Jen's Saturday Book Thread 15/07/06

[Jenjie]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

 

Anybody out There? by Marian Keyes (M Joseph £16.99) is the story of a thirtysomething Dublin woman who heads off to New York where she lands a “dream job” with Candy Grrrl cosmetics. She then meets Boston boy (her dream man) and they cavort around the Big Apple being witty. But this New York reverie soon turns nightmarish with a car crash involving some severe injuries to body and soul. Keyes is the justifiable queen of chick lit, a genuine storyteller with a knack for structure and timing, even if she does make heavy use of e-mail in place of character development. She also has a sharp eye for the grimly cheerful emotional landscape of the single twenty- and thirtysomething “grrrl”. Readers who can relate to a self-consciously droll heroine in kooky outfits will no doubt be hooked by this sparky tale of love and loss.

L. Atkins

 

In Innocent Traitor (Hutchinson £12.99), the historian Alison Weir throws concrete sources aside and plunges into more murky fictional waters where motives and blame are firmly ascribed and hypothesis can rule the day. Her brave move is a success. The “innocent traitor” is Lady Jane Grey, the so-called Nine Day Queen, who was briefly enthroned by various power-hungry nobles after Henry VIII’s son Edward VI died before he could come of age. Jane’s life, starting with her disappointing first breath (she was not a boy), abused childhood, marital rape, political manipulation and violent death is a succinct reflection of the lot of the Tudor woman. Compellingly told from various points of view, this story is bolstered by fabulously gruesome historical details, from Henry VIII’s suppurating leg ulcers to Jane’s internal examination by midwives checking she is not pregnant before she is beheaded.

L. Atkins

[Jenjie]

Alex Rider: the proof that boys should be boys

As Stormbreaker, the first film about children’s favourite junior spy, opens in cinemas, Amanda Craig talks to his creator, Anthony Horowitz, about adventures, kissing and growing up

 

“I STILL REMEMBER THE tremendous exuberance of being a boy,” Anthony Horowitz, the creator of Alex Rider, says. “It has an almost abstract quality that you can’t create by artificial means.”

I reflect on this as I walk round my local park every morning and see my son slay an entire Roman legion with a sword, track rabbits with a wolf and race against time to decode a complex computer virus invented by a fiendish villain bent on destroying every trace of human life.

 

The sword is really a stick, the wolf a dog and the computer virus a last-minute piece of maths homework. But to a boy aged between 3 and 13, these are an essential part of being himself. To be a boy these days, however, is to be born under a cloud. That natural exuberance is frowned on or even medicated; children are kept indoors instead of being allowed to run free.

 

Suddenly, however, the secret life of boys is being given much more support. The film of Horowitz’s Stormbreaker is coming to our screens, complete with death-defying car chases, jaw-dropping gadgets and enough adrenaline to boot James Bond into a bin liner. And the old-fashioned pleasures described in Conn and Hal Iggulden’s bestseller The Dangerous Book for Boys reassert such traditional pastimes as making a tree house, skinning a rabbit or peeling a thistle.

 

“I don’t think the imaginative world of boys has changed as perhaps that of girls has,” Horowitz says. “There’s something that is just pure, abstract Boy, which hasn’t changed since the 19th century. They still like violence, slapstick humour, gadgets, and Alex Rider very much plays on that.

 

“I deliberately don’t use slang or refer to fashionable clothes because those are so transient. I never set out to target boys, I just wrote for the boy in me.”

 

Despite the easy allure of computers and films, books are at the heart of the secret life of boys. Like Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Terry Pratchett and Michelle Paver, Horowitz is popular with both sexes, but he is one of those increasingly rare children’s writers who create heroes without heroines to support or match them. This, I think, is significant. The feminist revolution has expanded the imagination and ambition of girls largely by invading the kinds of narrative that used to be reserved for boys, and boys resent it.

 

Alex Rider gets boys back to their essential daydreams. He may not want to be a spy or a saviour, but he knows how to do all kinds of cool stuff, from martial arts to speaking three foreign languages.

 

Unlike those of Andy McNab’s deadly serious children’s heroes, his adventures have a touch of comedy in them — such as when he breaks out of a tank with a killer jellyfish by squeezing zit cream on the metal frame.

