How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Earlier this month, Steph Bowe wrote a list of things that make her stop reading a YA book. If I'm being honest, I'll say that very little will stop me from reading a YA book, mostly because YA books are generally so short that by the time I realize that I should have stopped reading one, I'm done with it. But here are the things that would make me stop reading one, and will keep me from reading the next book in the series, should there be one: 1. "hip" teen slang. Do authors really think that they're being authentic when they do this? Because without fail, "hip" slang sounds corny and cheesy in, at most, a year. Also, if you are not actually a teenager, you have no idea what they think is hip. Adult writers for YA should focus on story and worry about slang later. 2. too many pop culture references. These references, like the slang, grow stale way too quickly and only serve to date the story. And, again, adult writers have no idea what po...

Recently, J.A. Konrath has a post on his blog about how he believes that ebooks are the future of the publishing industry. I don't necessarily disagree with him, but I've got some issues with his discussion of people who are resisting books in digital form that I wanted to address.* 1. Konrath's first point is this: I love the feel of a regular book. I hear this a lot. The tactile experience of cracking open the spine and turning the pages. The smell and feel of paper. We grew up reading paper, and we have a good relationship with it that fosters warm feelings. But what if we grew up reading ebooks ? Would paper have a single advantage? Who's to say you can't form that same bond with an ereader ? I'm sure you can form a bond with an ereader. And I'm sure that people growing up now are much more comfortable reading ebooks than even I am (and I'm pretty comfortable with digital content). And I'm not saying that ereaders won't become the domina...

1. I was sick this weekend, so instead of having a nice relaxing weekend at home, I had a crappy phelgm-filled weekend. blech. 2. I also read a book this weekend that I was hoping would be good, but was not. Note to self: if your main character is going to do something reprehensible like cheat on his "perfect" significant other, it's important that he be either (a) interesting or (b) relatable.* Otherwise, the reader will end up thinking she wasted her time reading about a jerk who cheats on a nice girl for no real reason besides the other girl is hotter.** 3. I am lukewarm about the band Paramore*** and the song "Use Somebody" by the band Kings of Leon, but here is a perfect example of how two lukewarm things can become one steaming hot pile of amazing. It's Paramore's acoustic version of "Use Somebody," which shows that Paramore is more talented that a lot of people (including me) give them credit for, and that "Use Somebody"...

At some point, everyone who writes gets asked this question: Where do you get your ideas? Stephen King talks a lot about where his ideas come from, I think mostly because some of his ideas are so horrifying/strange that people really want to know. Nick Hornby, who writes books that are less strange than King*, probably doesn't get this question quite as much. But no matter what type of writer you are, I think this is a common question: people who don't make up stories always wonder how people who do make up stories do it. I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but what happens to me sounds pretty similar to what happens to King or anyone else, so I wanted to provide an example of how an idea came to me, recently.** I read a website called One Sentence , which is a place where people try to tell stories in one sentence. Pretty self-explanatory, right? Sometimes the stories are funny , sometimes they are sad , sometimes they are bitter , and sometimes the writers writ...

1. Apparently, Sunday is the day when all the guys who own the upholstery shops work in them with their shirts off. At least that was my experience on my morning constitutional this weekend. I don't know why, but it makes me less likely to go into these shops and inquire about having my couch redone. 2. Running Scared is a great buddy cop film. It stars Billy Crystal and the late great Gregory Hines as Chicago police officers who just need one last big bust before they move down to Florida and open a bar. If you can get past the 80s music and the hilarious technology (cell phones as big as phone books), it's a smart and funny cop movie. It's the cop movie that Lethal Weapon wanted to be when it grew up. (Yes, even the first Lethal Weapon .) 3. I mowed my lawn. I'm sure you don't care, but my neighbors are probably throwing a party. 4. I accidentally read a crappy book this weekend and now I have to wait until Monday to get started on some revisions I've pu...

Over on his blog the Critical Condition, Mark Blankenship did a post a little while back on what makes him stop reading a book . For him, the defining qualities are the smugness of the author and/or author overwriting. Yeah, I agree with both of those. But I don't put down a lot of books. I support it, because as I said, life is too short to read books you don't like, but I like most books. Or...I like them enough to finish them anyways, especially because that usually doesn't take me very long. For me, books I don't like fall into one of two categories: 1. books I don't finish (a very small category), and 2. books I dislike after I'm done with them ( a much larger, but still pretty small, category). So what would make a book so bad (to me) that I wouldn't finish it? a. Overwriting. I'm with Blankenship on this one. If you're too busy showing off your mad writing skillz (and/or you use the word "skillz" in your book) to tell the s...

I know that only, like, three people read this, but I still have to say that I just saw the book trailer for Katie Alender's forthcoming novel Bad Girls Don't Die and it is AWESOME. While I shouldn't link to it, since Katie is doing a sneak preview for her subscribers, I can say that if you happen go to YouTube and happen to search on "Katie Alender" (in quotation marks) you may, hypothetically get a chance to see the book trailer, too. In theory. Congratulations to Katie on the book trailer (and on the actual book, which comes out on April 21st and which you can pre-order at Barnes and Noble or Amazon ).

