The folks behind Jewsmas would like a different traditional Jewish Christmas, so everyone will “leave Chanukah the hell alone!” Traditions include The Refusal of the Ham and The Mumbling of the Carols. Sounds like not quite as much fun as The Airing of Grievances, but I’d give it a try.

Time for more Terrible Christmas Things! Erin McKeown, a wonderful singer-songwriter with whom I went to college, has an “anti-holiday album” entitled F*ck That! It’s not her best work, certainly; it’s a bit brittle and obvious, as you might guess from songs like “Go Tell It on the Mountain (That Karl Rove Is Born)” and “Santa Is an Asshole.” But I am in exactly the right mood to appreciate that sort of thing, and have been humming “You wish us happy holidays / But you really mean merry Christmas” for days.

I’ve had Rare Exports, a Finnish horror comedy about “the real Santa Claus,” recommended to me several times recently. I have a pretty limited appetite for horror, but the trailer was entertaining, anyway.

But I’ve saved the best for last: Coping With Christmas Carol Fatigue, complete with Raptor Christmas Carols:

Do you have a Terrible Christmas Thing you’d like to share? I mean, nothing’s going to top “Said the raptor to another one / Do you smell what I smell?” But I’ll appreciate your attempt.

Unfortunately, I have this Christmas Curse. Even if nothing bad has happened the rest of the year, the week or two before Christmas is 55% likely to feature the breakup of a serious relationship and/or a health crisis. This seems statistically implausible, but I assure you it is accurate (sample size: 11 post-college Decembers). I realized this year that Christmas is somewhat hopelessly tied to moping about for me, and 2011 sure wasn’t shaping up to buck this trend, so I’m skipping Christmas.

Whoa, what? Christmas is not a holiday one can just skip in this country. The pressure to Celebrate is so great that it’s not avoidable, even if the holiday itself has no real meaning for you or your family. Even people who really don’t observe Christmas at all are visiting their folks, because they get the time off. Restaurants and bars are closed. Volunteer gigs are few and fill up fast, because everybody wants to get a last bit of goodwill in.

But what’s the point of being Jewish if you can’t ignore Christmas with a movie and Chinese food? you ask, and you’re right, but I’ll be doing it alone.*

So I am reaching for the same solace I’ve used on many a lonely Valentine’s Day: gleeful bitterness. I am collecting Terrible Christmas Things. Picture me dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future, carrying one of Your Neighborhood Librarian’s Advil Calendar cocktails (most of which are the opposite of terrible, but the Crystal Lake Surprise looks promising).

Or dressed as Krampus, which is pretty much the ultimate Terrible Christmas Thing and is therefore my new favorite thing in the world. Christmas should be much more like Halloween.

Cracked’s list of The 11 Most Unintentionally Creepy Christmas Ornaments is pretty quality. Should you be in a gift-giving mood, I’m particularly fond of the screaming larva baby.

And of course there’s Jonathan Coulton’s classic “Chiron Beta Prime,” performed by my favorite ASL singer Stephen Torrance (even if he does misspell “soylent”):

More Terrible Christmas Things tomorrow!

*This is where I feel compelled to add that my family and I love each other very much. My dad even offered to fly here for the day. So I am alone by choice, but given the situation, it’s really best for all concerned.

“Strong female character” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons; robotic, lone-wolf, ascetic action heroines whose monomaniacal devotion to their crime-fighting makes them lean and cranky and very impatient; murderous 20-something comic-book salesgirls who dream of one day sidekicking for a superhero; avenging brides; poker-faced assassins; and gloomy ninjas with commitment issues.

Or the YA versions, typically found in fantasy or historical fiction: the girl who dresses up as a boy to fight or do some other “male” activity; the girl who hates the feminine tasks assigned her and runs off to do boy stuff instead; the girl who saves the world with her ass-kicking skills.

