My Obsession with Young Adult Fiction

I love young adult fiction, I really do. I have always loved Harry Potter. (Does it count as young adult fiction? I mean, did the category even really exist when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published?) I read, and did not love, all 4 Twilight books, and I have a bit of an obsession with The Hunger Games.

Two years ago, when my boss's wife brought us all lunch during a busy day, we were talking about books. I admitted to having stayed up very late the night before finishing Mockingjay. And then I explained that it was a YA book in a series about kids fighting to the death. They all looked at me with blank faces. I couldn't shake the feeling that my boss, a publisher and an author himself, was judging me for reading something so childish.

But lately, YA is getting more recognition as a genre, and it's less of a childish thing we old adults (ha! I called myself an adult) should be embarrassed by. Maybe my boss would still find these books silly, but plenty of people don't.

And thanks to Bitch magazine and its accompanying blogs, I've been discovering so many more YA books! Actually, I think I discovered The Hunger Games thanks to a Bitch article comparing the strong and independent Katniss Everdeen to the whining, lackluster Kristin Stewart, I mean, Bella Swan. Victoria Law has been writing a guest blog series for the Bitch site, Girls of Color in Dystopia, exploring YA books dealing with dystopic visions of the future. More mainstream books, like The Hunger Games, tend to be pretty much whitewashed (except for Rue, and I'm still recovering from her death); Law seeks out the books with a wider range of characters and experiences.

So far, I've read one and a half books that she discussed. I read, and loved, Cinder, a retelling of Cinderella in the future with cyborgs, alien threats, and, of course, handsome young princes. (Princes, apparently, will be sticking around, even as governments rise and fall and go to war and destroy each other. Princes are the cockroaches of fictionalized dystopic worlds.) I'm currently reading, and loving, Ash, another Cinderella re-telling, this one with a lesbian twist.

I was an English major and sometimes I do feel a little embarrassed for reading books with a target audience of 15-year-olds. Shouldn't I be reading literary novels? Shouldn't I be tackling that Gloria Steinem book like there's no tomorrow? Yes and no. I should, and do, read National Book Award-winning novels like Salvage the Bones (which I highly recommend) and I do read feminist nonfiction whenever I can. But since I've been out of college and working every day with no summer break like an old adult, I've started to understand why my mom has been reading trashy romance novels for so long, and why I'm craving YA books more often.

They're easy. They sweep you up in a story that you can move through quickly. They give you the good story and the drama with simpler language. And as YA is becoming more legit, the books are getting better. Recently, I had a very heated (and I do mean heated) debate about the merits of young adult fiction, specifically Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. Some people thought it was ridiculous to count these books as literature, or even as legitimate. Some thought there was no purpose to books with "literary merit". (Some people also never explained how they might define "literary merit".)

The truth is, I don't care if these books qualify as literature. How do you qualify anyway? There are plenty of books, young adult or not, that are terrible, and plenty that are great. The fact that anyone could try to debate the quality of Harry Potter and Twilight in the same conversation is ridiculous: one is a brilliant series with a vast, detailed world, and one is...not. But The Hunger Games brings so many provocative topics to the young reader: government censorship and control, relationships, violence as entertainment. Cinder shows them the problems with discrimination and Ash asks them to think more broadly about sexuality. How is a book that gets more kids and teens to think and form opinions a bad thing? Why don't teens deserve that opportunity?

YA novels allow readers to explore big ideas in language they understand. They can get non-readers interested in reading. They can open the door to higher brow books, or to poetry, or to literary non-fiction. And they provide anyone and everyone with a story to get swept up in after a long day at work.

That's enough for me.

Moving and Clean Slates

Y'all. I am a little too excited about moving.

I love Oxford, I love my job, but it is time to live somewhere else. And now that we've decided on Seattle, and started making serious plans, I am soooo ready! Aaron found a video about all the great stuff in Seattle, thanks to Expedia, and after watching it (twice), I want to be there and do everything. So I've made Seattle my computer background.

If you hadn't already figured this out, I'm a planner. Big time. It's very frustrating to me that people don't already know which apartments will be available in August--I want to plan 2 and a half months ahead!

