft of Writing” is something I think of as “close reading.” And close reading a writer’s work is something I only truly learned in graduate school.

When I was writing a long paper in high school or as an undergrad, I’d come up with an idea and try and pull evidence together as best I could. Since I’ve always been a good reader, I could usually remember and find significant plot points and descriptions and cobble something together. Throw in that I could string sentences together fairly well, and I’d end up with acceptable (if unremarkable) papers.

I agree with Kittle that if you want to truly understand a written work, and get at the how and why of it’s creation, then spending the time to re-read a text is important. While I never have storyboarded a novel, I have gone through a book with a highlighter and sticky note method looking to collect recurring themes, ideas, word choices, contradiction, etc. Yes, the book tells an obvious story, but an author creates a text by making choices that (should) all aim for a goal or idea.

I also like that Kittle likes and encourages students to imitate the style of writers. Doing this as an exercise is a cool idea. Every writer, whether they know it or not, uses bits and pieces of the works of others the like. Trying out a style is kind of like putting on someone else’s clothes and walking around a bit. Things fit and don’t fit, and there’s learning in that.

I posted this video in an earlier blog, but I think it fits better here.  This American Life’s Ira Glass says in this video that creative people (writers, artists, etc.) need to create and create and create.  Getting that experience, learning your craft, pays off with expertise and originality.   I’d add on to this for purposes of our class — people (young adults included)  need to read and write in tandem.  Each informs the other.

 

 

“Have you ever thought about what happens to all the characters after the book ends?”

I thought this was interesting, and I’m surprised that Hesse doesn’t think about her characters after she’s done writing.

karenhesseblog

I think about that often. In fact at one point I considered writing a book in which a selection of characters from some of my favorite novels (written by other authors) live in a high rise apartment house called Century Towers. These characters begin to fade over time and when the day comes when no one reads their books they vanish completely; their apartments left silent and empty.

As for my own characters, I don’t wonder at all about them after I’ve completed the book. Funny, isn’t it?

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Posting on Sunday About Steve Sheinkin’s Port Chicago 50

My first degree was in journalism.  My first jobs after college were at newspapers, and I’ve been a fan of nonfiction since forever.  I remember reading Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood  when I was in my 20s and thinking that what he had done was equal parts stunning and impossible.  The detail, the language, everything was every bit as good as a novel.

Just today, I blasted through Michael Lewis’ “The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street” story in the New York Times Magazine (which is adapted from his new book of the same name.)  Lewis is someone I think of in that same ballpark with Capote.  Lewis wrote Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short.  I’ve had experience sitting down and trying to pull together interviews, source material, facts and figures for a writing project, and it can be more than painful to bring it all into a cohesive narrative.  Lewis makes it look easy.

With all of the above in mind, I’d put Steven Sheinkin up against any nonfiction writer (YA or not today) today.  I’ve written previously about how much I liked his World Way II-focused book Bomb.  His latest book, The Port Chicago 50, is also tremendously good.

Sheinkin’s works cited section in Port Chicago 50 is huge, just like in Bomb.  He has scoured and vacuumed up interviews, newspaper stories, and so much more to put together a great civil rights story that is set during the Second World War.  It’s a compelling novel  about segregation and racism, the military, a huge and deadly accident, and what the U.S. Navy described as a mutiny.

For me, while the story held my attention, Port Chiacgo 50 wasn’t quite in the same league with Bomb, and maybe comparing the two isn’t fair.  Bomb had international intrigue, spies, and world leaders worried about the fate of humanity all in the storyline.  Port Chicago focuses on the fate of 50 men unfairly accused.  

Sheinkin is at his best in Port Chicago 50 when he’s relating how the sailors who would go on trial for mutiny think and spoke about their place in a segregated America — why they joined a Navy that didn’t value them, why they wanted to fight for a country that treated them as second-class citizens.  His depiction of the court martial proceedings are also very good.  I was less impressed with how Sheinkin tried to fit a young Thurgood Marshall into the book.  Marshall, then a lawyer with the NAACP,  followed the case, but he wasn’t central to story.  His role in the book felt, well, odd and forced.

For any history teacher looking at trying relate civil rights issues, I’d thoroughly recommend Port Chicago 50.  I’d also say that any English teacher who wanted to show how nonfiction can hold a reader’s attention every bit as much as fiction should also look to Sheinkin.

 

 

Nirvana — The Man who Sold The World

I miss Kurt Cobain, too. Twenty years is a long time and it’s not.