Really Bad YA Fiction

Today, I am coming to you about YA novels. I am going to do my best not to criticize, but instead just bring things to your attention, in case your attentions weren't there anyway.

I'd like to think I am the key demographic for Young Adult novels- I am a teenage girl who likes to read and will put up with a lot of rubbish exposition for about fifty pages. (I read Twilight, didn't I? Nothing happened for roughly the first 110 pages. And I read it before the sensation started, too. There was nothing keeping me there but my ironclad patience and lack of anything else to do.) Also, I have outgrown quite a few children's books, but am throughly bored and/or disgusted by some adult books. This type of literature was made for me.

Or so you might think.

There are quite a few excellent YA authors, and what makes them excellent is that they do not pander to their audience. They understand who they're writing to. They know that not every single teenager has their mind completely fixated on the opposite gender and how to make the other gender love them (though it would be a lie to say that doesn't play some part). I like books that bring up some sort of thought, some sort of wondering about the world. I think teenagers have a lot that we're not sure of, and we don't really seem to fit in anywhere. We're too old to do things that we like or liked to do, but too young to do things that seem like the next step from where we are. It's an extremely awkward and boring place to be in, sometimes, and finding that state of wondering that isn't child-like but isn't grown-up is hard to do, but really pleasant to read when the author finds it.

For these sort of books, I like Paper Towns by John Green (probably the best YA novel ever written) and Don't Call Me Ishmael by Micheal Gerard Bauer (which is funny the entire time. Also, Australian).

But then there are YA books that I don't like, and I won't mention any of these by name because I hate them so much.

Usually, these books involve a girl. This girl will be either be:

• some sort of completely inadequate and insecure so-called 'smart-girl' who has one super-mega-totally-tight-yo-best friend, a horde of 'just-there' friends, and lots of time to complain. You will be asked to relate to her, but there is a 75% chance* that you will hate her.
• some 'new girl' who is 'different', 'smart', and 'totally appealing to everybody' but will still wind up being the whiniest brat in the whole story. You will be asked nothing of her, because she is so 'meek' and 'shy', but there is a 92% chance* that you will hate her.
• some kind of a Mary Sue who's desperately insecure and hides it all behind her Homecoming Queen smile and straight-A average (she will be involved in 'dozens of extra-curriculars' but somehow also have enormous amounts of time in which to complain). You will be asked to relate to her. However, because she is both irritating, spoiled, and completely unrealistic, there is a 89% chance* that you will hate her.
• some awful variation/combination of one of these.

What will happen is that this girl will be completely fixated by some boy, and this boy will be a vampire but nobody else at the school knows it, and he'll be intrigued by her because he can't read her mind, because, you know, he's a mind reading-vampire-thing, and they'll sit next to each other in biology and he'll sparkle in the sun like a pretty, pretty diamond and she'll want to kiss him, but he'll be afraid that he'll eat her if they do kiss so he won't but then they do, and then there's a werewolf who comes in and makes things complicated but he's not really a werewolf and he doesn't own a shirt and he smells good which is part of the complication but that comes later, because now there's only the sparkly undead manly-man and the masochistic little wimpy high-schooler who is getting in too deep.

So...yeah.**

Quote for Sunday, April 3, 2011:

Kat: You are amazingly self-assured, has anyone ever told you that?

Patrick: I tell myself that every day, actually.

-(

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/quotes

)

Muse for Today:

Violet Hill, by Coldplay. This is my favorite song by them.

*Rough mathematical estimation made by a cow in Wellington boots

**Not every bad YA book is the one I was heavily referencing up there, but scores of bad YA novels were based off of that one and making fun of it is WAY too easy. So I failed not criticizing, but won my own heart.

Creative Title Goes Here

Day 2 of BEDA.

This is a little embarrassing. I had lots of blog ideas yesterday, but I kept thinking that I had to save them for BEDA. Now I'm sleepy and all of my ideas are gone.

I am so tempted to just post this, but I feel like I need quality for BEDA.

So, let's discuss things. (And by us discussing things, I mean I ramble about things and pretend that someone cares.)

Oh, gods above. I've gone blank.

Well, I can talk almost inexhaustibly about YouTubers and books, but since my pretentious Gone with the Wind analysis went up two days ago, I'll just talk about YouTubers,

[Now what do I say without sounding like a crazed fangirl?]

There is one blogger/vlogger I like. Actually, I like lots of blogger/vloggers, but I'm talking about Hayley G. Hoover today. She was part of the YouTube project fiveawesomegirls (she was Thursday). Anyway, she's funny and self-depreciating and likes Chipotle. I also disagree with her on a lot of topics, but she's fun to read anyway.

