Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 204

March 29, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: Three More Standout Sessions

[This past week we held the 50thAnniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme knowif you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]I attended and was part of a number of other great sessions over the course of the conference’s four days. Here are quick recaps of three more (each of which relates to AmericanStudies in many ways):1)      Form, Resistance, and U.S. Empire: I attended this panel in support of William and Mary graduate student Jennifer Ross, with whom I’m working as part of NeMLA’s new publishing mentorship program. But Jennifer’s wonderful paper on Omar el Akkad’s novel American War (2017) was complemented by the two from her co-panelists, fellow grad students Muhammad Waqar Azeem (who organized the panel) and Muhammad Sadiq, each of whom framed broader theoretical lenses through which to analyze these vital 21st century literary, cultural, and historical topics. I was so struck by the need to include those topics and these conversations more fully in NeMLA’s American Area and NeMLA overall that I’m hoping to invite a Pakistani American Studies scholar (or one from elsewhere, but that was a specific focus for the latter two talks and what Azeem and I began talking about after the panel) for next year’s area special event, and would love any suggestions or ideas!2)      Citizenship and American Literature: Following up my two African American lit sessions (about which I wrote in Tuesday and Thursday’s posts) was a two-part sequence on this central and related focus, panels created by Timothy Morris and Ariel Martino from Rutgers. I unfortunately wasn’t able to attend the first, but got back for the second, which featured Joe Alicea on 1970s Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri, Alexandra Lossadaon Hope Leslie , Hediye Ozkan on Zitkala-Ša, and John Rendeiro on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield.” First of all, if that ain’t AmericanStudies, I dunno what is! And that’s not just a delighted AmericanStudier’s response—it’s a vital point about how we define both citizenship and America overall. That is, there’s significant value in the simple but crucial act of including texts and stories, authors and voices, cultures and communities in our conversations, not just on their own terms but as part of the broad tapestry. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a conference panel that did so more potently than this quartet of great talks!3)      Landscape and Immigration: On the convention’s final morning I was part of an informal roundtable on NeMLA itself and then a formal panel on these topics, one organized by my friend and predecessor as American Area Director John Casey, Jr. John and our co-presenter Ariel Silver both spoke about Willa Cather and her novelistic representations of these historical and geographic themes, and I learned a lot from their readings of Cather and her contexts. But while I was already familiar with those works, I hadn’t heard at all of the focus of our fourth paper: recently minted PhD Laura Whitebell’s presentation on Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical fiction Lois the Witch (1861). British novelist Gaskell’s depiction of an English immigrant to late 17thcentury Salem who ends up accused of witchcraft during the 1692 trials sounds like a really interesting complement and challenge to Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (published just a decade earlier), and also like a text that I simply need to get my hands on ASAP. Which, as I’ve said all week, is one of the most inspiring parts of a convention that is always one of the highlights of my year!March Recap this weekend,BenPS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 28, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: My Second Af Am Panel

