Sometimes it seems to me that the world is comprised of two types of readers: those who re-read their favorite books and those who don’t.  Typically, children are big fans of re-reading.  My mom assures me that both my brother and I insisted she read The Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone over and over and over again.  Luckily, she obliged because research now suggests that reading the same book to children multiple times is highly beneficial.

Initially, I was torn between making this Wednesdays @ West post another in our important series on Banned Books Week, but I realized that there is a lot of overlap between books other people find offensive and seek to limit access to and those that I love and want to enjoy many times over.   I can’t even count how many times my younger self read Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume.  I am also one of those people whose life was changed by Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.  I was officially not a teenager by the time I discovered that book, but Garden’s writing so touched me that I cried at my desk the morning I heard she had passed away.

Other books that I discovered and rediscover as adult that are technically aimed at teens include The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.  These titles also frequently appear on lists of challenged books.

With Harry Potter, I generally re-read books one through seven every summer.  Assigning seasons of the year to specific books is a bit of a reading quirk of mine.  While the summers belong to Harry, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott makes an appearance every Christmas and Anne of Green Gables and the six other books about Anne Shirley by L.M. Montgomery tend to pop up in the spring.  These last two titles attest not only to my enduring love of literature for young people, but to a certain sense of nostalgia for the books that I loved as a child.

There are, of course, wonders of adult literature that I choose to escape into more than once as well.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh belong to this set, as does our Big Read title In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez.  Many of Barbara Kingsolver’s books are re-read favorites of mine, including Flight Behavior.  I’m also just about to delve into The Bean Trees yet again.

Sometimes what I wish to reread depends on my mood.  When I did comforting, I will often turn to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer or Joshua by Joseph Girzone.  If I’m starting to feel a bit cynical or uninspired, I will pick up Granny D: You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell by Doris Haddock.

There are many readers out there who don’t re-read.   Some feel there are too many wonderful titles they’ve yet to explore to go back to something they’ve already experienced.  As a person with an ever growing reading list, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view.  Rarer, I think, is the reader who doesn’t re-read because they don’t find books they like enough to read twice (or more).  While I feel deeply sorry for those readers, I’m afraid I can’t relate.

I’ve often thought that psychologists could learn a lot about a person’s psyche from asking them what books they like to re-read.  Not being trained in that particular field, I will leave the speculation of what my re-reading selections say about my mental state to others.  I’d rather spend my time re-visiting Harry, Anne, Jo, Dinah, Victoria and Taylor.

 

 

 

 

Like many of the staff members at the PIL, I am a big Downton Abbey fan.  I love following the exploits of the upper class Lady Mary, Lady Edith and, most especially, the Dowager Countess.  But perhaps even more intriguing to me are the “downstairs,” working class characters.  John and Anna Bates are my favorite romantic pairing and my appreciation for the fabulous Mrs. Hughes grows with every season.  As much fun as it can be to see how the elite lived in the earlier part of the twentieth century, I know in my heart of hearts that had I lived then, I would have been much more likely to be in the kitchen with Daisy and Mrs. Patmore than in the drawing room with Lord and Lady Grantham.

When it comes to books, I feel just the same.  It can be intriguing to get a glimpse into the lives of the rich and powerful, but I will admit, I often prefer the more down to earth characters and stories of people who have to work hard to earn a living.

A couple of weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor offered a list of  “10 Great Books Featuring Working Class Heroes.”  This list focuses on recent fiction and nonfiction, but of course, working class heroes are far from new to the literary world.  After all, some of the great classics of literature, like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men or almost anything by  Dickens, are the stories of the working class.

In any case, had the author of the Christian Science article consulted me about my picks for her article, here’s a few fictional I would have recommended she add:

Me Before You  by Jojo Moyes was my first Moyes title and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The main character, Lou, is pretty much the entire reason why.  When we meet Lou she is working at a tea shop, but after she is laid off, she takes a job helping to care for Will, a former daredevil, rich boy who was severely injured in a motorcycle accident.  Billing this book as simply a romance is, I think, remarkably unfair, but whatever genre you’d put it in, it’s a compelling read.  A movie version is in the works, but I’m far more excited by the book sequel, After You that is due out this month.

A couple of other forays into other works by Jojo Moyes were enough to show me that I really only like her when she is writing about likable, funny and flawed working class women.  Luckily for me, she wrote One Plus One.  Jess, a single mother, works two jobs: one at a bar and one as a house cleaner.  Despite her best efforts, her family is struggling.  Her teenage stepson is viciously bullied and her brilliant young daughter needs more than her mediocre school can provide.  When her daughter has the chance to enter a competition that could pay for her fees to much better school, Jess is determined to make it happen, even if it means accepting help from a rich client for whom she has a certain amount of disdain.

