Mental Floss Presents Best American Dedication

[maribou]

Dedication, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Not much more depth than you'd expect from a teen series novel (ie: predictable as all get out, just for starters), but fun and engrossing. I liked the flashback stuff better than the present day stuff, for the most part - maybe the authors should just try their hands at straight out YA?
(120/250)

Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge, by Will Pearson, Mangesh Hattikudur, and Elizabeth Hunt
Now, the first thing is that this book does not quite stack up to those two giants in the bathroom-reading-what's-stuffed-with-info field, namely An Incomplete Education (which has the best structure and narrative flow) and An Underground Education (which has the wackiest perspective). So you should buy those first, if you haven't already read them. But, as an aficionado of the genre, I was very pleased with this one. Interesting, amusing, and very easy to pick up and put down. Who doesn't love reading annotated lists?
(121/250)


Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006, edited by Brian Greene and Tim Folger
Greene made some excellent selections here; I was happily surprised by some of them and I really enjoyed the collection as a whole. Major props to Bennett, Sacks, and Chorost. (I was especially pleased to love the Chorost as I have been meaning to buy his book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, for ages.)
(122/250)

Comments

[garretfw.livejournal.com]

I liked the Nanny Diaries, but vote no for Emma And Nicola doing YA. The field is plenty full with the obvious and the simple! What is this one about?

[maribou]

It's about a woman who has a successful and fairly altruistic career but is unhappy in love, partly because she still can't get over the high school sweetheart who disappeared at the end of senior year and then resurfaced as a major pop star whose songs were all about her, her, her.

And, surprise surprise, she gets the call (from her still-best-friend whom she also went to public school with) that he is back in the hometown, so she flies home (oh, yes, also it's Christmastime) to Have Things Out. And the usual ensues from there.

The reason I was saying they should switch to YA is that I think they would be competing (and winning) for young women's attention against stuff like Gossip Girl, or the Insiders, and that *their* stuff, unlike that competition, has heart. And some degree of emotional complexity, even if it is kind of predictable emotional complexity.

Aside from maybe the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, most of the simple obvious YA tends to be pretty mean-spirited...

[maribou]

Oh, also the flashbacks are to aforementioned middle school/high school years, and they are written quite perceptively (IMO) and with fewer clunkers than the adult stuff.

[garretfw.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. In spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, I never think of anyone as ever reading Gossip Girls. What I do think is that Traveling Pants was mind-numbingly boring. It never occurred to me to judge it as being mean-spirited or not. So I am sure you are right, and I just didn't give it enough thought! PS Who reads gossip girls? Has anyone ever met anyone who reads them? Or do people just write about them as symbols as The End Of Civilization.

[maribou]

FWIW, while I do not read them and am not friends with anyone who reads them, I do work in a used bookstore and those things FLY off the shelf like hotcakes. I see teenagers buying them every time we get one in, like within days.

[garretfw.livejournal.com]

I remember when I worked in a bookstore (not used, but small and now long since out out of business by a chain), one of the Anne Rice books came out (I think it was a witch one, not sure). My god, I never saw anything leave so fast. Your comment made me remember that. Have a great weekend.