In the world of literary blogs (seriously, who reads such things? Oh…) there are a variety of genres and styles. One of the more interesting categories is the Young Adult (YA) blog. The basics are fairly simple: the blogger reads classic Young Adult novels and reviews them as their now smarmy adult self. One of our favorite YA blogs here at Bookish Us is Are you there youth? It’s me, Nikki. Using equal parts nostalgia and snarkiness, the eponymous Nikki makes us not only laugh about the ridiculousness of the usual YA book’s cover, but reminds us how much we loved Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee. Through the miracle of the World Wide Web, Bookish Us was able to sit down (sort of) and talk with Nikki about her blog, reading and reviewing on a schedule with a 2-1/2 year old, and of course Are You There God, It’s me, Margaret.

BOOKISH US: How did the blog come about?  Was there a specific ah-ha moment?

NIKKI: Someone had sent me a link to a blog called BSC Headquarters, which was BSC [Baby Sitters Club] specific and one for The Dairi Burger, which is SVH [Sweet Valley High]-centric. I got really into reading both and I just kind of thought, yeah this is something I can do for fun. No real a-ha moment, just kind of a desire to reread books and try my hand at writing a blog.

BU: The YA book is a fairly new form of literature that can mean different things to different people.  What is your definition of a YA book?

N: To me, YA isn’t really a new form of literature, it’s just a new classification for what has always been there. When I was growing up, my library didn’t even have a YA section, though that could have just been because it was a small rural library. There was juvenile fiction and adult fiction. But there truly is this whole class of book that lies somewhere in-between. Sometimes I’m still shocked to see Markus Zusak in the YA section, because I don’t know an adult who has read The Book Thief and hasn’t loved it immensely. And if that book had been released when I was 16 years old in 1993, it definitely would have been in the adult literature section. I’ve also noticed that To Kill a Mockingbird is now classified as YA. So I guess YA would be more defined by the protagonists of the books, rather than the readers of the book. Or it could be like what Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

BU: Did becoming a mother play a part in creating the blog in any way?

N: Not in any profound sort of way, honestly. As my son got more mobile, it became more difficult to sit and read for long periods of time. YA sort of allows me to successfully complete books at a pace that I’m used to from before he was born. Of course, now he’s 2 ½, and a real handful, and I’m finding myself with even less time to read.

BU: This summer will mark a year since you started the blog. How has the experience been so far?

N: I can’t believe it’s been almost a year! I think it’s gone better than I ever expected. I really only expected to have a handful of readers, a few friends, and maybe a few other people who have similar blogs. But I’m constantly surprised by the variety of people who leave me comments. Also, I have a nasty habit of starting things and not finishing them, and when I started I really thought I’d get sick of it within months. But I’ve really had so much fun doing this, and with each post I find myself enjoying it more. I’m always thinking ahead about what I can do in my next post.

BU: Why do you think people find this concept of reviewing YA books with an adult perspective so fun?

N: Truthfully, I don’t know. I kind of compare this to those shows on VH1, I Love the 80’s, I Love the 90’s, etc. Only I’m way less clever. I think people just love nostalgia and we love to poke fun at who we were. Honestly, I was a pretty unhappy teenager. Not for any particular reason, I did have good friends and a good family, but I was filled with a really horrible sense of self-loathing during that time period. So it is really surprising to me that I’ve kind of enjoyed reliving it all. And I’m basically at a loss to explain that, maybe I’m a masochist or something.

BU: What type of person do you feel reads the blog?

N: I think most of my readers are people who are like me. People who read too much as a kid and as a teenager, preferred their reading lives to real lives, and read the same books over and over and over again until they knew the characters better than their own friends.

BU: How much interaction do you have with your readers?

N: I do interact with a few of my readers and fellow YA book bloggers. A few of them are my Facebook friends and I have swapped books with some. Most of my interaction is through the comments section on my own blog and the other blogs that I follow.