 

“I did dream of being a spy, and even went as far as building radio receivers out of matchboxes when I was 9 or 10,” Horowitz says. “What I’m against is wrapping children in cotton wool. Modern life is squeezing danger out of children’s lives, because parents fear a paedophile on every street corner. Where is the spirit of Shackleton?” It is rare to find the type of unambiguous, confident hero celebrated by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Hergé or John Buchan in more modern books or films. (The Aragorn that Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings, who never doubts his moral strength, is a very different to that in Peter Jackson’s screen version.) Yet any parents who try to ban guns will find their sons biting them out of toast. Guns, swords, lavatory humour, practical jokes and dreams of glory are hard-wired into the male sex, and the adult failure to find this endearing and funny is why so many authors do not reach boys.

 

Until recently, children’s literature portrayed a prelapsarian age: magic depended upon not growing up, like Peter Pan. Ged, Ursula K. le Guin’s “Wizard of Earthsea”, specifically binds himself to chastity and only loses his virginity once he has lost his magic; Superman gives up his powers to have sex with Lois Lane.

 

Comic-book heroes may love the girl next door but Spiderman and Wolverine are always prevented from doing more than kissing them; in one of the most popular Playstation games for boys, Prince of Persia, the hero fights innumerable demons only to have his beautiful princess lose all memory of her saviour at the end. In Pullman’s His Dark Materials the ability to pass into other worlds ends after Will and Lyra kiss. For boys, who take on average two years longer to reach puberty, chastity is an essential part of the fantasy life.

 

Classic children’s novels, such as Geoffrey Trease’s Cue For Treason or C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, often ended with the hero and heroine (sometimes disguised as a boy) marrying when they grew up, and this was as satisfying as the ending of a traditional fairytale.

 

Today, much-loved series such as Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness which feature a boy and a girl are read with increasing anxiety by boys who realise that the nature of relationships may change.

 

Paver’s Torak is, in one sense, a classic boys’ hero, surviving in the Stone Age with just a slate knife, a bow and a wolf — but how long before he and the girl, Renn, start behaving like Adam and Eve? It is obvious that some kind of sex is going to happen — the latest novel, Soul Eater, ends with some tantalising facts about wolf cubs — but boys do not want hero and heroine to become involved emotionally. When Harry Potter snogged first Cho Chang, then Ginny Weasley, half his fan base among the under-12s evaporated.

 

Alex Rider does have a girl friend, Sabina Pleasure, but she is not a girlfriend. He kisses her only once, at the end of the third book before saying goodbye to her for ever. Originally, the kiss was described in some detail, but when Horowitz read the scene to his sons, then 12 and 14, they reacted so strongly against it that it was cut. They felt, he said, that although James Bond has sex, they were “ uncomfortable” about a boy their own age having such feelings.

 

“Alex doesn’t have sex,” Horowitz says. “Sex erodes what I’m writing about, it interferes with childhood, with that total immersion of creating a world within a world.”

 

Our sons need this world badly, and the fact that their innocence will end naturally some time during their teens does not mean that it should be brought to a deliberate halt. The success of The Dangerous Book for Boys (which includes a sensible chapter on talking to girls) has hit a nerve precisely because the secret life of boys retains all of its essential characteristics, despite having received very little encouragement over the past 20 years. “I think that a lot of authors who try to write books for boys because they think there’s big money in it have fallen flat on their faces because you can’t reinvent it if you’ve lost it. The most horrifying thing I heard at a school was that a child was allowed to read my books for pleasure because they had passed an exam.”

 

Today’s boys may no longer want to join the scouts, but the Just William types still want to build dens in woods, dam rivers or race through the streets on their bicycles just as Alex Rider does in Stormbreaker’s most thrilling chase sequence. They want danger. The fact that many parents are too busy, or too frightened, to allow it has done most to push them into the sort of fantasy where the only action is the pressing of thumbs on console buttons — and where the heroes are bold, brave and living in a world of their own.

 

A. Craig

http://www.timesonline.co.uk

[Jenjie]

Heaney nominated for Forward poetry prize

 

An unusually eminent figure is disclosed today as a contender for a £10,000 annual British poetry prize. He is a man who has in the past won 90 times that amount in one fell swoop.

The Nobel prize laureate and grand old man of English verse, Seamus Heaney, is on the shortlist for the best collection section of the Forward poetry awards. Though the prize money is low by the Nobel's £900,000 standards, they are the country's richest poetry prizes, eagerly coveted in a field where earnings are scant. Heaney is listed for his 12th volume of poems, District and Circle. He is up against four respected established poets and a formidable newcomer, Kate Bingham, 35, whose Quicksand Beach is only her second published collection.