[This past week we held the 50thAnniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme knowif you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, I got so many great abstracts for my “African American Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” call that I was able to create two panels. Complementing the Morrison panel was this trio of wonderful papers that looked at other African American lit and voices from across literary history:1)      Emma McNamara: Emma, a Washington, DC high school English teacher and independent scholar, started us off with a linguistic and structuralist analysis of Walter Dean Myers’s ground-breaking YA novel Monster (1999). Emma’s paper highlighted four different languages/codes in the course of Myers’s novel, and used them to analyze issues of race and culture, mass incarceration and the justice system, and other vital American and 21st century themes and threads. But she also made a potent case for two crucial literary threads alongside those historical and cultural ones: the role of narrative in creating and contesting images of such themes; and the role of audience (and thus reader response theory) in engaging and interpreting those texts. All questions that helped shape the rest of this great panel as well!2)      Pearl Nielsen: Pearl carried those conversations forward a couple decades, looking at two complex and crucial works of contemporary African American literature: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s autobiographical and political Between the World and Me (2015) and Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011). Her multi-layered analyses of these texts nicely laid out the complicated relationship between collective and individual identity, a frame that of course relates closely to members of a racial and ethnic community like African American (already complicated here since Cole is the son of Nigerian immigrant parents while Coates’s American roots go back many generations) but that has implications and meanings for all American audiences. But she also and crucially introduced 21st century global connections and contexts into the mix, particularly through the topic of cosmopolitan patriotism, a middle ground between both individual/collective and American/global dualities. Pearl’s paper gave me a lot to think about with both these vital works/authors and every aspect of our current moment.3)      Rod Taylor: Rod took us back a century, looking at the late 19th century through the lens of anti-plantation literature (a term of his own from his dissertation studying this era). This is of course an era and broad set of literary and cultural histories I know well, and indeed Rod was kind enough to name-check my first book as part of his great analysis of the genre and period. But Rod’s paper focused on an in-depth analysis (including wonderful work with rare archival materials) of an author and figure about whom I knew very little: Daniel Webster Davis. Rod analyzed both Davis’s published poems and his unpublished lecture notes (held in a Richmond, VA collection) at length, making the case for both the challenges/limits of Davis’s perspective and voice and yet his potent revisions of plantation tradition and Lost Cause mythologies. But he also simply and crucially reminded me that there’s always so much more to learn, which remains one of the most powerful and inspiring lessons I take away from each and every NeMLA convention!Last recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 27, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: Homi Bhabha

[This past week we held the 50thAnniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme knowif you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]On three stand-out phrases from Homi Bhabha’sbracing and inspiring keynote address.1)      Disappointed hope: The central focus of Bhabha’s talk was a reimagining of our current moment’s unfolding histories of migration and displacement, and his recurring image and phrase for those histories was “disappointed hope” (or, as he put it in one moment, “migration holds hope hostage”). Although of course the emphasis on disappointment is tough for this critical optimist (and advocate of hard-won hope) to hear, the phrase also reflects a key tenet of Bhabha’s talk and his current projects: his argument for the vital need of making the humanity and desires of migrants (rather than false worries about “crisis”) central to our responses and policies. So even if we see their hopes as disappointed or held hostage, we are nonetheless focusing on the hopes and perspectives that motivate these individuals and communities, and working to imagine solidarity based (as Bhabha argued throughout) on a recognition of their alterity to our own situation yet a concurrent empathy with their situation.2)      Concentration and internment camps: The principal voice with which Bhabha put his own in conversation throughout the talk was Hannah Arendt. That included a key thread about her concept of “the banality of evil” as it appears in our own era, among many other engagements with Arendt’s ideas and arguments. Those engagements also meant that Bhabha was able to use both Arendt’s voice and her world (especially that of World War II) to further develop his own perspective on the 21st century world and its challenges, however. And in one particular phrase, which I believe was partly echoing Arendt’s words but also extending them with Bhabha’s own perspective, he connected the 1940s to our own moment pitch-perfectly: describing a world in which those defined as “other” are put in “concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.” All too terribly true.3)      Despair and Repair: As those first two items illustrate, Bhabha’s talk was, as I put it above and to say the least, bracing in its consistent engagement with some of the darkest moments and elements of our world, past and present. “I dwell in despair,” he put it succinctly and accurately at one point. Yet he followed that phrase with a recognition that he is “mindful of the need for repair,” and I can’t imagine a more concise duality through which to express my own goals of highlighting the darkest histories but working toward the light. As Hannah Arendt herself once put it, “In dark times [a phrase she used consistently to describe her epoch], we search for courage.” Indeed we do—and as I’ve argued at length, we cannot find such courage by eliding or ignoring the darkness, but rather through and beyond it. While that means I might quibble a bit with Bhabha’s use of “dwell,” I certainly recognize the need to acknowledge and engage with our despair—and then to work together on the vital need and goal of repair. I can think of few talks I’ve ever heard that made the case for each element of that equation more eloquently than did Homi Bhabha’s NeMLA 2019 keynote address.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 26, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: My Toni Morrison Panel