Roger Sutton has a post here about giving up on a book that's just not clicking with you as a reader. I have to say that I fully support this. Life is finite, you know? I'm not going to stick with a book or a movie or a television show that I feel is a waste of my time.* Of course, there are some things that are worth the time--David Foster Wallace for me, Faulkner for my friend Anonymous, we all have our little ballywicks--and I believe in giving a book a fair chance. A book under 200 pages gets at least 50 to get moving for me, and a book over 200 pages gets at least a 100, but if I'm not interested by then?* Forget it. I'm not going to be interested. Another factor that sometimes comes into play is how long it takes me to read the pages. I'm normally a very fast reader. Fifty pages of your average level adult fiction won't take me a half hour, even if (or especially if) I like it.** If it takes me an hour, or two, or three, I don't like the book....

Recently, I fell in love with a new book. I'll tell you about that book in another post, but it's a type of book that I wouldn't normally read, one I picked up because I heard about the author on NPR and he seemed like a nice and funny guy so I thought "what the heck?" That's what libraries are for, right? And I fell in love with it so much that I read it twice, once and then again right after, before I had to take it back to the library, and now I'm going to be buying it, because it's a book I have to own.* But it got me thinking. If this is a type of book I don't normally read, by an author I wouldn't have heard of except for the radio, what about it made me fall in love? I mean, some books are so obviously for me they might as well have had "Jay Montville's book" printed right on the cover. Jonathan Strange , for example. That book couldn't have been more for me if I'd written it myself. Or The Grounding of Grou...

1. Okay, Winter, seriously, enough with the snowing . We GET IT. Now, please stop. 2. I read three books this weekend (short ones). Two were Really Good, and of those two, one may make a future appearance on Jay Loves A Book. One was...okay. Do you ever get the feeling that some books are considered good just because they were the first ones of their kind? Yeah, that's sort of the feeling I got about this book. 3. Speaking of books,* I find it hard to suspend my disbelief in a YA book when there is no mention of parents whatsoever. Don't get me wrong, I don't think parents need to play a very big role in a YA book, just that they need to exist. When a protag lives at home, then there needs to be a modicum of parental interaction. Just a little. Just enough to ground the book in reality. Otherwise, it's teenage fantasy-land and I find the rest of the story hard to buy. 4. ABC Family makes the cheesiest sequels to movies ever (The Cutting Edge THREE? Anoth...

This post is not about pants, it's about Butt Covers. That is, book covers that feature a young woman's butt and, usually a weapon and a tramp stamp of some kind. Like this one: Juno Books has a post about these covers here , including a bunch other covers.* These covers are really striking and unusual, and a lot of them are very beautiful, but...they all seem very similar. Some of the commenters to the Juno post indicate that that's sort of what they like about the covers--they know what they're going to get when they pick up a book like this. But the commenters also indicate that they sometimes think because the covers are so similar that the stories are all basically the same as well, which I can say from experience is SOOOO not true. Just like, for a while, all the chick lit covers were pink and had shoes on them, but the stories inside varied greatly in terms of appeal, so too with the Butt Covers. At least Butt Covers imply that, if you don't like the gi...

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler is another book whose arrival in my life is shrouded in mystery. I don't know how I came across it or why I picked it up. It's not the type of book I usually read, frankly. It's about middle-aged married people and the only really dramatic event (the sad murder of the main character's son) happens before the book even starts. And it's still a completely absorbing novel that completely suck me in to its world every time I pick it up. The story is basically this: Macon and his wife, Sarah, have been married for forever. When their son is killed in a robbery gone wrong, their marriage falls apart, and, somehow, Macon falls in with an eccentric and erratic woman named Muriel. See, not super dramatic, right? But, like Girl , this story isn't about the events that happen, but the voice that they happen in. Macon Leary is so three dimensional, I feel like I've actually met him, like he's a friend of mine, who simply ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all chicks love Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and that is because P&P is a f***ing awesome book. Many people dismiss P&P as a "romance" novel, which it is, insofar as there is a romance in it, or a comedy, which it is insofar as there are some funny parts, but I prefer to think of it as just a Really Good Book, one that you can read over and over again, because the characters feel very real and relatable, which is not, I should point out, the same thing as "likeable" because, as you know, I do not believe in "likable" as an asset. Wow. That is a very long sentence. Anyway, even though none of my seven intrepid blog readers don't know the plot of P&P, it's basically this: -girl meets boy -girl thinks boy is a snob (which he is ) -boy thinks girl is beneath him socially (which she is ) and also may be a bit of a money grubber (which she is not --that's just her mother) -boy starts t...

