Mechele Dillard, Examiner extraordinaire for Examiner.com’s YA Lit Section, asked me to do a guest blog this week, recommending some books as gifts.
Here’s what I had to say (eesh, it’s really struck home during this promo/release time for FiL that being a writer is such an incredibly narcissistic job!):
Pretty Paper: Ten of Melissa’s fave books to give the teen (including twenty-teen, forty-teen…) reader on your list.
Okay, it’s actually twelve, but you’ll see why.
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. So we’re supposed to love this book because of Mr. Darcy. After all, he’s gorgeous, supremely self-confident, and one of the richest men in England. What’s not to like? (Email me, girls and boys, and I will suggest a few other, better characteristics to go for in a guy…But then, I do like Darcy.) I suggest we love this book because of Elizabeth Bennet. She is us: smarter than lots of the people who surround her, endlessly loyal to those people who deserve it (and sometimes those who, well…don’t), and she quietly wants to be admired. If there’s ever a girl who deserves to get exactly what she wants (note: and not one of those nauseatingly good, selfless girls), it’s me…er, you…oh, yeah, Lizzie Bennet.
2. Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. Lemme tell you, I’m not a fan of werewolves. In general, I’m not a fan of any of those books where the Object of Desire’s basic biological imperative is to bite the girl and keep biting until she is rahther devoid of blood and/or life. That said, I loved this book about a wolf and the girl who loves him. It scratched all the itchy-reader parts of me like a big furry lupine paw (yeah, I really just wrote that– sorry): there’s longing and hope and suspense and cold weather and a bookstore, all in a beautifully-written package.
3. Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I think this is maybe the best under-read book of the last decade. I think this book should go right next to Catcher in the Rye on every Boy Meets World reading list. Arnold Spirit is the Elizabeth Bennet of fourteen-year-old, impoverished, Spokane Indians (brains, loyalty, ambition…). ATD isn’t a love story; it’s a bunch of them, along with some getting knocked down and growing up.
3b. Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher. In case it hasn’t been glaringly obvious to this point, I love love-stories. Doesn’t have to be romance. It can be bro-mance, BFF, family… Falling in love can happen in a zillion ways. And if you don’t fall a little bit in love with TJ, the protgonist, I’ll be a lot surprised. Crutcher packs a lot of issues into the book: racism, abandonment, abuse, physical limitations…but he does it beautifully.
4. Jane Austen’s Letters by…well, Jane Austen. P&P is sharp and often very funny. Some of Austen’s letters are positively lethal and hilarious; others are just really, really good writing. I won’t give the most lethal examples. But, can you honestly read “Next week I shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend…..” or “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” without smiling even just a little? If you answered “yes”, you might want to stop reading right here. Your bookshelves and mine probably only intersect in the dictionary section.
5. Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum. It breaks my heart that so many people have no idea that there were fourteen Baum Oz books. Most stop at The Wonderful Wizard, which is, IMO, far from the best of the bunch. Actually, most people stop at the movie, but that’s a discussion for another time. In Ozma, Dorothy returns to Oz and has adventures with characters who more than rival the first set. One of my faves is Princess Langwidere (gotta love the name) who has thirty heads she can switch depending on her mood. C’mon, imagine it: “Shall I be Scarlett Johanssen today, or Penelope Cruz? I was thinking Natalie Portman, but I have that quiz tomorrow and her extra-big brain will help. Can’t wear the same head two days in a row…” Written for kids, but some of the best stuff ever was. Plus, the illustrations are great, so much better than the first book.
5b. The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum. If you’re a stickler for chronology, this is the second book in the…what’s the word for a fourteen of something? series. It’s pretty wonderful, too.
6. Sushi for Beginners by Marian Keyes. This is kinda The Devil Wears Prada in Ireland. Marian Keyes wraps a story of ambition and loneliness and depression in the sparkly shiny cover of a fashion mag. She’s really good at doing stuff like that, a Sarah Dessen down the road a few years. If you relate to Dessen’s helplessly responsible Auden and Macy, Aisling Kennedy will appeal to you. If you’re into Austen’s Darcy and his snarky, sexy brethren, you’ll like Jack Devine. It’s a common Irish name, Devine, but what a name. Melissa Devine. Melissa Jensen Devine. “Your table is ready, Ms. Devine”…
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Ambition, loneliness, insanity, and a guy who’s somewhere between Mr. Devine-Darcy and that kind of biting werewolf I don’t like (and, of course, you should all care very very much about what I like…/insert eye roll here/). Jane’s not Lizzie Bennet, but there’s something in her restlessness and yearning and refusal to agree with everyone else that she doesn’t deserve something fab that just resonates. If we’re not Jane, we know Janes. If we’re lucky, she’s one of our inner circle.
8. Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. So where do think you’ll be when you’re not here any more? Me, I tend to hope for someplace like London W2, but that’s beside the point. Zevin creates an afterlife that is unique, hopeful and…plausible. She even makes a place for your pets. It’s tough to think about death, especially tough to think about who and what we leave behind, but through Liz (hmm, maybe there’s something in the name and if we all name our characters Liz, they’ll be 3-D and fab), Zevin makes it relatively painless. I say relatively because everyone I know who has read this book cried a little. Or a lot. Almost as good as Liz is the cast of secondary characters: the grandma who lets a newly-dead, never-got-her-license granddaughter drive her car (badly) without stomping her foot on an imaginary brake, the zen dead rock star, the ever-hopeful golden retriever…
9. Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan. So, you know how I usually feel about werewolves? Apply that to graphic novels, especially sci-fi graphic novels. But that’s kinda exactly what Tales is. It’s a mind-bending, disbelief-suspending, completely wonderful and charming combination of weird art and bizarre stories. There’s the visiting exchange student who looks a bit like a leaf and has a thing for bottle caps. And the guy who wanders the neighborhood in an antique diving suit (if I make a Captain Cutler reference, do you have any idea what I’m babbling about?), the nameless holiday that is Christmas-but-not. So worth reading. Worth owning. We’re on our second copy. We loaned out the original one time too many and never got it back.
10. A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. This is half about a neurobiologist’s years spent on the East African savannah studying baboons, and half about what the neurobiologist learned about the primate brain. Yes, I just used the word “neurobiologist” twice within a sentence in a list of books I recommend as gifts for people you actually like. I wanted to say “neurobiology” for the second one, but that would have blow the twice-in-one-sentence thang. This book is an amazingly good, easy read. It tells you everything you never knew you wanted to know about primate behavior. And remember, we’re primates. A lot of what Sapolsky studied is social hierarchy, how it’s determined and gained and kept. In other words, he knows all about Mean Girl primates. And remember, we’re primates. That alpha girl who dates the football player and abuses the gleek? Picture her really, really hairy and you have one of Sapolsky’s perfectly-drawn characters.
Happy Holidays. Happy Reading!