Fine, BEDA. Day 2. Full of quality. I had a celebrity cameo.

Quote for Saturday, April 2, 2011:

"Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.”

-Marie Chapian

(http://thinkexist.com/quotes/marie_chapian/)

Muse for Today:

Interesting: India won the ICC Cricket Final. I am Indian. So this relates to me, somehow. Heh. I don't understand cricket. I am the shame of my family.

Not Interesting: The 'song' Friday by Rebecca Black. AAAAAAH I hate this song so much why is it stuck in my head?

BEDA

No, I have nothing April Fool's like to give the Internet. Today, everyone's on edge- it's April Fool's Day!

But you're all expecting it! What's the point?

Also, I don't have a sense of humor.

Moving on.

My, my. Look at the title. BEDA. What could that possibly mean?

In 2009, one of my favorite authors, Maureen Johnson, decided that she had been neglecting her blog, and that she would blog every day until the release of her book in paperback. The book was going to be released on May 1, so she would Blog Every Day (in) April.

I have also been neglecting my blog, and even though I am not as talented or witty or as famous as Maureen, I have thought about doing this. I need some kind of self-imposed discipline, so I am going to try BEDA this year.

This will be a greater dose of ME than you are used to, since I am a spotty sporadic blogger.

So, let's see how long I can keep this up until I realize that no one, least of all me, actually cares.

And no, this is not my subtle, cleverly hidden April Fool's Joke.

That was a terrible effort.

Here's to BEDA! Where hopefully, I will put it more effort than I put into this 'joke'!

Quote for Friday, April 1, 2011:

The early bird gathers no moss! The rolling stone catches the worm!

-Truman Burbank, The Truman Show

(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show)

Muse for Today:

Interesting: This. It is a toaster that makes toast...and cooks eggs!

Not Interesting: Tedious, vague, and time-consuming projects.

Gone With the Wind

I wrote this and wanted to put it on here, but I seriously couldn't be bothered editing it to make coherent sense. It was written in a stream of consciousness, so some ideas may be more stupid than others.

Also, the formatting on this post is kind of wonky, but there's nothing I could do to fix that...

**Also, I seriously spoil Gone With the Wind for you, so read at will.**

I finished Gone with the Wind, the epically long novel by Margaret Mitchell.

I stormed around for about an hour because, Good Lord, that book is 1037 pages long, and that was it? That was the ending? I was whipped along on some challenging, somewhat romantic ride through the American South during the Civil War, was forced to endure the continuing oblivious nature of Scarlett O’Hara (or Hamilton or Kennedy or Butler, I don’t really know), the sweet stupidity of Melanie Wilkes, the doomed and senseless ‘love’ between Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes, and the odd, unfathomable charisma of Rhett Butler…and in the end, what does that writer do? Lovely Melanie dies, clueless, trusting and pure to the bitter end; Rhett disintegrates because he never got Scarlett and lost his daughter-version of Scarlett in Bonnie and ceases to be the selfish rascal that made me like him in the first place; and Scarlett realizes the truths that I have known the whole freaking time, and ultimately fails to get Rhett. She was so blind for so long that she lost him! In the name of God! What kind of a moron is she?

And it (meaning the fist-clenching idiocy of it all) doesn’t even end there! Scarlett stands in the dining room at the end of the book, alone, freshly rejected by Rhett and in pure realization that she never loved Ashley in the first place, and she says to herself that she’ll think about all the drama of the evening later, because she simply can’t bear to think of it all now.

What in the bloody name of pomegranates? Why do you think this bothers me so much? Because this is what she has been doing for more than one-thousand pages, and it’s sort of wearing at this point. For all that she hates Ashley’s tendency to live in dreams and not look at what was in front of him, Scarlett is amazingly good at this too. She always says that she’ll ‘think about it later’, and then she never does! The problem gets shoved to the back of everything and ultimately ends up corroding the framework of her life. Thinking about it later is why it was ultimately better that Rhett and Melanie had Ashley buy the mill from Scarlett. Johnnie Gallagher was mistreating the convicts so badly, and she just wanted to ‘think about it later.’ Well, she never did. And Ashley got the mill, and he was fully willing to hire freed slaves and pay their wages instead of the cheap convict labor Scarlett so loved.

So this darling little adage of hers really doesn’t seem to do much good, and yet that’s how the book ends. With her thinking about how to win Rhett back ‘another day.’