Chocano acknowledges that the original goal of “strong female characters” was “strong” as in “interesting or complex or well written,” and that is certainly the goal of these YA characters as well. Too often, though, the thing that makes them interesting or complex is the fact that they don’t want to do what their society expects of them as women. They buck their culture’s expectations while fitting neatly into the reader’s. What girl would want to be stuck with no options but cooking and sewing and getting married? By modern standards, a girl who submits to those restrictions couldn’t possibly be strong.

But that ends up implying that cooking and sewing and raising a family can’t be strong things to do — or more to the point, that they can’t be strong things to want, since to be strong a YA character must go after what she wants. (Though that’s a pretty American attitude — it could also be strong to submit to what one doesn’t want for the good of the many. But that’s a discussion for another time.) I would love to see more YA historical fiction and fantasy with more strong (as in complex, interesting, and possessed of inner strength) female characters who aren’t strong (as in wielding a sword).

Arianna of Wandering Librarians writes more about that inner strength idea.

Ok, so there’s a lot of dark YA lit because teens want to read it — both the Literature and the popcorn. There’s also tons of light YA lit. (And if the mother at the beginning of Gurdon’s column couldn’t find any, perhaps she should have asked an experienced professional — at an indie bookstore or library if she couldn’t find one at Barnes & Noble — rather than fumbling through the YA section on her own.) Sure, there are trends, but YA is no more one-note than adult lit is.

But there is an awful lot of dark, heavy stuff on the recommended lists — the books we as educators assign and give awards to. In the last few years of Printz winners there’s abject poverty, environmental apocalypse, child labor, abusive parents, children as murderers, terminal illness, child abandonment, suicide, terrorism, and teen pregnancy, just to name a few. These are excellent, deserving books and I adore many of them, as do my students. But the darkness seems over-represented. (Note: tone is important, obviously, and I don’t want to make this all about a context-free list of content markers. But I would argue that while every one has some form of “happy ending,” the tone of most of these books is just as dark as their content implies.)

There are plenty of exceptions, obviously, but there is a general belief in our culture that “dark and heavy” = quality. This reaches far beyond YA lit; for instance, how often does a romantic comedy win Best Picture? Every year our high school students look at the summer reading list and say, “Is there anything on here that’s not depressing?” And the list is mostly adult books! (The answer, by the way, is definitely yes, but we had to add some lighter books deliberately for that reason, and they often aren’t “canon.”) Do we believe that it requires more skill to make someone cry than laugh? Is it more worthy to address painful subjects? Do we feel that stories have more truth if they end tragically with a touch of uplift? I’m asking these questions honestly; my mind’s not set here and I hope you’ll tell me what you think about my premise or the reasons behind it.

It does seem worth taking a look at our instinct, as gatekeepers, to recommend the intense Holocaust novel as “Literature” over the love story with a happy ending. If some kids at some moments need dark YA to save them (and I do believe that they do), they also sometimes need to be saved by a light or funny book about people whose lives aren’t perfect but mostly turn out all right. I know I do.

It seriously has taken me weeks to wade through the explosion of responses. The YA community circled wagons and wrote a lot of inspiring posts about how some teens need dark books (see #YAsaves on Twitter); YA needs to come in a variety of flavors just like adult books do; there’s a difference between censorship by institutional gatekeepers and guidance by parents. I don’t disagree with any of that, and I’m not going to get into it much because everybody has already said it at least as well as I could. Similarly, the internet has pretty well covered the point that Gurdon’s examples are cherry-picked and ignore how we’ve been having this conversation for more than 30 years.

There are a few things going on here that I do want to address. First, teen readers come from vastly different backgrounds — from homes where at 12 they have already experienced violence and drug use and sex, and from homes where those things are distant fiction. And all those kids want different sorts of things out of their reading material. Liz of A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy expresses this mix well:

What this article ignores is the questions of why people read what they do — one of the areas I find fascinating just because, and also because it helps with readers advisory. Some kids in terrible circumstances read about kids in terrible circumstances and find comfort and hope, even in the bleakest book; others live it, so don’t want to read it. Some read for windows; some, for mirrors. Some kids in crappy circumstances want to read about kids who have it worse off, so they can think, “at least my life isn’t bad as so and sos.” Some teens love literary books; some teens get so much literature during the school year that recreational reading is all about the popcorn. Each reader’s “popcorn” is different; for some it’s vampires and horror, for others it’s books that make them cry, like books about suicide, for others its books that talk frankly about what is whispered around school, like self-mutilation.

