A Valentine's Recommendation: My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger

So, in honor of Valentine's Day today, I am going to talk about my favorite book ever. (It's in my top three favorite books of all time so you know it's good. 

It's calles My Most Excellent Year, and it was written by Steve Kluger and takes place in Boston over the 2003-2004 school year. (I think. It may be 02-03 or 04-05. Anyway, it was a contemporary when it came out, now there are SOME bits that are outdated, but for the most part it has aged very well.)

(It's not my favorite cover, but it works well enough that I won't complain. It could have been a lot worse.)

Actual description:

 Three teenagers in Boston narrate their experiences of a year of new friendships, first loves, and coming into their own.

Wow is that boring or what? Here's my description/review, which is way more informative: 

My Most Excellent Year is a 3+ POV epistolary novel. (There are 3 official POVs, but sometimes we see emails between the parents or a note from the guidance counselor, or newspaper clippings. It's realt seamlessly integrated and it's great. 

It's about a Bostonian boy with a dead mom falling in love for the first time with a whip smart Mexican daughter of an ambassador, while his “brother”/bff is struggling with being gay and Chinese. Oh and a little Deaf boy who plays baseball in the park and is obsessed with Mary Poppins crashes into their lives and shakes EVERYTHING up.

 It is a FABULOUS book full of realistic freshman-year feels, a really nice girl friendship in the background, and a diverse cast. It’s so awesome. The kids have their love stories, but there's also a huge emphasis on friendship, family and adults starting over too. 

There are shenanigans, jokes, a LOT of musical theater references, baseball games, a quest involving internment camps, and an especially hilarious ski trip. It is one of my top three favorite novels ever and you should DEFINITELY read it. 

There is literally something for everyone in this book. Sports people get the baseball, there's political activism in the form of Alejandra's outspokenness, there's a musical serving as an EXCELLENT allegory, there is SO MUCH AWESOME IN THIS BOOK I AM CONSTANTLY FLOORED. 

Also the author's website is in-universe and it rocks. 

This book and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks are the reasons that I have such incredibly high standards for the contemporary YA I read. 

Please please read it. It's awesome and you won't regret it. 

Happy Valentine's Day! 

A Pseudo-review of A.S. King's Reality Boy

This is a series of tweets I wrote early this morning. I finished Reality Boy and it killed me. It kills me, when people have families and friends who just don't care. I still read their stories because often they're so beautiful, but it makes my heart hurt.

We're all searching to find our people in life, and that's what so much of YA is about: figuring out that our parents and hometowns don't have to be our only people, or even our people at all, and setting out to find those who truly understand us.

There's an article sitting on my desk right now that my mom gave me when she visited last week. It's about intimacy as viewed from a religious and romantic standpoint, but she also talked about it in terms of emotional intimacy with friends and family. I haven't read the article yet, but I know what she's talking about. That is the reason I read YA.

Recently, my thoughts are always all over the place about everything. When I think anything, it gets connected to literally everything else I'm interested in. An article about Amazon is something I can easily connect to code-switching (linguistics) or the feminist movement. In my brain, everything is related and it's easy. But spewing it all out in words is hard.

Reality Boy was a great book. I liked it a little less than King's Ask the Passengers, but it was still definitely worth pulling an all-nighter for.

(Reality Boy was checked out via my college town's eLibrary system.)

Baby Trilingual

English is my first full language. In high school I took French, and I'm taking it again now. But over the summer, i went to Deutschland and learned German. 

I am terrified to open my mouth in French class because German might come out. 

Today was the first day of classes and my instructor wrote un dictionnaire on the board. She asked us to describe it. 

My mind: "oh that's easy. Es ist eine Wörterbuch." I was thinking, in English, "a dictionary is a word book" and since dictionary in German is literally word-book, my mind went to German before French. 

This is a real problem. *sigh*

the gorgeous music of the soul

I watched the movie August Rush today. It's a movie about music and love and heartbreak and becoming found. 

I couldn't find paper fast enough, so I wrote on magazine ads with a sharpie. I may use these notes later for collage or something, but for now I want to record them and release them. 

These are my notes. I don't know if they're really legible, but is that really the point?

on inspiration

I just read Golden by Jessi Kirby.

In a sort of oblique way, the novel deals with the idea of inspiration and goals. A recurring quotation is "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Art by Simini Blocker for GoodReads

It makes me want to answer that question myself.

