Newengland's comments (member since Jan 15, 2008)

Newengland's comments from the Young Adult Fiction for Adults group.

I've heard raves about Eoin Colfer's Airman and it's in my sights for next trip to the bookstore. I look forward to your review.

Generation Kill? I've never heard of such a thing. It doesn't sound pleasant, though (especially for the older generation).

Anyway, although I enjoyed BOTH of the WWII novels, I especially liked Soldier X. Let me know how (if) he likes them.

Hi, Stephen. I, too, teach middle school (8th grade). My resistant boy readers (their numbers are legion!) loved these books last year:

War Genre:

Soldier Boys (Dean Hughes) -- WWII
Search and Destroy (Dean Hughes) -- Vietnam
Soldier X (Don Wulffson) -- WWII
Fallen Angels (Walter Dean Myers) -- Vietnam

Sports Genre:

Crackback (Jon Coy) -- football
Gym Candy (Carl Deuker) -- football/steroids
Night Hoops (Carl Deuker) -- basketball
Runner (Carl Deuker) -- running/adventure
High Heat (Carl Deuker) -- baseball
Painting the Black (Carl Deuker) -- baseball
Rash (Pete Hautman) -- football/futuristic
Slam! (Walter Dean Myers) -- basketball
Hoops (Walter Dean Myers) -- basketball

Other Genres:

The Lightning Thief and all Percy Jackson/Olympians series (Rick Riordan) -- fantasy
Alex Rider series (Anthony Horowitz) -- James Bond-like
Inside Out (Terry Trueman) -- hostage drama w/disabled kid
House of the Scorpion (Nancy Farmer) -- fantasy/cloning
Son of the Mob (Gordon Korman) -- mafia humor

Well, it's a start...

Sorry, J-Lynn, but what does the acronym mean?

Figures. Sometimes I think the better a book is, the more difficult it is to translate into a movie.

The flip side? The more terrible a book is, the EASIER it is to translate in into a movie. Hollywood will suck this drivel up (then disgorge it on unsuspecting audiences).

I stand corrected (or would if I weren't sitting)...

Elizabeth -- I think only the moderator (in this case, Jaime) can use the force (Luke or no...).

Maybe you can send a message to Jaime and suggest it?

Looks like the first one is The Wee Free Men followed by A Hat Full of Sky. Although I don't know much about Terry Pratchett, I think I recently read that he revealed to the media he is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. If true, very sad.

P.S. Checked it out and it's true:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment...

Nancy Farmer (The Ear, Eye, and Arm, I mean). Check out her House of the Scorpion for a great novel centered on cloning.

Fair enough. I can buy Janis' argument that this group has a unique wrinkle. It's for adults who trade in YA for their own enjoyment.

Boyd, I think your idea of a group focused on teachers is actually a good one. There's only one group I'm in for teachers -- the Educator Book Group, I think it's called -- and it's sleepier than Rip Van Winkle after Thanksgiving dinner watching a Masterpiece Theatre rerun.

Plus, if I'm a member, it'll be active. I talk too much.

P.S. Why is Tiffany aching? Moving earth with a wheelbarrow or something?

P.P.S. Aimee -- A big New England (we're known for our friendliness*) welcome to Good Reads!


* joke, is all

Welcome, Elizabeth! FYI, if you're a true YA-phile here on GR, you might want to also join two other groups with good YA info: "Best Teen Books" and "Young Adult Fiction." (Many of us -- like me -- are members of all three and wishing they would make a Wall Street merger for the sake of simplicity, but until that day dawns...)

Yes, my 8th grade girls love Sonya Sones' free verse books. They're a little "edgy" but not quite crossing the line enough to preclude them from a classroom library (he says while whistling through the graveyard...).

I commented in the other group (and what I wouldn't do to MERGE these three YA groups I am a member of... it's like hitting toggle switches or something!).

Valerie says:

I don't know about any of the other readers of this forum, but there are plenty of unlikeable literary characters that I love to dislike - Severus Snape and Count Olaf are a couple of popular ones - so I'm not exactly sure where the argument comes in that you wouldn't want to read about someone that you wouldn't want to associate with. That's what can make literature so interesting.

