Follow Up on Looking for Alaska and John Green

I've really enjoyed the discussion about John Green's Looking for Alaska and coincidentally it just debuted on the NY Times bestsellers list. I almost didn't finish it because of my interpretation of page 48. Here it is and a little set up: the narrator is new at this boarding school and at his first basketball game with his roommate the Colonel.

I wanted to abandon the book but these posts on Facebook helped me decide to keep reading.

And when I posted the blog there was more discussion both in the blog comments and on Facebook.

So then I set out to connect with Looking for Alaska author John Green. I found his twitter and since it was an active account with tweets by him, I wrote these:

I didn't hear back from him so I followed up with these:

And a while later, he responded! 

So I replied

but I didn't hear anything back. Hm. So what now? If he didn't think the characters were black, is it still racist? Another Facebook discussion ensued which brought me some closure on the whole thing. 

Whew. That was so fun! If you participated, thank you! If you waded through all of that, thank you too! If you care to weigh in on the topic, comment away...

@Spectermagazine Friday Twitter Topic #top10bkmovie

Again, there was a twitter hashtag I had to chime in on and this time it's books made into movies. Here are my top 10. I put 11 on twitter so Henry the V had to go.

1. To Kill A Mockingbird: inspires just with the score and opening credits.

2. Whale Rider: indigenous girl's coming of age story, lovely little book too.

3. Pride and Prejudice: the BBC version with Colin Firth that made me love Mr. Darcy not that ridiculous Keira Knightley one.

4. Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire: didn't think it could be done. A different experience but equally devastating.

5. A Room With a View: Helena Bonham Carter saying, "Freddy, go look for tennis balls!" is my most quoted movie line.

6. Capote: a movie about a book about an author writing a book.

7. The Hours: another movie based on a book about a writer. A modern take on Virginia Wolff?

8. A Single Man: Oh, Colin Firth, you kill me again. And if you haven't read any Christopher Isherwood, the time has come.

9. Malcolm X: Alex Haley + Spike Lee w/ Denzel = <3.

10. Stand By Me: Stephen King meet River Phoenix.

I've forgotten many others. Help remind me.

Twitter as Blog Topic Generator: #top25books

I've been spending so much time on twitter lately that I almost automatically add # and RT before writing, but it's so worth it. I have met an amazing community of writers and teachers there and today a couple of twitterlits (twitter people who love literature) started a conversation about their top 25 books. If you haven't explored twitter, just search for #top25books and you'll get a glimpse into the way dialogue on twitter can work. Anyway, here is the list I came up with and I'm sure (like the twitter conversation) you'll have lots of titles to add and comment about. Do it. Comments on blogs make them worthy.  And if you join twitter, let me know! I'm writersgrind and these are my #top25books ~in no particular order.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje

Billy by Albert French

Blu's Hanging by Lois Ann Yamanaka

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois Ann Yamanaka

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Native Son by Richard Wright

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Push by Sapphire

Drown by Junot Diaz

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Young Adult Lit: Book Thieves Listening for Voices in the Dark

When the Wall Street Journal published "Darkness too Visible," by Meghan Cox Gurden, writers and readers of young adult literature fired back with blog posts and a twitter hashtag #YAsaves.

Her article argues that young readers are being exposed to too much ugliness and darkness, but I don't see it that way. As a young adult, books like Go Ask Alice and Judy Blume's Forever  gave my girlfriends and I literature we actually wanted to discuss. While our teachers guided us through Diary of a Young Girl, we dog-eared pages in Tiger Eyes so we could read and re-read passages, discuss the decisions of young protagonists and help us navigate similar territories. YA lit provided my classmates and I our first book club experiences and opportunities for real literary analysis.

Last school year, for the first time as a middle school teacher, I wasn't sure if I wanted to put a book on my shelf. I wasn't sure Push by Sapphire, the book the movie Precious is based on, belonged in my classroom library. Should my students read about such brutal incest and abuse? I suppose I was thinking a little like Gurden is in her article, but I put it on my shelf, and talked about the book with students as they checked it out and lined up to read it. And then it disappeared. It went into circulation. It was passed from student to student and I never saw it again. It became a book club book.

I realized that Push is like so many YA books, like many of the titles Gurden is critical of. Markus Zusak's Liesel in The Book Thief (another dark young adult work) steals books and books eventually save her. My students aren't willing to let go of books that mean so much to them. Every year I buy additional copies of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Judy Blume's Are You There God, It's Me Margaret. I pick up several of Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series, because if you love a book, if a book saves you, you want to hold on to it. You want it to be yours. For so many middle schoolers, reading just isn't cool, so if my students steal these books and read them in the dark with the door closed tight, they do it because it's true: YA saves.