The way she goes, she might never do that.

But I railed and I complained, and then I started thinking.

Honestly—I hate this ending. This is the longest book I have ever read in my life, and that was one of the most disappointing endings ever written, I think. But it makes sense. I don’t have to like it, but it makes sense.

I was born and bred on Disney and fairytales, and that was my childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I like that I had a sheltered portion of my life where I thought that everything could be okay, that everybody got a happy ending. But I’ve grown up since then. I’m not foolish enough to say I’ve grown up completely, but yes, I’ve grown up. And maybe this was Margaret Mitchell’s way of telling girls like me that we don’t always get a happy ending. Scarlett was indeed the belle of the county, and she was charming and lovely and that’s what princesses are like. In a way, to so many characters, Scarlett was a princess. But she spent so much of her life pining after something she didn’t understand, something that wasn’t even real, that she failed to appreciate what she did have, which was the love of a guy like Rhett Butler. She was selfish and greedy and stupid and cunning and far too human to be a princess.

In a fairy tale, maybe there’d be some second chance. Maybe Rhett wouldn’t have exhausted all of his love for Scarlett and they could have lived happily ever after, the end. But life doesn’t always have second chances. Not every fool gets second chances if she’s exhausted every resource, every chance thrown her way. And that’s always been a faint truth lingering in the back of my head, but this ending—this horrible, awful, maddeningly unsatisfying ending—really drove the point home. Not everyone always wins. It’s a simple, difficult truth.

I can appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it. I can still like my fairytale endings, because they belong in fairytales. I just need to start growing up and differentiating what happens in real life and what rarely ever does.

But rarely—rarely does a naïve soul like Melanie love a brazen, hard person like Scarlett and not even realize that there is no love back. Rarely is a person so loved and ignorant of that love it as Scarlett was to Rhett Butler. Rarely have I loathed and failed to understand a person, even just a character, as I have loathed and failed to understand the selfish, scheming Scarlett. She was a moron. She trampled people to get her way, she alienated people, she taunted them, used them, clung to them when they were up and kicked them when they were down. She’s no princess, but I guess that might’ve been the point.

Snob

My return to school this year has made me into... a snob. Or an anti-snob, which is in and of itself pretty snobby. There are too many snobs. Snob. Now it doesn't sound like a word. Snob snob snob.

It has sapped all of my time- well, not really. Combined with my general laziness and my slight lack of time, I have not blogged in some time. It took a bit of cajoling to win back my sponsor. They pay me tens of theoretical dollars. I can't forgo that money, my sirs and madams.

I am an anti-Abercrombie-&-Fitch snob, which means that if I ever stop wasting my time and start doing something worthwhile, they will NEVER sponsor me. I really hate the brand, even if it is begrudgingly well made, because it symbolizes everything I hate. Most of my childhood hatred can be summarized in Abercrombie & Fitch. It symbolizes vapidity to me, the idea of buying something just so you can have the tiny logo on your shirt pocket, bragging to everybody that you just paid $48 for a t-shirt that's so thin you'll pull holes in it by Week 5. Without the logo, the shirt would be costing a lot less. I hate it. I HATE IT.

I am, in general, a snob. But I am a Harry Potter snob almost more than anything.

I hate it when people only watch the movies and don't read the books (what's the point?), I hate it when people watch one movie and they declare themselves 'a fan' (the fact that you own five Hot Topic shirts with Rupert Grint's face on them is, while admirable, NOT directly related to you being a fan), and worst of all, I hate annoying Harry Potter fans who feel the need to rub their Harry Potter lovin' in everybody's faces. We get it, Irritating-Girl-in-My-Math-Class. You've read the books "forty-two times each! I SO wanna go!"

See if I care. Go on, ask me if I care.

NO.

But worst of all is:

"I can't wait to go! My friend got us tickets and everything! So which movie is it? Five?" (True story, by the way.)

AAARGH. Give ME the tickets!

I am also a clothes snob, but I am the worst kind of all- I am a hypocritical clothes snob. I care more about what other people wear than what I wear. Like K. (Remember K, my brother who I represent with a fake initial?) I care very much about what he wears, which makes him want to walk outside in a pair of shabby clown pants and only one suspender.

I wish I owned suspenders. But two, at least.

Quote for Thursday, November 18, 2010:

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

-William Makepeace Thackeray

(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/snob.html)

Muse for Today:

I am so tired that I cannot decide whether 'Thackeray' is an awful last name or a good one, and whether coupling it with 'Makepeace' makes it better or worse.