 

In recent years it has been rare for artists of Heaney's rank to be associated with poetry competitions, which are generally seen as a chance for writers with less star status. But any suggestion that the Northern Irish poet is acting unfairly was dismissed yesterday by Bingham's publisher, Seren books.

"Of course it's not unfair," said Seren's spokesman, Simon Hicks. "It's like saying Brazil should not enter the World Cup. Well, they did enter - and they didn't win. You can't complain because someone like Heaney publishes a book the year yours is out."

 

The judges' chairman, the poet John Burnside, said Heaney might not even know of his entry until today. "My understanding is that it's standard for publishers to enter books without telling authors. I think it's fair. The prize isn't swayed by reputation. Big names don't necessarily make the list. If they do, it confers extra prestige on the awards."

 

Bingham is known for writing about love with a physical vigour and relish for paradox reminiscent of 17th-century metaphysical poets such as John Donne:

 

We didn't see monogamy / - dumb, satisfied, unsung monogamy / sneak in and slide between us on the bed, / ... disguised as love's / romantic ideal, and mocking our offhand, one / night stand bravado.

 

Heaney writes of a blackbird:

 

Hedge-hop, I am absolute / For you, your ready talkback, / Your each stand-offish comeback, / Your picky, nervy goldbeak - / On the grass when I arrive.

 

Also on the best collection shortlist are Paul Farley, for Tramp in Flames; Vicki Feaver, for The Book of Blood; Robin Robertson, for Swithering; and Penelope Shuttle, for Redgrove's Wife.

 

J. Ezard

http://www.guardian.co.uk

[Jenjie]

Shakespeare's First Folio fetches £2.8m

 

The most important book in English literature was sold earlier today at Sotheby's for £2,808,000. The successful bid for a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio of plays was made by Simon Finch, a London book dealer based in Mayfair.

Published only seven years after the author's death in 1623, this copy had been owned by one of the oldest libraries in Britain to be open to the public. Situated just down the road from the British Library, Dr Williams's Library specialises in non-conformist religious writings. The director of the library, Dr David Wykes, explained that the Folio was being sold to "secure the finances of the library" and to "enhance the service we offer our readers".

 

There are about 230 copies of the First Folio extant, most of which are owned by American institutions. The copy sold today was bound in calf leather in the mid 17th-century, and contains extensive markings and annotations that shed light on its early readership.

The final figure of £2.8m, including the 12% buyer's premium, was towards the bottom of the estimated range for the sale, which had been expected to raise between £2.5m and £3.5m. Peter Selley, the auctioneer in charge of the sale declared himself "delighted with the price achieved", saying it was "a great pleasure to have handled the sale of this remarkable and special copy".

 

R. Lea

http://www.guardian.co.uk

[Jenjie]

The long fight

 

Like her best-selling memoir, Wild Swans, Jung Chang's controversial biography Mao is banned in China, but she hopes the first Chinese translation will break through. By Maya Jaggi.

 

During Jung Chang's childhood in Maoist China, lawns and flower gardens were destroyed as symptoms of bourgeois decadence, while Red Guards made bonfires of books. Moving to Britain as a student in 1978, Chang - briefly a Red Guard in her teens - greeted London's parks with "indescribable joy", while Nineteen-Eighty-Four made her wonder, "in a naive way, if Orwell had ever been in China. I was reading about the society I'd been living in. How did he know?"

 

Her experience of the cultural revolution of 1966-76, when her privileges as the daughter of a high-ranking communist were curtailed after her parents' denunciation as class traitors, fuelled her memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991). The family saga, encompassing the history of 20th-century China through her life and those of her mother and grandmother, drew comparisons with Dickens and Balzac, and plaudits from Martin Amis and Penelope Fitzgerald. It sold more than 10 million copies and was translated into 30 languages.

Yet relatively few have read Wild Swans in mainland China, where the translation has been banned since 1994, and even pirated editions omit references to Mao. Although Chang has been free to come and go ("Wild Swans was a threat, but I was not"), mention of her is prohibited in the Chinese media, she says. The experience of her first book makes her ambitions to extend the readership of her second all the more remarkable. Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), the 800-page biography co-authored with her husband, historian Jon Halliday, is out in UK paperback this week (Vintage), and Chang has just completed a Chinese translation for publication in Hong Kong. She has no doubt it will be banned on the mainland, but is confident copies will find their way in, as with the English version on sale in Hong Kong ("they can't check every suitcase").

