Flash Burnout

Young Adult Fiction seems to be my main source of reading material recently; when I have more time, I'll read and report on either more classic literature, or something new and controversial. In the meantime, here's a quick and colorful book. It's called Flash Burnout, by L. K. Madigan. The main character is a guy in high school who's also the narrator, which is why I say it's colorful; his thoughts are what I imagine actually goes through the heads of the guys around me. If you're too young, too old, or too sheltered, you might have to Urban Dictionary some of the terms he uses.

This whole book is tied together by photography, which is the narrator/protagonist's passion. In the story, his best female friend is having trouble with her mother, a meth addict, and things are heating up with his high-maintenance girl friend. He's a pretty normal kid, and the book is fun to read, although the plot probably won't get your heart racing too often. It's written by a woman (this took extensive research to find out, since nothing in the book specified) so all it tells us is that all women (well, okay, me and her) assume the most of the same things about the thoughts and feelings of teen guys.

The one thing I got out of reading this, to be honest, was a really strong desire to either take up photography or befriend someone who already has. Or both. But if you need some entertainment, I'd recommend Flash Burnout.

You Are What You Hear

Candor, by Pam Bachorz, is a supremely creepy book. It's about a boy who lives in a special town that his father founded, where music containing subliminal messages is used to control the people who live there. Catchy phrases turn them into loose-clothing-wearing, healthy-food-eating, nonartistic, avidly academic individuals. No one wears eye makeup or nailpolish or holds hands in public, and teenagers never drink alcohol or make out in movie theatres. And if they ever leave and forget to take some of the special music with them, they will go insane and die a violent suicidal death. Oscar, the protagonist, has found a way to outsmart his father, but he's still stuck in this strange microcosm, with questions of love, control and honesty to confront. The entire book was full of suspense - will he escape? Will anyone escape? Will they all be brainwashed by the evil Mr. Banks, with no hope of free thought?

Clearly Bachorz believes that a) the media can affect us without our realization and b) our music, and the messages it contains, can define who we are. I agree that the words in songs, as well as the pictures and articles in magazines and the things we see on TV, can change both our perception and our goals more than we expect, but I think villainizing music is a pretty strong exageration of this concept. Then again, maybe the exageration is necessary to catch our attention.

Crooked, Zipped, and Crushed

These are three seperate books, by one married couple of authors. They aren't a series, but they are all "young adult" books, and they're all about pretty normal American teenagers. If I were a guy, I would probably be most interested in Zipped and least interested in Crushed, but if you like one of these, you'll probably like all of them.




Crooked was the first book I read by Laura and Tom McNeal, and it's about a girl with a crooked nose and no mother. There's a bad guy and a good guy who sometimes seem to change roles, and a really bad guy. Reading it felt like moving to a new town and getting to know new people, only probably a bit more exciting. The characters were all "round" characters, as my English teacher calls them, and I liked it a lot. This one gets 4.5 outta 5 stars.

Zipped was mainly told from a guy's point of view. It was full of questions and matters of perspective and identity, covering everything from adultery to racism to Mormon culture. It had one of the best quotes-within-a-story I've ever come across when two characters discuss the lyrics of a showtune, and no one was completely bad or completely good. 4 stars.

I honestly didn't want to read Crushed, but I liked the other two books enough to try it, and it wasn't terrible. Everyone it it was dealing with loss, whether that involved money, friends, family, or some combination thereof, and it was honestly pretty interesting. The characters, though, all seemed either naive or distrustworthy, except a few nice ones, who's importance levels fell somewhere between benchwarmers and supporting actors. So everyone likable was basically a "flat character". I think I should have stopped after Zipped, but this book isn't a total waste of time. 3 stars.

Has anyone else read any of these? Would you want to? Does the label "Young Adult Literature" affect whether or not you want to?

Say You're One of Them

I think there are authors who think that happy endings are boring, predictable, and less meaningful to the reader. They may be right. I also think that Uwem Akpan, author of Say You're One of Them, is one of these authors.

This collection of fictional stories by a smiley Jesuit priest from Nigeria doesn't have a single happy ending. There are bittersweet endings, endings that are twisted with relief and regret, and endings that leave you cold. But, as I recently learned how to say in Spanish, Todas las cuentas acaban mal. They have sad endings.

If you feel like you now don't have to read these stories, don't get me wrong; the endings are often unpredictable, some ending with what we hoped for all along, but not quite as happy, and some ending with what the characters dreaded, but we were too naive to believe possible.

These stories of Africa, exploring ordeals that happen to people there, and not rarely, are all unnerving. I had to ask myself, over and over, what seperates me from them? There are answers - physical distance, money, language - but they pale in comparison to the similarities, the unnerving proximities. Like Jubril, am I not at the mercy of the crowd whenever I take a bus or a train, or a plane? Could the others not kill me, if all incensed and united against me? Could I not lose my parents in an instant, like Kotchikpa, and find myself at the mercy of the world? These stories take place in an alternate universe, one that exists, only a plane ride away.

Some people don't read "depressing" stories, because they say that there isn't anything they can do about it. But maybe, if we read about the struggles of others, we won't be tempted to prey upon the one Muslim in a group of Christians, even in times of desperation and fear. Maybe we won't turn against our neighbors and families when there is a crisis, because we see how horrific it was when it happened in Rwanda. Maybe we won't ignore those charities that help child slaves just because they seem so far away, and we'll be careful where and how we get our oil and diamonds. So read Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan. Maybe you'll learn something about life, or yourself.

Titian; The Last Days

Over Spring Break, I finished an excessive number of books, but this was not one of them.

Titian, by Mark Hudson, is about everything and everyone (and everyone's cousin) in Italy within a century or two of Titian's life. I read detailed accounts of the possible interpretations of paintings (which Titian probably never even saw) by artists who Titian never knew. I read the word "beatific" four times in one page, and eventually looked it up. ( If you're curious, it means saintly, calm, enlightened, etc; it is not simply another way to say beautiful. It is also used to address the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. If you find this excessive and unwarranted explanantion tedious, I recommend you do NOT read this book). Reading this, I felt as though someone had written a three page dissertation on Titian, realized that it had to be a 100 page paper, panicked, and proceeded to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. And then, realizing he only had 99.5 pages, threw in the kitchen sink and made the page margins a bit smaller.

So if you'd like to educate yourself about Titian's home and how it looks now, rumors about the personal lives of those who inspired and trained him, and the nuances of tempera paint as opposed to oil paint, I would recommend this book. If you want to learn something about Titian, I'd recommend Wikipedia.