[This past week we held the 50thAnniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme knowif you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]Out of my initial proposal “African American Literature and the Ironies of Freedom” came two great panels—here’s a quick recap of the four wonderful papers on the first, which ended up focusing on Toni Morrison’s novels.1)      Laura Dawkins: Laura got the panel off and running with a multi-layered comparative analysis of Morrison’s Beloved (1987) alongside Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), a novel that echoes and extends Morrison’s classic in numerous ways. Besides making a great case for how literary legacies can help us read and understand individual texts, Laura’s talk also engaged with both novels through an impressive balancing act: focusing on the traumas and horrors (of but not limited to slavery) that both feature; but arguing at the same time for how narrative provides a fraught but crucial vehicle for countering such traumas in both books. Like all seven papers across these two panels, Laura’s talk offered a bracing and an inspiring start to our conversations!2)      Theresa Desmond: In the panel’s second talk, Theresa offered an excerpt from her recently defended dissertation on 20th century reframings and revisings of images of single womanhood. In particular, her talk drew from a chapter on Morrison’s Sula (1973), and linked that novel’s title character and its other central women to the stereotypical images of the mammy, the jezebel, and the sapphire. I had never heard of the third stereotype, and that context both reframes Morrison’s novel and offers new windows into considering those other two types and the limited range of images presented to mid-20th century African American women. But Theresa’s readings of how the two characters of Sula and Nell engage with these various images and their own trajectories also adds compelling to our understanding of both this particular novel and to other mid-century texts and contexts such as Betty Friedan’s “The Problem That Has No Name.”3)      Shari Evans: Shari’s talk shifted our thematic focus a bit, using three Morrison novels (The Bluest Eye [1970], Paradise [1997], and A Mercy [2008]) to consider the limits and possibilities of moments and processes of becoming for individuals, communities, and the nation. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t had the chance to read A Mercy yet, and Shari not only reminded me that I need to do so ASAP, but made a compelling case for what that book helps us understand about the nation’s fraught origin points. I was particularly struck by her multi-layered reading of the novel’s images of communities and their multi-generational identities and stories, as exemplified by an oven that is transplanted from one town (where it serves its original utilitarian purpose) to another (where it stands in the center of town as a memorial to that past and how the community has moved beyond it). Yet that memorial is then defaced by younger residents, highlighting how stories and images of the past likewise continue to evolve with each generation and perspective.4)      Rachel Schratz: Rachel finished up this great quartet of papers with an extended reading of another Morrison novel I haven’t had a chance to read in full, God Help the Child (2015). Her extended analysis of colorism in this most recent Morrison novel added important contexts to a social and cultural conversation that has become prominent in recent months (thanks in no small measure to the January Black-ish episode on that theme). Yet as with each of these four great papers, Rachel’s analyses went well beyond both one theme and even her focal texts, considering such vital topics as the duality of othering and sympathy and how both relate to the ironic but shared quest for freedom on which the panel’s title and through-lines likewise focused. As with all the best panels, these four papers staked their own claims but related to and build upon each other quite strikingly, creating a broader conversation that could have continued well beyond our allotted time.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 25, 2019: NeMLA 2019 Recaps: Imbolo Mbue