I love books like this that make me want to go out and do something, make something. Sometimes it makes me feel inferior because instead I drown my sorrows and pent-up inspiration in tumblr, twitter, and pinterest.

I'm a creative-thinking person, not a creative-doing person. (It's a never-ending cycle, a self-sustaining prophecy and I can't. help. but believe it.)

Look to this as an example. It's a ramble. It has no point. It isn't inspiring. It won't make sense if you haven't read Golden. (It may not make sense even then.)

Nothing gold can stay.

But why would I want it to?

Honestly, life would SUCK if it were to always stay the same. I'm a restless person. From late August until mid-November, I slept in the exact same bed every night. It was stifling. In the past month, I've slept in three beds (mine at the Bird House (aka home, home-home, or my parents' house), mine at school (aka the Dorm), and my cousin's bed when I went up to her house last weekend) and travelled a little more, gotten off campus a couple of times and oh lord it is
still.
not.
enough.

My mum's often talked about her belief that young people should have "little gypsy feet" (and while some days I want to rant about gypsy stereotypes, other days I take it for the metaphor it is) and this is something I've internalized. I'm never quite happy enough in one place. I get tetchy. I want to move around. See new things. A six hour car ride? Cake. A plane? Even better.

It isn't even that I want to backpack around Asia or go on some grand "world tour" to see the seven wonders of the world or anything. I don't want that.

All it is, for me anyway, is a thirst for knowledge.  I want to know about your life. And his life, and hers, and theirs. About life in Canada and Michigan and Hawaii and Egypt, the Phillipines, Japan, China, Russia, South Africa. Life then, life now, what we think life will be. How we express these thoughts -- does culture play a part? does gendereducationlocation


and

then

I

just

stop.


…

…

…













It feels like my brain is stuck on a loading screen.

The countdown says "5 more seconds", but it has to be a lie.

It's said that for ten minutes now.



It's a sign from the universe to me to stop. Wait. Explore. Be in the now. Worry about the future in the future. Plan for the future when plans are needed, but not before.

Above all, enjoy

this wild and precious life

because if I don't do that,

how can I do anything with it at all?

The Test of Time

You know how it says on the sidebar that this blog will stand the test of time? Well, it hasn't. It really hasn't.

I just suck at blogging. I always have. I've always sucked at keeping a daily journal or diary too. Schedules and I… we just don't get along. It's something I'm working on.

I want to use this blog more. Maybe as a catchall.

Short stories and pictures and thoughts and rants.

It's gonna be part of  my resolutions for 2014.

Not that I've ever kept my resolutions either.

But I'm going to try.

Sea of Monsters Movie mini-review

When you read a book, you have a picture in your head of what the characters look like, right? And sometimes, when there's a movie made where the actor looks nothing like you pictured, you can't help but be a little disappointed.

That happened to me yesterday.

I went to go see Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters with my two best friends from elementary school, who were the ones who introduced me to the series. We did not have high hopes. Therefore, we were pleasantly surprised! The movie got the broad strokes of the book right, and overall, even as an adaptation, it wasn't bad. We agreed that Clarisse was a little too small and we were all SUPER DISAPPOINTED at the lack of guinea pigs, sirens, and man-eating sheep, but overall, well worth the six bucks we paid.

But one thing majorly kept throwing me. Tyson. The guy who played him was great, and perfectly fit my mental image, except for one fact.

He was white.

In my head, Tyson is a big, African-American-looking dude. He's dark. Darker than Grover, even! So when this pasty white kid shows up with dreads and one eye, I had to do a double-take. It kept weirding me out, even though I don't think it really caused too much of an issue -- the guy was spot on in every other characteristic.

Now, it's been a solid three years since I've read any of PJO. I've read some of Heroes of Olympus since then, but it's been a couple years on that front as well. I have no idea what the canon description of Tyson is, but I'm fairly sure that his race is never explicitly stated. But still -- I think it would have been awesome to have a little more diversity with the campers. Luke, Annabeth, Thalia, Clarisse, Percy, they're all white. At least Grover provides a LITTLE color.

*sigh*

Oh well. Maybe in the next one?

(THEY LEFT OUT THE PARTY PONIES WAIT A SECOND THIS IS NOT OKAY.)