Unlike Jojo Moyes, Barbara Kingsolver is not a new-to-me author.  I’ve been enjoying everything she’s written for fifteen or sixteen years now.  She has quite the knack for creating characters that intrigue me, whether they are missionaries in Africa or recluses in the mountains of Appalachia.  My first Kingsolver novel was The Bean Trees.  When Taylor Greer graduates high school, the first and only item on her to do list is to get out of  her rural Kentucky hometown.  She takes a less than reliable car and starts driving west.  She eventually lands in Arizona, but  along the way, she picks up an abandoned child and finds herself creating a whole new family.

Despite the first scene in which Dellarobia Turnbow appears in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, I found myself really liking this young woman from a struggling farming family in Appalachia.  She’s sarcastic and condescending towards her husband and in-laws, but I found her rather endearing.  Flight Behavior is the story of how Dellarobia is thrust into a world of scientific observation when her family’s property becomes the site of a climate change phenomenon.  Frankly, the whole book is worth reading just for the scene where Della demonstrates to a yuppie environmentalist  just how little he knows about the lives and habits of working class people.

At the start of The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Victoria doesn’t even make the ranks of the working class.  As an eighteen year old, aging out of the foster care system, she has no place to live, no job and no support.  She’s also bitter and angry and perhaps an unlikely candidate to know much about the usually romantic Victorian language of flowers.  This is her specialty, however, and she parlays her affinity for flowers into a job with a florist.  Things certainly don’t proceed smoothly for Victoria, however, as she must face the events and people of her past.  In real life, Victoria would be extremely difficult to like, but between the pages of the book, the reader grows to feel a certain sympathy for her.

Diffenbaugh’s recently released second book offers another main character who can be difficult to connect with at first.  Letty is a single mother, but without much emphasis on the mother part.  Her own mother has, until the start of We Never Asked for Wings almost exclusively raised Letty’s children while Letty worked as a bartender.  When her parents decide to go back to Mexico and leave Letty to fend for herself and her two children for the first time, Letty certainly doesn’t seem to be a contender for mother of the year.  However, she does try to improve her children’s lives by dreaming up a scheme in which they can attend better quality schools.  In the end, it’s her teenage son, Alex, who really steals the show and runs away with the readers’ hearts, but I found myself liking Letty more at the end than I thought I would.

Like We Never Asked for Wings, The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez features characters from working class families that have recently immigrated to the United States.  In this case, the spotlight is on the Hernandez family that comes from Mexico after their daughter suffers brain damage in a sad accident.  Believing an American school can help Maribel recover from her injury, the Hernandez family relocates.  They are unprepared, however, for the reality that faces them in the United States.  This includes Maribel’s new relationship with a neighbor boy from Panama.  Henriquez weaves the stories of all the immigrant neighbors of the Hernandez family into an intriguing and heartbreaking novel.

 

 

This morning was the August meeting of Literatea.  The tea of the month was iced white tea with strawberries.  For a list of this month’s highlighted books, check out the August Newsletter.

Need even more suggestions?  Here’s what the lovely bibliophiles of Literatea have been reading and talking about:

Invisible City by Julia Dahl

 

 

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

 

 

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

 

 

 

The Shoemaker’s Wife by Adriana Trigiani

 

 

 

The Queen of the Big Time by Adriana Trigiani

 

 

 

Flowers of the Field by Sarah Harrison

 

 

 

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

 

 

 

World Without End by Ken Follett

 

 

 

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

 

 

 

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I am Pilgrim: a thriller by Terry Hayes

 

 

 

All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

 

 

 

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me by Jennifer Teege

 

 

 

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

 

 

 

The Silver Star by Jeanette Walls

Before starting my tenure as a branch librarian, I spent twelve years as a teen librarian.  During that time, I always had an excuse to read books written for and marketed to teens– it was a professional obligation.  As the years went on, I noticed an increasing number of other adults were catching on to what had previously been a teen librarian secret: books marked teen or young adult are often some of the most engaging, enjoyable literature being published.  After a few high profile titles that had clear generational cross-over appeal (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games), more and more adventurous “grown-ups” started seeing the teen section as a place they too could discover books worth of their time and devotion.

One of the (many) great things about teen books is that there is truly something for every reader.  Historical fiction, realistic, thriller, fantasy, whatever your favorite genre is, you can find some wonderful teen literature to expand your “to read” list.

Historical fiction fans won’t want to miss A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly.  Based on a true story, Donnelley’s fictional heroine is struggling with the expectations of her family and the man who wants to marry her.  Their demands clash with her own desires to attend college and become a writer.  When Mattie takes a summer job at a hotel, she becomes embroiled in a mystery when a guest, who after entrusting Mattie with a secret, drowns.  Donnelly is the author of a popular trilogy for adults, starting with Tea Rose.  Another of her young adult titles, Revolution, is another sure-fire hit with fans of historical fiction.

After you’ve made your way through Donnelly’s teen fiction, you may want to check out A Mad Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller.  Another tale of a young woman chaffing against society’s expectations, Victoria is more interested in becoming an artist than in attending debutante balls, as her parents expect.  Both of these competing pulls, however, seem to be at odds with Victoria’s increasing involvement in the British women’s suffrage movement.