[This past week we held the 50thAnniversary NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC. It was a great time as ever, and this week I’ll highlight a few of the many standout moments and conversations for me. Lemme knowif you’d like to hear or chat more about the NeMLA Board, the American Area, next year’s convention in Boston, or anything else!]On two takeaways from a compelling creative reading and talk.Sometimes a literary work becomes more and more relevant in the years after its release, perhaps in ways that would surprise even the author. I think that’s the case with Cameroonian American author Imbolo Mbue’s wonderful debut novel Behold the Dreamers (2016). Mbue’s overt focus is on recent social and economic histories, specifically those of the 2008 financial crisis and recession; one of her two central families features Clark Edwards, a high-ranking official at Lehman Brothers, and his disaffected wife Cindy and their two children. She thus initially contrasts and compares the experiences, perspectives, and versions of the American Dream of the novel’s other central family, Cameroonian immigrants Jende and Neni Jonga and their own two young children, to those of Clark and his family (for whom both Jende and Neni end up working in different capacities). But it is more than class or wealth that separate these families—throughout the novel the Jenga’s are fighting to avoid deportation and gain legal (or at least permanent) status in the United States, and it is those battles, always part of our history of course, that feel even more frustratingly salient three years after the novel’s publication, in the age of Trump.I conceived of the above opening line about this evolution of Mbue’s book surprising even her before I had the chance to hear her read from and talk about Behold the Dreamers at NeMLA 2019’s opening night creative event. But interestingly enough, in that presentation Mbue likewise emphasized that she was her book and its characters mostly through the lens of class; she was specifically responding to a question about the relative absence of race from the book’s thematic engagements, and noted that for her class has been the dominant issue in both her own life experiences and her perspective on the world. Of course there’s no one identity issue or theme that informs human experiences and societies, and certainly the financial crisis in particular both reflected and affected class and social status in America in particular and striking ways. Yet the truth is that immigration status is at least as significant a factor in the experiences of the Jonga family as anything related to the 2008 crash—and if it’s ever been possible to see immigration status as separate from racial and ethnic communities and identities (and I’ve argued in many places that that’s never been the case), the last couple years have made clear just how intertwined those themes are. That doesn’t mean there aren’t multiple ways to read Mbue’s multi-layered novel, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine a 2019 reading that doesn’t engage with these themes of race and ethnicity.Hearing an author speak about her own work is even more illuminating when it comes to topics like process, and on that note Mbue offered a particularly striking story. I knew this book was her first novel, but of course many writers have multiple projects in development before that first book is published, publish a number of short stories before landing a book deal, or in other ways have established careers or bodies of work prior to that debut novel. Yet in Mbue’s case, the opposite was true—not only had she not published any short stories, but if I understand her correctly she really hadn’t written any (and certainly hadn’t written any other novels). Instead, this novel emerged from her personal experience of the financial crisis on multiple levels—she was laid off from a job in New York City, was walking down the street out of work and increasingly impoverished, and saw a line of chauffeurs waiting to pick up Wall Street executives from their offices. Out of that combination of personal situation and social observation was born the initial idea for Behold the Dreamers, the first extended creative writing Mbue had ever worked on. Of course, she would then work on it for five years and have it rejected by (in her words) “every agent in America other than [her] agent,” which just goes to show that the road to an amazing, “overnight” success might be unique but still has some common threads across many writers.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA reflections to share?