Yes, I have asthma, and yes, I Googled the best
cities for people with asthma.

I'm also just really excited about the opportunity for a clean slate. New place to live, new people to meet, new jobs to find (and get!), and, we've decided, new furniture! It hadn't even occurred to us not to rent a U-Haul or use PODS or something to move all our stuff across the country. When talking to my Aunt Genie (yes I'm named for her) about prices, she finally stopped me and said, "Is the stuff that you have worth $1,500 or $2,000 plus the hassle? Or could you just sell it and buy new stuff when you get there?"

Honestly, her suggestion kind of blew my mind. How had this never occurred to me? Well, probably because we are all pretty attached to our stuff, and when we picture new apartments and homes, we imagine the stuff we have going into them. But we are 25, with no kids and no expensive furniture; why should we bother with the expense and difficulty of moving everything? We were all planning to leave a lot of our books in my mom's attic (because we just assume we won't have space for them and the bookcases). I'm pretty sure we can find another $90 couch. And my dresser, which I've moved to three different living locations now, is too small and has had a broken drawer all four years. It's probably easily fixed, but I sure as hell haven't fixed it. So why do I still have it at all?

So now we begin the process of cleaning everything out. For those of you who live in my area, be prepared: we'll be selling some good (and some just okay) furniture at the end of the summer. And this process is really exciting to me. For one thing, it gives me an outlet to focus my excited moving energy while I'm waiting for time to move a little faster so I can get serious about apartment hunting. Plus, it feels really good to finally let go of a lot of the stuff I've been carrying around with me for years.

Books I put aside to keep without taking,
by storing them in Mom's attic

This is a step on the way to not becoming a hoarder. That's always a good step to take.














I will, however, miss this beautiful catalpa tree from the Ole Miss campus.

I just wanted to share this awesome picture.

Defending My Time

This past weekend was the Creative Nonfiction Conference in Oxford. My company was part of the group putting it on, so I spent most of the weekend working (and fighting off a sudden allergy attack). As I watched all the attendees, panelists, and workshop leaders talking about their work, I was disappointed in myself. People were talking about waking up at 4:30 every morning to write, staying up late to write when their families have gone to bed, finding time between work and home to get that 45 minutes of writing all to themselves. What happened to my discipline about writing?

I've been amazed at how hard it's been to become disciplined about my writing, mainly because I'm disciplined in almost every other aspect of my life. I buy new groceries before the old ones have run out. My office is over-organized with folders for everything. I have no problem spending my Saturday mornings cleaning the house and doing laundry. But when it comes to finding time to write, giving myself the time to write, it's almost impossible.

This weekend, I was able to listen to one of the final panels; the topic was "Balancing Work, Life, and Writing". The writer River Jordan said something that really struck me. She said, "This may be totally sexist but I think women have a harder time carving out that time to write." She talked about offering to take care of her grandbaby on a day she knew she was supposed to be writing. Even her husband was reminding her that she was supposed to be writing, but she said, "I can do both." My first thought was, That's not sexist. That's just true.

And it is. It's true. It's a truth that stems from living in a sexist society. Women are made to feel that they can and should do everything. We are supposed to be the baby nurturers, the cleaners, the decorators, the cooks, the caretakers. We work outside the home and are still expected to manage the home. In a world where women are still largely expected to live their lives, first and foremost, for their children and families, a woman taking time for herself often feels selfish.

It's no wonder that women have a hard time giving themselves that alone time for writing. We feel guilty about it. How can I take the time to write when there is laundry to be done, dinner to be cooked, someone else's needs to be attended to? River thought, "I can do both." But she couldn't, and she knew it.

We can't do it all or have it all. No human can. We have to be protective (another word a writer on the panel used) of our writing time. We have to take it. We have to block it off in our schedules and defend our right to use it. Women writers like River and others from this weekend have found a way to do it, and I'm going to be better about doing it for myself. We owe it to ourselves. And to the world of writing. Because otherwise, all writing would be done only by men.

And wouldn't that be boring?