BU: Is there a process or method you have to finding a title, reading it, and writing a review?

N: Not much of a process. I browse the library and used book stores to look for titles that I remember. There are some books that I had in mind right away, like most of the Judy Blume titles, which I was really anxious to do. Then I pretty much read it in my spare time. Most of the writing goes on in my head, honestly. After I read a book I take a few days to digest the book before putting the words down, but by that time I generally know what I want to say. If I think of something really clever, I’ll take a few notes. Then I have to wait for my son to take a nice long nap to actually get the post complete.

BU: You’ve written posts offhandedly mentioning that you read regular adult books as well, so I’m wondering how big a chunk these books take up of your overall reading time. How much reading do you generally do?

N: Well, the YA books are starting to take up more and more of my time. But I do love regular adult books. Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Chabon are my very favorite authors (my son was even named for a Chabon character). I generally am able to read for about an hour, maybe a little more a day. But it’s not an hour straight, it tends to come in increments anywhere from five to twenty minutes. I’m lucky enough to be a very fast reader and most of the YA books rarely take longer than two or three hours to finish, even less for a really short book. I can finish a BSC book in forty-five minutes.

BU: You named your kid after a Chabon character? That’s awesome! Which one?

N: My son is named Grady.  As in Grady Tripp from Wonder Boys.  Mysteries of Pittsburgh is actually my favorite Chabon book, but I didn’t want to saddle my kid with the name Arthur (or Art).

BU: What really strikes me most about your YA blog is that while most others will generally stick to a series (SVH or BSC) or an author (RL Stine), yours really runs the gamut: there are titles that are part of series, meant to be read by girls, meant for boys, or meant for both genders.  Was that originally your intention or did it just sort of develop that way?

N: That was absolutely my intention. I wanted to blog in basically the same way that I read back then. Which is whatever I could get my hands on that had an adolescent protagonist. Oddly enough, I didn’t always love the books with the boy protagonists back then, but I’m really enjoying reading those a lot now. Maybe because I have a son.

BU: You have a category on the blog entitled the “Cunt Log” and how did that come about?  (Do you mind if I use the word “cunt,” even though I’m a man?)

N: I absolutely don’t mind you using the word Cunt. Cunt is such a fantastic word, isn’t it? I love the hard C at the beginning and the hard T as the end. It’s such a great word to spit out. I have a love of foul language. It’s so colorful and interesting. Fuck and cunt are pretty much my favorite words, but I know they are really taboo, and obviously with a toddler running around my opportunities to use these words are limited. We can thank Jessica Wakefield, of Sweet Valley fame for starting the Cunt Log. She was the first character I ever called a cunt, and I was actually pretty nervous about it, cunt being that one word that really can raise someone’s ire. I love my readers and don’t want to offend any of them. It took me days of debating before hitting the publish button. But Jessica is just so horrible, I really thought it was fitting. I believe my exact phrase was “Jessica Wakefield is an insufferable cunt,” and she so is. Then Jill Brenner from Blubber came along and she was also a horrible cunt and I just had to point that out. I got some positive feedback on it recently, so I created a label so people could read all the Cunt Log posts. There are four characters on it so far; Nancy Wheeler from Are You There God, It’s me, Margaret, Jessica Wakefield, Jill Brenner, and most recently Jana Morgan from the Taffy Sinclair Series.

BU: Do you think that character (of the type listed in the Cunt Log) is a sort of cliché in YA books?

N: Yes. One of the problems with YA as opposed to adult literature is that there tends to be less subtlety in the characters. So the bitchy character is going to be insanely bitchy. And the good girl character is insanely virginal. And bad boys are always going to wear leather jackets and smoke cigarettes. In real life and in most adult literature, naturally, everyone falls somewhere in between. Of course, this is just a generalization because I could name some YA books with fantastically complex characters (think Snape from Harry Potter).

BU: Do you think you’ll add more entries to the Cunt Log?