And for others, of course, it’s totally fluffy romances or brand porn like The Clique series. So the “YA saves” refrain makes an important point, but it’s limiting. Roger Sutton calls shenanigans on it as the dominant message in this conversation: sure, maybe Go Ask Alice convinced some girls in the ’70s and ’80s not to become drug addicts or helped them understand the addicts in their lives, but mostly it probably titillated a lot of middle-class girls with nice lives who wanted a thrill. When I was a kid I read a ton of Lurlene McDaniel precisely because I didn’t know anyone who’d died tragically young of leukemia: it was a safely lurid emotional release. And that’s fine. Books can be wonderful therapy, but how boring a world would it be if the only times we read books were when we needed to heal from something? Expecting all YA books — even all dark, violent, sad YA books — to be read as therapy is just as limiting as expecting all YA books to present some other “positive message.”

Another issue here is the range of what’s considered “YA.” Kids need their parents to know what they’re reading and to discuss it; teens much less so — and it’s the borderline of young adolescence, when parents still need to guide but kids no longer make it easy, that’s scariest for parents. If I were the parent of one of my 7th graders who’s reading Hunger Games, I’d absolutely want to read it myself and discuss it with her. As the parent of an 11th grader that would feel much less crucial. (As their librarian, I discuss it with both age groups, and far more 7th graders than 11th graders put it down or don’t pick it up in the first place because it creeps them out. Kids are pretty good at monitoring their own reading material.)

And on that note, I very much wish I could have found more teen responses in the vast sea of librarian, teacher, bookseller, reviewer, and author blog posts. Emma of Booking Through 365 wrote an excellent one; if you’ve found (or written) more, please let me know. However involved in the lives of teen readers we are, we are still adults, and our days as 14-year-olds reading Flowers in the Attic are increasingly distant. The open platform of the internet should give us access to the opinions of current teenagers so we aren’t just talking to each other.

Ultimately, Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon wrote perhaps my favorite response, a fairly balanced (the insult in the following quote notwithstanding) consideration in which she makes the lovely point that, “One of the terrific side effects of an obviously click-baiting piece of editorial twaddle like Gurdon’s is that it reminds people how many fellow passionate readers there are in the world.” People wouldn’t have gotten so upset about this column all over the internet if they didn’t love books. And I hope that’s something we can all agree is a good thing.

I’d very much like to hear what my fellow “YA community” members think about this, but I’m even more curious to hear the thoughts of those of you who aren’t steeped in the YA world every day.

This was such a “right book at the right time” for me. The idea of chucking it all for a solitary cross-country journey of self-discovery sounds so awesome right now I can’t even tell you. This is the sort of book that inspires a soundtrack — she’s biking, not sitting on a train or bus, but you can picture the “staring out a window listening to folk rock as the corn fields fly by” montage anyway. I have a pretty much endless appetite for that montage, in movie or book form. It’s so romantically appealing to believe that a geographical journey can inspire and mirror an internal journey, that we can return changed to a changed life.

(I said this to Deborah, and she reminded me of the Dar Williams song “Road Buddy”:

I thought we’d find each story like a snake-skin or an arrowhead
But we only stop at fast food places
They hate their jobs; I understand

So okay, not every road trip leads to great discovery; some just lead to French fries and indigestion. Grand romantic gestures are often a disappointment. I think I’ll take my cross-country train trip anyway.)