I agree. I enjoyed Crime and Punishment and all of Edgar Allan Poe's shorts stories, for instance, and many of the protagonists are not only creeps, but murderers. In literature, it's not only many of the characters, but many of the authors themselves, who are unlikable. But I look at the work of art (UNLESS the author is alive and so hateful that I feel my dollars to purchase a book are helping his/her/its cause... then I hold back and speak up).

Forgot about Daniel's comment. Fair enough. But if he directed his vehement disagreement at MY opinions, I wouldn't take it personally, I'd just shrug it off. Hey, I'm used to people disagreeing with me (or maybe my skin -- like my brain -- is thicker).

Thanks for the explanation, anyway. Let's all move on, eh?

I agree with your comments about YA, Valerie, though I'm confused as to what Kim is taking umbrage over. Looked back and all Janis said is that she, personally, doesn't like books if SHE finds the characters unlikable (which is her prerogative, just as it is Kim's and others' to disagree with it). Nowhere did I see Janis stating that her thoughts were anything but exactly that -- a personal opinion that applies to herself only.

Clearly no one was offended and clearly no one was advocating banning books. Any thread with the topic "What's good?" is going to foster respectful (one would hope!) disagreement or else it would be boring.

Hey, differing opinions are why we have horse races. If we weren't allowed them, it'd be like declaring the favorite a winner before every race (which would be boring but possibly very profitable).

Anyway, I'm still innie (though I'm not sure why we're discussing belly buttons at a time like this).

Artemis Fowl is seldom (if at all) checked out in my classroom library. Ditto the school library. It's like it had its 15 minutes of fame (like many a book) and then, *poof*, they moved on...

I can't weigh in because I haven't read them, however. If a book is selling like ice water in Hades, I'll check it out. If it's selling like Bic lighters, no.

P.S. Do they even make Bic lighters anymore? Durn the durned fog if I know.

alisonwonderland (great nom de poste, by the way) -- Maybe you could let it off the hook for that, though I don't see how this book is a fable (unless just adding the word to the title conveniently makes it so -- license to play fast and loose with what is, let's face it, a touchy subject).

I guess it's a matter of taste, in the end. For me, the conceit didn't work at all (but for others, obviously, yes).

Back to Aesop,
Newengland

I second Daniel's endorsement of the Zelazny's Amber Series. I couldn't stop myself after reading Nine Princes in Amber many moons ago (when I was youngish). The trouble is, the Amber series appears to only be available in one huge, dictionary-like paperback edition now (all ten books in one), and what kid is going to lug around THAT? (Answer: None.)

I hope they come out with separate paperbacks again, each with a cool cover. Teen fantasy fans will snap them up, I guarantee, and I will buy all ten for my classroom library.

You're not alone, Julie. 8th-graders (well -- half of them: the girls) are eating this series up, too. The books are big but the pages go down in a hurry.

I'm treated to the reading journals. You know. The usual sort of thing in America: Girl falls for vampire. Girl falls for werewolf. Girl must make a bloody choice. Girl creates a hairy situation. And so forth.

Vampires are hot in YA, that's for sure. I try to tell them Bram Stoker's DRACULA is a great book, but who has time for THAT when there are so many hot (apparently) vampires and werewolves loping around in YA circles?

No one said teaching is easy (checks window for full moon...).

Hello all. For a different viewpoint, I offer the fact that I had major problems with this book. I thought it was off-the-charts unrealistic. It had two "children" of a high-ranking Nazi official who live in Berlin during WWII (never mentioned) yet seem to know nothing of the war going on.

When the father is assigned a top post at Aushwitz (never mentioned by name), the son befriends a boy in striped pajamas he meets by the fence (the son can't figure out it's a prison). The boy in striped pajamas -- apparently unwatched for huge stretches of time -- shows up every day at this fence -- apparently unguarded for huge stretches of time, to talk to the Nazi's son.

It's all beyond the pale and, I would think, insulting to young adult readers' intelligence.

Or so it struck me. Great moral to the tale at the ending (a dark take on Twain's THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER), but really, it took the suspension of disbelief and made a mockery of it.