Girl by Blake Nelson is the book that taught me timelessness. That sounds strange, considering that it was published in 1994 and is actually pretty rooted in the emergence of the grunge culture, but it's true. I look at some books today, full of pop culture references and technology, and I think "this book is going to be out of date in 6 months." But Girl talks endlessly about bands and popularity, only it does so only through fictional references. So we understand what kinds of music Andrea listens to and what kind of person she is, but we don't think "oh God , she's into Nirvana? That's so 1994." And that's why Girl fourteen years old and is almost as fresh and perfect today as it was the first day it came out. I don't remember how I heard about Girl --for some reason I have an impression that I read about it in a women's magazine like Cosmopolitan or Sassy or Jane . Although I didn't really read those women's magazines....

Over on The Swivet, guest blogger Courtney Summers talks a little bit about how to stop worrying about offending people* by just being true to the story you're trying to tell. I think that's something that all YA writers are concerned about to some extent: because our books are read by kids, sometimes fairly young kids, and because our books deal with things that teenagers are dealing with (like sex and drugs and rock'n'roll) that are "adult" things, we occupy this sort of grey area where we can get called on the carpet by actual adults for the things we appear to be advocating when we include them in stories for young adults. This concern isn't a huge one of mine,** I think because of the way that I was brought up. My mother was (is) a single working mom and didn't have a lot of time for hands on supervision. The good news is that I didn't need a lot of hands on supervision. I was (am) a very independent person, even as a child. Put me a room wit...

This is another one of those recommendations that you may look at and think "Jesus, Jay, when do you think I'm going to have time to read 800 pages? I have a job ," but what can I say? This feature is called "Jay Loves A Book" not "Jay Says You Can Finish This In An Afternoon If You Don't Have Anything Else To Do." I used to study Victorian Lit and I like long books, what can I say? Both of those facts means that Strange is a double win for me, because what Clarke has done (in this, her first book) is essentially write a Victorian novel. The book tells the story of the emergence of two magicians in 19 th century England. And by magicians, I don't mean guys who do magic tricks in top hats, I mean real magicians, who use magic, like wizards, only more...English. The plot, like the plot of all good Victorian novels, is way too complicated to go into, but the basics are these: in England, most magicians only study magic, they don't perf...

I don't like non-fiction generally, because it is usually boring.* It's reminiscent of history textbooks, to me, all first this happened, then this happened, blah blah blah , can't something explode already? Jeez! But, no, it can't explode, because it didn't explode in Real Life, Jay, and this is non -fiction. YAWN. That said, though, good writing conquers all, because there are some writers who can make me read stuff I would never otherwise read (Atul Gawande's Complications ) about subjects I don't even care about (Michael Lewis's Moneyball ), and David Simon's Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets is one of those books. By now, you're probably familiar with David Simon--he's the guy who created infamous HBO series The Wire , which was proclaimed, like, the Savior of All Television, Espcially HBO after The Sopranos went off the air,** but this book is where it all starts. The book is basically a recount of the entire year of 1988 wit...

When I was in graduate school, we got to create our own curriculum for the freshman English classes. We had to have our syllabii (syllabuses?) approved, of course, but the approval standards were not that strict, and we were all English majors, and so, therefore, skilled at the bullshit that professors liked to hear, so we pretty much got anything we wanted approved. One semester, I did a whole freshman comp class on tropes in horror fiction. Another semester, we spent all 12 weeks on The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom . (It hardly seems fair, does it? :) ) One semester, my friend Joe, a fellow graduate student, decided to do a whole semester on the theme of the unreliable narrator, and the first book he chose for the class was American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. All the rest of the graduate students were like, "aww, man! I should have thought of the unreliable narrator!" (That semester I was doing E.M. Forster--as an aside, I learned the important lesson...

Last weekend I had to travel for business, and I forgot to bring a book for the way home! I never forget a book for place trips, but on the way out to San Diego I had to do a lot of prep for the meetings I was attending, so I didn't need one, and I didn't think "oh, Jay, you won't be doing prep on the way home." So there I was in the airport without a book. Boo! This is particularly traumatic for me because I'm picky about what I read and airport bookstores are almost universal in the suck. They are chock full of boring business books and top ten bestsellers that (a) I've already read or (b) I wouldn't read with someone else's eyes, let alone pay good money for. I was, to be blunt, in despair. But I saw a book with a pretty cool cover, so I picked it up. And, when I checked out the back cover, the hook was good. When I opened it up, I was a little concerned...it was supposedly one of those suspense/mystery novels, but it started with a prolo...

I want to move away from the YA for a minute, lest people get the impression that I've never read a book for adults in my life. I have. I do. I think that's one of the impressions a lot of people have about YA writers, is that we only read the stuff we write. Not true (at least not for me). Authors of "adult literature" (by which I mean books for people over the age of 17, not the other kind of "adult" literature), are some of my favorite writers. And my most favorite of all of them is David Foster Wallace. I'm going to talk about "Infinite Jest" here, because that's my favorite of all of his fiction and is sort of the apex of his career (to this point - I expect great things) and is the type of thing I'm most qualified (by my own reading and thinking) to evaluate, but his nonfiction is some of the most entertaining stuff I've ever read. A good place to start with Wallace is his collection of essays called "A Supposedly F...