March 23-24, 2019: Crowd-sourced YA Lit

[In a development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and about-to-be 12 year-old sonsare both huge readers. They are fans of many authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well, series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and recommendations of fellow YALitStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]Responding to Monday’s Rick Riordan post, Jamie Lynn Longo writes, “Riordan wins my everlasting affection for the epigraph to The House of Hades: ‘To my wonderful readers:/Sorry about that last cliff-hanger./Well, no, not really. HAHAHAHA./But seriously, I love you guys.’ (For those unfamiliar with the series, the previous book ended with people literally hanging off a cliff.) I already deeply loved all of his series, but that little zing made my day. I can't wait to introduce 9 to Percy.”Natalie Chase agrees, adding, “I’m sure others have recommended this, but I hear my students talk about the Percy Jackson series more than any others!”Responding to Thursday’s Timmy Failure post, Irene Martyniuk writes, “I was going to email you about Timmy Failure. He is our family favorite, without question.”Responding to Friday’s Chronicles of Prydain post, Abby MullenTweets, “I just started my 7yo reading those, which were some of my absolute favorite books as a kid, and I'm thrilled to see her responding to them in the same way.” She adds, “And I'm currently reading her The Phantom Tollbooth, which is my favorite book of all time of any genre.”On the same post, Sara Georgini Tweets, “Great post, Ben! I, too, tore thru those books--always hoping I'd grow up to be Eilonwy.” And Katherine Keena adds, “I took a kiddie lit course wherein I discovered these books! My children loved!”Other YA lit and series recommendations:Diego Ubiera nominates Elizabeth Acevedo, and specifically The Poet X . Katy Covino agrees, writing, “Heard her give a reading. Amaze.”Katy shares, “Enjoying David Levithan - another moving reader! 13 Reasons Why - for the class discussions. Kate Chopin - same.”Paige Wallace writes, “The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series by Jenny Han. They’re easy reads, well-written, and lighthearted. I devoured them.” She adds, “Also, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas.”Kristen Hera nominates Symptoms of Being Human and The 57 Bus .Rachel Weeks Bright shares a long list: “Rick Riordan. His cast of characters are very diverse. He’s also a huge supporter of younger YA writers esp women & POC (see the Rick Riordan Presents imprint). Lumberjanes . Graphic novels/novels that are the books that I needed to read as a teenager (but didn’t exist). My boys love them too. Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Fortunately the Milk (Neil Gaiman). The Sisters Grimm (series). Descendants of the storytellers, they solve fairy-tale based mysteries. Hamster Princess (series). Also based on fairy tales, Harriet is a hamster and a kick-ass princess. How to Train Your Dragon (series). Far better than the movies IMO, very dark at times, but with hope. Harry Potter (of course). Bone (graphic novel series). There are really so many good YA graphic novels available right now—excellent artistry and deep storytelling. American Born Chinese, Boxers & Saints, Secret Coders (Gene Luen Yang) The Witch Boy (graphic novel series). Awkward, Brave (graphic novels by Svetlana Chmakova). Mysterious Benedict Society (series).Melissa Mazzone writes, “I absolutely adore the genius Leigh Bardugo and her Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology (both set in her “grishaverse” world). Laini Taylor is phenomenal with her Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy. Both Fantasy series that are considered more “upper YA” and rich with magic and lore.” She adds, “Oh! Marissa Meyer has a fantastic series called The Lunar Chronicles that includes 4 amazing sci-fi fairytale retellings. A few of my favorite contemporary YA authors are Courtney Summers, Emery Lord, Nova Ren Suma, and Sarah Dessen.”Anna Consalvo nominates Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyami.And Jamie Lynn Longo writes, “In addition to all the awesome books others have shared, I would include these series and stand-alones.**Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty series and The Diviners series. The latter has become one of my very favorite things because of its inclusiveness. It is set in the 1920s, but features multiple characters of color and characters on the LGBTQ spectrum, and they are major players, not merely fodder to kill off tragically.

** Rainbow Rowell'sEleanor & Park, which is one of the loveliest books I've ever read. I was particularly struck by Park's parents in this book. Both parents have moments where you want to shake them and say, ‘Can't you see how this choice is hurting ____?’ But they also both have moments where something clicks into place and they see the full picture and act without hesitation to do to the right thing. It's kind of beautiful.

** Nnedi Okorafor's Binti "trilogy" of novellas ("trilogy" because there's now an additional short story) and Akata Witch series, both of which are amazing Afro-futurist awesomeness

** Oddity, by Sarah Cannon, which is straight-up one of THE FUNNIEST books I've ever read. Imagine the SciFi show Eureka with a dark twist: children going missing. A group of middle-schoolers tries to find out what's going on.

** Justina Ireland's Dread Nation -- What if the Civil War had been interrupted by zombies and free Black women were actively trained to fight them off and Lincoln had been shot but survived?! This is an intended series for which I'm anxiously awaiting the next entry.

** The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano, by Sonia Manzano(Sesame Street's Maria!), which takes its initially unlikeable protagonist on a journey into social justice. That makes it sound SO BORING, but imagine a 16-year-old Nuyorican discovering the Young Lords when they take over her church. It's amazing.

** Sometimes We Tell the Truth, by Kim Zarins. Zarins came to the brilliant conclusion that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are basically Boccaccio fan fiction, so she updated the Tales using contemporary fandoms as a set of stories told on a school bus trip from CT to DC.

** Laurel Garver'scurrently two-book series Never Goneand Almost There (with maybe other books in the works). These two books explore a teen girl's grief over her father's death and how she tries to make sense of the world (and her faith) in the aftermath.

I tried to limit myself to Americans, since much of my favorite YA is from elsewhere.”BenPS. Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?

