Lucky, adult nonfiction by Alice Sebold. If I ever taught a class whose sole objective was making children understand, why words, why story, this would be the key text. She takes a deep breath and aims herself straight down the edge of her precipice, she's got steering but no brakes, she tells the hardest part in the first thirty pages, no flinching, no pausing, it's intense and you know she owns it. It's impossible to look away and -- well -- I learned a lot. Recommended, but brace yourself.
Beasts of No Nation, adult fiction by Uzodinma Iweala, in audiobook. I picked this up off my Critically Acclaimed Possibly Relevant list and thought, I know every single thing that this is going to be like, and then rejoined, how unfair, like every Holocaust or slavery novel's just the same, and everybody loved it, come on, everybody's not stupid, and you know what, I was right the first time. Interestingly bold postcolonialist gamesmanship, though, using invented broken-English dialect to represent rhythms of African language.
Un Lun Dun, young-adult fiction by China Mieville. Witty and inventive magic of Harry Potter, minus the compelling characters and relationships such as they are and story suspense such as it is, but the prose is easier on the eyes. If the previews for the first HP movie comprised more than half of what you love about the heptology -- or if you remembered The Phantom Tollbooth as better than it turned out to be when you went back to it -- this is for you.
Thirteen Reasons Why, young-adult fiction by Jay Asher, in audiobook. This might be... thinking... yeah, this might be the book that's pissed me off the most, ever. Certainly in recent memory.
The writing's lazy as hell and the plot relies on readers' having no experience with the mechanics of actual high school life and the one jot of narrative tension is resolved at about the 3/4 mark with "actually, no, that wasn't a thing at all" and none of that's even what bugs me.
And when I say bugs I mean infuriates and offends.
The premise -- and I'm about to try my damndest to spoil this book for you -- is that a high school girl has killed herself and left behind thirteen audiotapes, one about each of the thirteen people whose betrayals forced her to it, plus complicated instructions for the delivery of the full series to each of those thirteen.
There is no catch.
There is no twist.
There is no redemption.
From the text as written, it is difficult to avoid concluding ALL of the following:
(1) The petty cruelty of high school students has the power to rob its victims of their bodies and selves.
(2) There is no fighting back. There is no assertion of self. If they decide to hurt you, you bleed, and you become weak.
(3) Suicide is a not unreasonable response to an accumulation of such cruelties.
(4) The suicide of a victim can serve as punishment for the perpetrators of such cruelties.
(5) Along with petty cruelty, rape, failure to stop a rape, drunk driving, sexual harassment, lack of respect for the privacy of others, gossip, objectification, and phoniness can be more or less equated as crimes of betrayal. There is some meaning to be derived from distributing responsibility and penance more or less equally among their perpetrators.
(6) The worst, cruelest thing you can do to a girl is believe her to be sexually active when she is in fact wholesome and pure.
(7) It is appropriate for a girl who is believed to be sexually active to consider herself ruined, not just socially but personally.
(8) Suicide gives you a voice. Finally you will be able to tell your story. Finally people will listen. Finally they will understand how they have hurt you and they will be sorry.
(9) High school students and teachers who failed to pick up on warning signs are to blame for your suicide. If you have ever failed in this way, however, you deserve them.
(10) Fortunately your peers can redeem themselves by paying closer attention to the next girl they catch in dark lipstick.
I mean... I don't know. I don't even feel snarky. I'm just horrified. How are people digging this?