SHELF DISCOVERY

Shelf Discovery: Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading—A Reading Memoir, by Lizzie Skurnick: I adored the now sadly defunct (I think?) Fine Lines series at Jezebel, which revisited beloved YA novels of my generation (Island of the Blue Dolphins! Jacob Have I Loved!). I was happy to see that someone else had read the All-of-a-Kind Family books, one of my favorite childhood series: “You should also go to Coney Island circa 1903, the better to plunge into the Atlantic wearing 8 petticoats, holding hands with your sisters, stopping only to get lost and be taken in by an Irish policeman ( ‘Air ye now! Well, ye come along with me...’) who buys you a peanut-candy bar and a lollipop and an ice-cream and it is magically not creepy at all.” And the writeup of Summer of Fear cracked me up especially; check it out for the Lois Duncan tropes alone (“The Malevolent Double,” “Perky heroine, just getting breasts, hotter boyfriend than she deserves”) if you read any of those books when you were a kid. (My college friend M and I rediscovered Summer of Fear in a used bookstore circa 1998, bought it, and passed it back and forth between us for weeks, each marking it up with mocking commentary, MST3K-style. Good times.)

So I was thrilled when I learned there would be a book based on the feature. The book is pretty much like the blog (which is to say, brilliant—both entertaining and insightful), and the only time I was disappointed in it was when I wanted it to be more like the blog (some of the pieces were excluded or shortened, and some new pieces were added). Needless to say, I now have a list as long as my arm of young-adult books I want to read or reread.

I’m deficient in Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and some of the other YA classics because I didn’t really go for hard-hitting realism as a kid—I mostly devoured books about animals (The Incredible Journey, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, Paddington); the intersection of real and fantasy worlds (Oz, Narnia, Roald Dahl, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L’Engle, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Freaky Friday), Olden Times, preferably involving hardship (Little House, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, All-of-a-Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Betsy-Tacy, Island of the Blue Dolphins); and ordinary, mostly wholesome, adventurous, precocious girls (Ramona Quimby, Anastasia Krupnik, Harriet the Spy, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Pippi Longstocking). I was an advanced reader, but not an emotionally mature one, so I had little interest in reading about dating, drugs, alcohol, or other grown-up things, and by the time I was finally interested I was mainly reading adult books. I may have skipped the Sweet Valley High stage entirely (although I ardently loved the Babysitters Club for a few years), and I know I never had a V.C. Andrews phase. So about half the essays in Shelf Discovery had me nodding in agreement and recognition, while the others had me frowning in puzzlement (Did I read that one? Does it sound vaguely familiar?) or thinking, “Wow, this sounds awesome! How did I miss it?” (except for the V.C. Andrews ones, which had me thinking, “Ew! I would have hated this then and I would hate it now”).

My friend A was just telling me that she and her coworkers have started a book club where they read only YA books (perfect for book clubs, because they’re short, nostalgic, fun, and generally packed with issues) , which had me seething with jealousy. I want a YA book club! Anyone want to start one with me? At least maybe I’ll make reading or revisiting classic YA books a regular blog feature next year...er, along with the 200 or so other books I really want to read. Sometimes the amount there is to be read excites me, but often it just thoroughly oppresses me.

I suppose one solution is just to stop reading books about books, which are always guaranteed to make me want to read more books.