March 22, 2019: YA Series: The Chronicles of Prydain, Revisited

[In a development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and about-to-be 12 year-old sonsare both huge readers. They are fans of many authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well, series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. Please share your YA recommendations, series or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On watching my older son read a childhood favorite series of mine.Seven and a half years ago, I wrote a post inspired by my delighted discovery that Lloyd Alexander, author of many of my childhood favorite books including the Chronicles of Prydain series, was born outside of Philadelphia (rather than in Wales as I had always thought, given the Welsh-inspired sideto the Prydain books in particular). Obviously Alexander could be from the Moon and his books would still be the same wonderful contributors to my childhood love of all things fantastic (and more than a little mischievous), but it’s nonetheless very cool for this AmericanStudier to know that Alexander was bringing these old European myths and legends to a late 20th century American context, a la Shadow and Wednesday and company in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The detail made me feel that much more connected to Alexander, and that much more excited to start sharing his books with the boys when they got old enough.I think I read them Time Cat (1963) at some point in our early days with chapter books, but it clearly didn’t make too much of an impression (not for any fault with the book, just don’t think we were quite ready for it); so it was really this past holiday season when I truly got to share Alexander with them for the first time. My older son had just finished his last Rick Riordan book (until the next one comes out in a few months, anyway—man that dude writes fast!), and I got him the first Prydain Chronicle, The Book of Three (1964), from the library. The boys are open to most everything, but certainly they have read books that didn’t quite work, or at least didn’t grab them enough that they would feel a need to continue with that series or author. So needless to say I’ve been beyond thrilled that he seems to have enjoyed Prydain as much as I did—he tore through all five books (finishing the fifth on the mid-January day when I’m drafting this post), and was doing the thing where he asks me to mute commercials when we’re watching playoff football games so he can read literally every possible second (his father used to read a book while walking down the halls at school, so I know the feeling quite well).For whatever reason he’s not a big fan of talking to me too much about the books he reads (I think he thinks of me as an English Professor and that I’m asking as a kind of homework or the like), but I managed to get a couple thoughts out of him when he had finished the series (with his explicit permission to include them as part of this blog post). He said that he could tell by the language that they weren’t written recently, although we talked about how that was a choice even in the 1960s and an attempt to make the books feel more like classic myths or legends. And he said that he really loved the characters, that despite that archaic language they didn’t feel like they were part of an old story but like he could imagine interacting with them in his own life (a paraphrase but definitely the gist of his thoughts). I think (without making this into, y’know, literary analysis homework or anything) that he has hit the nail on the head in terms of the combination that makes Alexander’s series so perennially engaging: a legendary story and style that satisfies our human need for myths, wedded to deeply human and relatable characters that can draw in any audience, young or old. Sounds like some good goals for any YA series to me!Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: thoughts on this post? Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?