N: Only if someone truly horrible enough comes along. I don’t have anyone in mind for it at the moment, but I could definitely come across some characters who deserve it. My theory is that in order to preserve what is awesome about the word cunt, we don’t want to overuse it.

BU: Speaking of Are You There God, It’s me, Margaret.  Why do you think it’s held up as the go-to book for helping girls enter puberty?

N: Are You There God is one of the most open and honest fiction novels about girls going through puberty. Judy Blume has a knack of taking something that just sucks, like puberty and periods, and turning it into a great story with a sympathetic voice. But, you know what’s funny about that book, is I remembered reading it as a kid and thinking it was all about girls waiting to get their periods and the embarrassment of going bra shopping. But when I re-read it for the blog, I was surprised that a good chunk of the book really deals with Margaret’s struggles with religion and spirituality. So this book is constantly challenged at the school and public library level and constantly under threat of being banned, and intelligent people ask ‘Why? What’s wrong with a story about menstruation?’ But I think the Book Banners’ (who are mostly a religious bunch) problem with it might actually be that Margaret has an unconventional relationship with God, which is nearly ruined by her dabbling in organized religion.

BU: Is there anything you’ve notice or realized about YA books that you didn’t when you were a young reader?

N: The wrong books seem to become super famous. When I was a kid it was all about the BSC and SVH. Now Twilight is the big thing. But, and I say this with total affection for the BSC and SVH, those books are pretty shitty. They just aren’t well-written. Don’t even get me started on the abstinence allegory that is the Twilight series. Thank God for Harry Potter and Judy Blume, who are there as examples to show us that sometimes the masses just get it right. There are really awesome YA authors out there, like Mary Downing Hahn and Jerry Spinelli, and it kind of kills me that they haven’t sold as many copies of their books as Stephenie Meyer has sold. That’s why, even though my blog can be heavy on snark, I also want to give praise where it’s due. Just look at how I gushed over Maniac Magee.

BU: Why do you think Manic Magee has really stood the test of time as a favorite, not only to kids just discovering it but the kids who read it and grew up (us) and still love it?

N: Maniac Magee is the ultimate YA hero. He is who every kid wants to be. He’s independent, good at sports, good at reading, well-liked, and he makes a real difference in the world. And he manages all that without seeming like a goody-two-shoes. Spinelli really crafted an amazing character. And the writing….oh I could go on about it, but I already did in my post.

BU: One of my other favorite categories (besides the Cunt Long, of course) is the abandoned kids thread, why do you think that theme is used in a lot of YA novels?

N: I wish I knew for sure. I suspect it has something to do with authors needing a source for angst, particularly in the books that skew for older kids. It’s the same with the dead parents thread. Personally, I kind of liked reading about kids who didn’t have two parents, for whatever reason, because it was so different than my own experience.

BU: Do you think you’ll every review a contemporary YA book, like Harry Potter or Twilight?

N: I haven’t ruled it out. I have Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson in my TBR pile. I really got it just to read for enjoyment, but I may do a post on it. I probably won’t do Twilight because I could write a thesis on why I hate it and with Harry Potter I could write a thesis on why I don’t hate it. Twilight and Harry Potter have also been picked to death on the Internet, and I doubt I have anything new and interesting to add. I will admit to writing one brief Twilight post while I was in the middle of Breaking Dawn and really just hating myself for having ever started that series.

BU: Does reading all these books and writing about them inspire you to write your own YA novel?

N: It’s kind of lurking in the back of my mind. I went through a phase when I was about twelve through fourteen years old where I decided to write a book. So I’d write something then go back and read it days later and be disgusted with what I wrote and I’d trash the story, and start all over again. So I just kind of decided at that age that writing isn’t for me. But I do kind of always wonder if I was being too hard on myself back then, like my expectations for myself were too high. So yeah, I’ve thought about it, but nothing is on paper and I have no real expectations of ever actually doing it. Also, karma is a bitch and I may have snarked a little too much YA lit. But wouldn’t getting a book published be the greatest thrill ever?