I actually think this has a lot to do with the appeal of YA for me in general. Every YA novel is in some sense a coming-of-age, and therefore every one is about a reinvention of the self (if not necessarily a drastic one). Adult books often seem to be looking backward at choices made in the past and trying to incorporate those choices into the current self; YA books deal with making those choices and evolving. I suppose at some point I might feel like I’ve accumulated enough of a past that I relate to characters dealing with theirs, but for now I’m still more interested in what happens next and who I am becoming. (Disclaimer: I read comparatively few “literary” adult novels, so I might be way off base here. I want to explore this idea more as part of the endless debate about “how to define a YA novel,” so please share your thoughts!)

Wow, I got off track there, didn’t I? Oops. (Heh… “off track”? Get it? Trains?) At some point I was reviewing a book… A more review-like criticism: I found the timeline really confusing at first, since everything’s told in “Then” and “Now” flashback/flashforward, but it isn’t clear when “Then” and “Now” are.

I also had to suspend disbelief about Cass’s deep hatred of Heather at the beginning. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t sparing a thought for my junior high tormentors by the summer before my senior year. Dude, we all sucked in 8th grade; move on. Eventually we saw enough flashbacks to make it clear that this was a serious pattern of abuse rather than “just” the teasing all middle school geeks go through, which made it a bit more understandable, but still… it felt like too long for the feelings to still be so intense.

Criticisms aside, though, obviously I loved it. It is part of the recent Will Grayson, Will Grayson/My Most Excellent Year/Suite Scarlett genre of Behind the Scenes of the Offbeat Yet Heartwarming Play. But you know, I’m never going to say that we have too many books about smart kids doing what they’re passionate about. We can never have too many kids doing that, so how could we have too many books about it? If you have recommendations in this genre (that I just invented), I’d love to hear them!

Also reviewed by: Bitch Magazine, Abby (the) Librarian, and Dreaming in Books

It’s about the impossibility of being “well-read” (or well-watched, or well-listened), given the vast quantities of writing, theater, movies, music, and TV that have been and are constantly being produced.

It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

I think it could just as well be about the impossibility of making all possible choices in our lives. As I get older and some options of necessity close down (I will never tie myself to trees for Greenpeace and I will never become fluent in six languages, to name a couple of people I thought in high school I might become), I think about this a lot. I could do those things, if they mattered that much to me (they don’t; I’ve changed a lot since I was 15), but because of time or other limitations they would mean giving up other things that matter. We make choices. There are only so many stories we can read, or watch, or live.

(For more on this, I also recently loved the poem “The Blue House” by Tomas Tranströmer, which I got to from Dear Sugar, my new favorite advice column.)

Christy Lusiak, counselor and Lecturer in English and Women & Gender Studies, spoke about “triggering,” which might be of interest to those of you who had such a good discussion about it back on my original post. She defined a trigger as something that “retraumatizes a victim of abuse, or any traumatic event.” I like her use of the word “retraumatize” — as distinct from ordinary kinds of being upset.

Christy also noted that the flip side of triggers is that a different victim of the same sort of trauma might read the same book and find comfort in it. One of the many reasons why content warnings would have been a better idea than removing the books entirely.

Panelist Amy Pattee, my Children’s Lit prof from library school, and moderator Kelly Hager, interim Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies (both super-smart women for whom I have endless respect) discussed the more theoretical aspects of creating a list of books “for the feminist reader.” What does that mean anyway? Are readers feminist just because they’re female, or because they’re actively working for women’s equality, or because they’re girls who the writers of the Bitch list hope will do so eventually, or what?

And what is a book meant to do for such a reader? The word “empower” shows up predictably on this list and others like it, but empower whom to do what? As Amy asked, is it only feminist to read books with “kick-ass teens,” or can you still be a feminist reader reading Sweet Valley High? Does being a “feminist reader” mean something about how you critically interact with texts, all texts? (In other words, are you a feminist who is reading, or are you reading in a feminist manner?)