March 21, 2019: YA Series: Timmy Failure

[In a development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and about-to-be 12 year-old sonsare both huge readers. They are fans of many authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well, series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. Please share your YA recommendations, series or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the difficult task of appealing to kid and adult audiences, and a series that pulls it off in (Sam) spades.Having become something of an expert in children’s and YA adult media and culture over the last, I dunno, baker’s dozen or so years, I would argue that there is a very distinct spectrum when it comes to whether and how a particular work appeals to kid and/or adult audiences. If a work appeals only or even mostly to kids, it can be pretty painful for the adult who is often experiencing it along with them (I’m looking at you, Captain Underpants). If it appeals too fully to adults, then kid audiences will be either bored or confused and it seems kind of selfish for an adult to make them experience it with him or her (I’m looking at you, SpongeBob SquarePants ). But when a work manages to appeal to both audiences equally and successfully, it becomes one of those truly engaging cultural texts that, I dunno, single fathers and their two tween sons can experience again and again with great pleasure (I’m delightedly looking at you, the first Wreck-It Ralph [the less said about the recent sequel, the better]).Among the YA series that the boys have enjoyed over the last couple years, I would say that Stephan Pastis’ Timmy Failure books are perhaps the best at hitting that sweet spot. From 2013’s Mistakes Were Made through last year’s 7th and apparently final It’s the End When I Say It’s the End , the series has chronicled the hilarious and heart-warming misadventures of Timmy Failure, our narrator, a middle schooler, and the self-proclaimed (and onlyself-proclaimed) World’s Greatest Detective. I’m not sure any books have made my sons laugh as consistently as has Timmy; when a new book comes out we often go to Barnes & Noble so the boys can each read their own copy immediately before we purchase one for our collection, and watching the two of them laugh their way through a new Timmy Failure has been one of my great parenting joys of the last couple years. Although he would likely never admit it, Timmy also has a very big heart, and Pastis finds a way to weave those heartfelt moments and lessons through the books without losing a bit of Timmy’s delightfully un-self-aware arrogance and silliness. These are truly unique and successful tween reads, and I would unreservedly recommend them to any tweens and their parents.But not only them—for the last few books in the series, after that B&N ritual this AmericanStudier has taken his own turn to read the new Timmy Failure as well. All those aforementioned qualifies are certainly part of it, as this is not the kind of humor that can rub an adult reader the wrong way (I’m still looking at you, Captain Underpants). But what really sets Timmy apart is its impressively accurate deconstruction of the hard-boiled private detective mystery genre. Timmy himself is clearly a connoisseur of the genre, and so his voice and persona are carefully constructed attempts to fashion himself into that hard-boiled prototype. But as he does so, Pastis is able to gently satirize two different sides to the type: the irony that these uber-detectives are often pretty clueless, especially about other characters and relationships; and the more moving irony that their hard-boiled exteriors often mask traumatic histories that they’re attempting to repress or forget (in Timmy’s case, his father’s abandonment of the family). For this lifelong MysteryStudier, these elements make the Timmy Failure books truly engaging and thought-provoking, one more way in which they hit that rare sweet spot of kid and adult audience appeals.Last series tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?

March 20, 2019: YA Series: Artemis Fowl

[In a development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and about-to-be 12 year-old sonsare both huge readers. They are fans of many authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well, series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. Please share your YA recommendations, series or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the fraught pleasures of rooting for an anti-hero, and how a popular series transcends them.I’ve written a good bit in this space about the emphasis on anti-heroes in prominent recent TV shows (often through the now-deeply-fraught lens of House of Cards, but I suppose the ongoing revelations of Kevin Spacey’s history of disturbing and criminal behavior only adds one more layer to his character Frank Underwood as an anti-hero par excellence). As I’ve noted in most of those posts, I have deeply mixed feelings about this trend and such characters, or more exactly see them as straddling a very fine line: between a realistic depiction of human flaws on one side, flaws that the characters themselves recognize and are at least somewhat committed to working on, even if they (realistically) fail more often than they succeed (a la Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty on The Wire); and a celebration of their dastardly ways on the other side, a narrative that requires the characters to remain anti-heroic and indeed become more villainous over time (a la Brian Cranston’s Walter White on Breaking Bad). I get the appeal of the latter version, but to me it plays into some pretty ugly sides of human nature, and leaves me feeling more sleazy than entertained.The character at the heart of one of the boys’ recent favorite YA series, Artemis Fowl, consistently and complicatedly straddles that line to be sure. Introduced by Irish author Eoin Colfer in 2001’s Artemis Fowl (the first of eight Fowl books in a series that concluded with 2012’s Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian), the teenage Fowl is the smartest kid in the world, a scion of extreme wealth, and seemingly devoid of any morals, making him more or less a James Bond villain in training. That first novel centers entirely on one such villainous plan of Fowl’s, and to be honest when I listened to the audiobook version with the boys (they got into those, read by the wonderful Nathaniel Parker, after finishing reading the series) I found myself rooting hard (if silently) against Fowl as a result (not the intended reader response in a book entitled Artemis Fowl, I venture to guess). While Fowl does gradually grow to care about various fellow characters (on some of whom more in a moment) over the course of the series, I’m not sure he ever stops straddling this fine line, and indeed would argue that many of the plotlines present his evil mastermind qualities as helpful and even necessary to defeating the books’ challenges and (other) villains).Fortunately for readers of (and semi-unwilling listeners to) the Fowl books, Colfer also creates a wonderfully rich fantasy universe alongside the 21st century real world of his anti-hero protagonist. That world, known as the Lower Elements, is populated by all manner of fantastic creatures (known collectively as The People or fairies) who at one historical point lived on the Earth’s surface but have long since retreated to their underground setting. Colfer creates the world of the Lower Elements with remarkable depth and detail, and populates it with a number of wonderfully realized individual characters, most working for the Lower Elements Police Recon (LEPRecon, natch) force. Besides all their own merits and appeals, this community adds a vital aspect to the books: since they’re entirely separate from the human world, they both take Artemis Fowl down a significant peg and allow more resisting readers like this AmericanStudier to likewise engage with the series in a way that doesn’t require an embrace of or even an emphasis on the anti-hero title character. They are, dare I say it, a genius touch, if not at all an evil one.Next series tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?