If you’re American, you likely have never heard of Stewart Lee. I hadn’t either until I ran into a quote about Dan Brown from him on the internet. The quote piqued my interest, especially so as the quote was derogatory, and I had to find its origin. Enter Mr. Lee. Stewart Lee is an English comedian with a long comedy history, a history which I will not reiterate here but instead send you to his Wikipedia entry, and was recently given his own six-run series called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC2. The show is shot mainly in the stand-up format, with short sketches illustrating the comedy inserted when appropriate.

My search for the Dan Brown quote lead me, in particular, to the first installment of Lee’s new show. This episode is about the sad state of the modern publishing industry, where awful writers like Dan Brown become megastars, celebrities publish books just because they can, the tragic memoir is king, and adults fawn all over children’s books like Harry Potter. Now throughout the episode Lee, I admit, often comes off as a cranky old man screaming for the kids to get off his lawn. And some of his bits do seem meandering for this American viewer (particularly the “rapper” bit). But the crux of his argument (and it is more of an argument than just pure comedy) is something I myself lament; where have all the good books gone?

Sure, it can be argued that people can read whatever they like to read and that’s fine. But people can only read what is given to them, and what is given to them is crap. People are given crap because it’s not challenging to read crap, people do not wish to be challenged, and the publishers are just giving the people what they want. Fine. But being motivated solely by money, which seems to be the philosophy of the modern publishing giant, is not sustainable over time. The record industry is on its way out, yielding (though kicking and screaming while doing so) to a more populist way of doing business, and if you look to our current banking crisis in which quantity over quality was the norm, you can see that doing business only to get rich creates a bubble; all bubbles eventually pop.

Lee says near the end of his act in the first episode that “a man who read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who read nothing,” and I’m inclined to think that’s true. Isn’t much of this drivel published akin to fast food? Made for mass consumption, cheap and easy, but ultimately not healthy. Fast food will rot your body, bad books will rot your brain. Maybe this comparison is going too far. Maybe you could argue that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, that we shouldn’t care about what they do or how they do it. But I tend to believe that through mass media, through advertising, people are convinced to like certain things, a way of dumbing down a population, because people who are susceptible to advertising are very easy to sell anything to. So, sure, people can read Dan Brown because they saw an ad for him on television, or he’s displayed prominently at CostCo or the airport. But there’s something subversive below it all; the desire to sell you another Dan Brown book. Because if you digested the first one without question, that next BigMac will go down even easier. Keep eating.

For your pleasure, through the technology of YouTube, I’ve included this first episode (in three parts) of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Again, I caution, some of his humor and references may be lost on the American viewer (I laughed only a few times and I’ve actually lived in England). But I think he’s saying something that isn’t often said on the public stage and for that I think it’s important that people hear him out. What do you think?

Over at CNN.com, there’s an article about a Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone in the US) first edition exceeding expectations at auction in Dallas, Texas and bringing in over $19,000. That’s a lot of quiddich or muggles or whatever the currency is at Hogwart’s. The edition itself is a soft-cover of the original 200 print run; I’m not sure of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter’s history, but perhaps this was her self-publishing foray that turned into something great. Or maybe it was an extremely paltry first pressing of a book that, as a series, has sold over 100 million copies. Regardless, it’s quite impressive this sale of a signed first edition. Me, I’d much rather have the first edition hardcover of Blood Meridian I saw last spring at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair; I think it was less than $1000. The Harry Potter first might be a good investment, though. The scariest part of the article, however, is this tidbit:

The winning bid of $19,120 bypassed expectations, but it was not the most expensive sale of Harry Potter-related items in an auction.

The highest selling item, if you’re interested, was a lock of Daniel Radcliffe’s hair that the buyer used to complete her Harry Potter Real Doll; she had the fingernail clippings, she just had to have the hair. Oh yeah.