And who cares anyway? What’s the point of lists? It’s easy to sniff at the authoritarianism of list-making in this era of crowd-sourcing, but a list from people or an organization with authority in the field has value, I think. There are simply too many books in the world (movies, albums, restaurants…); sometimes we want to enjoy serendipity, but sometimes we rely on those with experience to narrow our choices down. One problem — the biggest one, I’d say — with the Bitch list is that it wasn’t clear who wrote it or what their criteria were. But with those specified (“we are the editors of a feminist magazine, compiling a list of stories that we hope will inspire teenage girls to be thoughtful about their role in the world as women,” to toss out my hasty, poorly-written attempt), and with some annotations on the books themselves, Bitch could have created something really valuable.

As usual, I parked my obnoxious little self in the front row and talked too much. Sorry, Kelly (and everyone else). I made too much of a concern that many of the books aren’t “YA.” To be clearer about my issue with this: yes, there isn’t a clear definition for what YA means, but it seems to me that a list that includes both Harriet the Spy and Hunger Games without being clear why, and puts both under the banner “YA,” hasn’t thought things through. There’s overlap, yes, but these are not books for the same readers at the same point in their lives.

Simmons took a survey and ended up with its own list, which has exactly the same problems as the Bitch list: it isn’t clear who wrote it and the criteria and goals aren’t clear. A crowd-sourced list from the general Simmons community asked to choose their “favorite” feminist YA books from the Bitch list garnered a fairly predictable top 10 of mostly classics we adults would have loved as kids (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins) and a few modern classics widely read by adults (Hunger Games, Speak, Golden Compass). Books like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Climbing the Stairs, which might have something even more compelling to say to the modern feminist girl, were overlooked, probably because they were unfamiliar to most of the voters from outside the YA lit field. There’s an interesting list of write-in votes (from Little Women to the Abhorsen trilogy), but it’s just as unmediated as the rest.

Simmons College, a reputable women’s college with an outstanding library school and Children’s Literature department, is in a position at least as good as Bitch Magazine’s to create a meaningful list of “books for the feminist reader.” I would really, really love for that to happen. And in the meantime, the discussion was utterly fascinating and an hour wasn’t nearly enough. Thanks, Kelly, Amy, and Christy, for making it happen!

The kids I celebrated in my early books as “digital natives,” capable of seeing through all efforts of big media and marketing, have actually proven less able to discern the integrity of the sources they read and the intentions of the programs they use than we struggling adults are.

My initial reaction was “DUH.” Anyone who works with both technology and teenagers has known this all along.* But I respect a person who can correct himself, and Rushkoff does so beautifully in this article, which is one of the smartest things I’ve read about technology education.

He addresses the lack of social cues in digital communication: “Only seven percent of communication takes place on the literal level allowed by most online interfaces. The other 93 percent takes place non-verbally.” (ETA: This is a bogus statistic, as JFPBookworm points out below. I know that, and should have used a different quote to illustrate what I still think is an interesting point — that’s what I get for blogging too fast at the end of the day!) He addresses “answers without meaning” — pulling an answer from a sea of search results with no context.

Most importantly, he discusses how the real “intellectual freedom” isn’t the access to all this knowledge; that’s just the beginning. Real intellectual freedom comes from the ability to draw critical connections about information. From the understanding that tools like Facebook and Google don’t come free of bias and context — they’re designed to make money, and as such have their own agenda.

And, of course, from the knowledge of how programs work and the ability to create and innovate our own, a skill which is shockingly lacking in American education, public and otherwise. Rushkoff makes a great case for teaching programming in schools — “technological literacy” isn’t just how to use Word. We aren’t teaching any of these skills in school to the degree we should, and it shows.

If you care about digital literacy or education, I think the whole article is well worth a read.

* In fact, I would say we adults ain’t doing such a great job “discern[ing] the integrity of the sources,” either. I try to keep politics out of this blog, more or less, but I’m having an angry week. A Fox News show reversed Gallup poll results to make it look like the majority of Americans oppose collective bargaining rights, when the reverse is true. (They later issued a brief correction, in passing.) This is still the most-watched news channel in the country?

In lieu of such emotional regression, a modest goal for my 13th year: at least 2 posts a week, one review and one something else. I ought to be able to handle that, right? (*cough*)