March 19, 2019: YA Series: Wildwood and Ratbridge

[In a development that I’m sure will shock precisely no one, my 13 (!!!) and about-to-be 12 year-old sonsare both huge readers. They are fans of many authors and books, but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on, well, series—Young Adult series in particular—that they love. Please share your YA recommendations, series or otherwise, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the limits and appeals of quirky fantasy series.Ever since I read my childhood favorite Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix (1957) to my sons as our first chapter book together, fantasy fiction has been a staple of their library. And not just the mainstream, immensely popular fantasy series like Rick Riordan’s books (the subject of yesterday’s post) or Lisa McMann’s best-selling Unwantedsseries (although a resounding yes to both). No, perhaps inspired by their starting point with Ormondroyd’s less well known and more alternative vision of YA fantasy, the boys have also been drawn to more unique and quirky fantasy epics. I think the two longest books I ever read to them fall into that category: Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s Wildwood(2011), definitely our longest read together; and Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters! (2005), another mammoth shared bedtime read (and the inspiration for the popular 2014 stop-motion animated film The Boxtrolls ). Each launched a multi-part series (the Wildwoodand Ratbridge chronicles, respectively), and in each case, a couple years after we read the first volume together, the boys returned to the series and read the later installments themselves.I’ll admit to some surprise that they did so, because both of the first books (I haven’t read the later volumes so can’t say much about them or the series overall) were to my mind a bit extra: not just in size, but also and especially in quirkiness. Meloy and Ellis’s book is set in a fantastic world just adjacent to their hometown of Portland, Oregon (and their young protagonists born and raised there), and so that city’s notorious quirkiness becomes a thread in its own right; moreover, their imagined world of Wildwood is itself deeply quirky, as exemplified by the entirely, purposefully random detail of a badger pulling a rickshaw who shows up out of nowhere at one point to give the heroine a ride. Snow’s book is more quirky still, as its deeply peculiar imagined city of Ratbridge (with no neighboring real world city like Portland as a contrast) features sentient cheeses who are hunted for sport by the villains, an array of highly strange creatures exemplified by the now-famous boxtrolls, and steampunk-inspired technology like an effigy of the protagonist’s grandfather which also serves as a walkie-talkie between the two characters. I’m not averse to quirk per se, but at times the characters and stories of these books are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of strangeness they feature.At the same time, I think the quirkiness of these two YA fantasy epics does allow them to offer pleasures that complement those of more mainstream fare like Riordan’s and McMann’s. Meloy and Ellis’ series parallels Riordan’s and its ilk, as seemingly ordinary children find themselves thrown into and connected to a previously unknown magical world; but because Wildwood’s protagonists have that Portland quirkiness from the outset (its heroine Prue, known to Wildwood’s inhabitants as Port-land Prue, rides a bike literally everywhere, including to the book’s climactic battle), the book avoids clichéd contrasts between the real and the fantastic in favor of representatives of two unique worlds learning more about each other. Snow’s series is closer in type to McMann’s, the creation of an entirely fantastic world against which its somewhat familiar save-the-world-from-dastardly-villains plot plays out; but because that fantastic world is so entirely unfamiliar (unless you’ve encountered sentient cheeses that can run around on two legs before), readers can’t predict where the book will take them and are able to be genuinely surprised as a result (not an easy thing in genre fiction once you’ve read a good bit of it). So I’m very glad the boys have had these highly quirky and unique series in their reading lives!Next series tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other YA lit series, books, or authors you’d highlight?