For a darker, more gothic historical story, with a sweet love angle, we have Wildthorn by Jane Eagland.  After Louisa is told she is being sent to stay with cousins, she find herself imprisoned in an insane asylum.   Here Eagland borrows from the all too common real life practice of locking up young women who showed too much interest in academic pursuits or a attraction to same-sex love.  Louisa is “guilty” of both.  Amid cruel treatment and great frustrations in the asylum, Louisa finds affection and a blossoming relationship with a young asylum worker, Eliza.  With Eliza’s help, Louisa plots an escape from her imprisonment, seeking both freedom and explanation of why she was locked up in the first place.  Dark and gripping, yet still hopeful.

I have been on a mission for several years now to get everyone I know to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  A rare story that will have you laughing and crying within pages of each other.  Alexie’s main character, Arnold Spirit, is one of those classic literary underdogs, who readers will root for from start to finish.  Arnold lives on a Native American reservation, but fed up with the poor schools, he decides to become the first kid to leave the reservation school for the more affluent and primarily white school in the surrounding town.  Arnold’s path is certainly not smooth, either on or off the reservation, but he relates his story with humor and optimism and it is one that will stay with you for a long time.

Personally, one of my favorite things about teen literature is that so much of it has a real social justice bent to it.  It can be seen in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but also in two of my other recommendations:  The Queen of Water by Laura Resau and Bamboo 
People by Mitali Perkins.  Teens often get the reputation for being self-centered and oblivious to the world and injustices around them.  The literature that has been written and enjoyed by them, however, often tells a different story.  In The Queen of Water, Resau tells the story of a Quechua Indian girl in Ecuador who is indentured by her desperately poor family to work as a servant for an upper class family where she suffers abuse as a young child at the hands of the mother and finds herself facing worse at the hands of the father as she reaches adolescence.  In Bamboo People, Mitali Perkins’ character, Chiko may live on the other side of the world, but his life as an forced child soldier in the Burmese army is yet another tale of   exploitation and survival.

If you’d like to explore the world of teen fantasy fiction (and I do highly suggest it), you really must make room on your reading list for Tamora Pierce.  The prolific Pierce has so many wonderful series to her credit that it can difficult to pick a starting point.  My personal favorites are Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen, which take place in her fabulously detailed, magic world of Tortall.  Other Tortall series include her first series about Alanna the Lionness, Keladry in the Protector of the Small series and Beka Cooper, a Provost guard in the series that begins with Terrier.   Pierce has created other beloved magical worlds that are featured in her Circle of Magic and Circle Opens series, featuring mages who can control the elements of the earth.  If you’re having trouble picking one Pierce novel to read, just give it up and commit to reading them all!

If you like your science fiction with more than a touch of the apocalyptic, you won’t want to pass up Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer.  Miranda’s account of life after a meteor hits the moon and causes an unprecedented wave of natural disasters on Earth  has been a favorite among teen readers since even before The Hunger Games launched the current wave of dystopian novels.

Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block is a compilation of five, genre defying novels.  The closest category I think they could fit in would be magical realism.  Block’s five, very short novels revolve around the lives of Weetzie Bat and the family she creates for herself in an intriguingly magical, but still gritty Los Angeles.  Lyrical and beautiful, the Dangerous Angels novels are truly hard to compare to any other writing for teens or adults I’ve come across.

While I am certainly no expert on the issue, I will say that I find the portrayal of LGBT characters in literature to be more diverse, likable and enjoyable to read about in literature aimed at teens over much of what is written for adults.  Examples include Louisa in Wildthorn and also in the love story of Dirk and Duck in Dangerous Angels.   Kirstin Cronn-Mills creates another wonderful LGBT character in Beautiful Music for Ugly Children.  Gabe is a female-to-male transgender teen, who still lives as Liz at school and home, but is able to be himself when he is on air as a disc jockey on a local radio station.  When Gabe’s radio show gains popularity, his secret is threatened.  The cast of characters in this novel is simply beautiful, Gabe’s love of music is palpable and the whole story is a satisfying read.

While those who know me can tell you I’m not a big thriller reader, I am glad I made an exception for Double Helix by Nancy Werlin.  Werlin, who has her roots in Peabody, has written some intriguing teen thrillers, as well as branching out more recently into some interesting fantasy fiction.  Double Helix brings her trademark ability to create suspense together with a controversy concerning genetic engineering.  After graduating from high school, Eli decides to postpone college in favor of a job in a lab with a renowned geneticist.  Eli’s father is unexpectedly outraged by this move, which puzzles his son, until he starts to unravel the story of how he and his family are deeply connected to these same genetic experiments.

So the next time you’re in the library, stop by the teen area and browse for some engaging reads.  We officially give you our permission to read as much teen literature as you want!