 

The biography, which, unexpectedly, took 12 years to complete, sought to "unravel the labyrinth of myths" surrounding the Mao who haunts Wild Swans. "It's certainly not a bland history; our research uncovered things far worse than anything I could imagine," Chang says in the stuccoed house in London's Notting Hill she shares with her husband. "The book reflected my shock and outrage at what Mao did to the Chinese." Among its findings is his "love for bloodthirsty thuggery [bordering] on sadism", and that his rule saw the deaths of 70 million people in peacetime. Worst for Chang was the famine of 1958-61, when "38 million people died of starvation and overwork. I had thought it was a result of economic mismanagement. But he knew many people would die because he was exporting the food they were dependent on for their survival to Russia, to buy nuclear technology to further his ambition to build China into a military superpower."

 

The couple, who work at home on different floors, divided the research by language, with Chang tackling Chinese archives, and Halliday Russian, Albanian and others. New sources included interviews with Mao's girlfriends, doctors and bodyguards, Soviet archives opened up since 1991, and letters from Mao's second wife, Yang Kaihui, found hidden behind a roof beam ("every historian's dream"). Though Mao's inner circle had been warned off talking to the couple, the warning became an "advertisement for the prestige of the biography", says Chang. "Because the regime repressed memories, people immediately opened up." World figures were as forthcoming, from Henry Kissinger and Imelda Marcos to the former Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whom Chang collared at a Hong Kong hotel hairdresser's.

 

Despite reforms since Mao's death in 1976, says Chang, Deng Xiaoping ensured the communist party still derives its legitimacy from Mao. "The young are not allowed to know what life under Mao was like," she says. Last month's 30th anniversary of the end of the cultural revolution was a "non-event; the media were under strict orders not to mention it. Brainwashing still goes on, and Mao's portrait hangs in classrooms as the guiding force of the nation." That, she said at English PEN's international writers day last month, is "why the book is so dangerous, because the facts will change people's lingering ideas about Mao".

 

The biography, Michael Yahuda wrote in these pages, exposed Mao as "one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century alongside Hitler and Stalin". Yet Chang admits it has drawn both "wonderful reviews and furious attacks". The latter range from self-proclaimed Maoists leafleting outside her talks, to Andrew Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia university, criticising the authors as "magpies - every bright piece of evidence goes in, no matter where it comes from or how reliable it is", sparking a heated exchange with them in the London Review of Books. "We never twisted the evidence; it's our accuser who was misrepresenting our sources," says Chang. She denies a charge that the book over-emphasised Mao's personality. "As a writer, I'm interested in character and Mao changed the course of history. But we show he couldn't have taken power without Stalin or the Japanese invasion." As for a desire for vengeance clouding her vision, "there's nothing wrong with Mao's victims wanting to get even, but that's not my motive", she says. "Revenge consumes a person, whereas I've wanted to enjoy life."

 

Her mother still lives in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, but of Chang's four siblings, only her sister is in China. Her brothers - a physicist, journalist and businessman - live in Canada, London and France. She was born in 1952 in Sichuan. As a child, she has written, she would have died for Chairman Mao: "He was the idol, the God, the inspiration." But her doubts began when she was 14. "The violence and atrocities went against my nature." Her father, who refused to "sell his soul" by backing the cultural revolution, was forced from his teaching job, tortured and sent to a labour camp, where he had a mental breakdown that hastened his death in 1975. Her mother, under pressure to renounce him, was paraded in a dunce's cap, beaten and made to kneel on broken glass. Before the family was scattered to labour camps, Chang would accompany her ailing mother to "horrible denunciation meetings when she was haemorrhaging from her womb. I'd sit in a hysterical crowd that was yelling and screaming." Her grandmother died in 1969, killed, Chang believes, by the "accumulation of anguish".

 

Yet Chang blamed only those around Mao until 1974, when she read a smuggled copy of Newsweek that described Madame Mao as her husband's "eyes and ears". She says, "it spelled out Mao's responsibility. A window opened in my mind, and light came in. I can see how powerful the brainwashing and indoctrination were; I was reasonably intelligent, but it took me eight years."

 

It was the burning of her father's library, she thinks, that unhinged his mind. She found him weeping over a kitchen fire, stoking it with the last of his precious volumes. Yet her "entrepreneurial" 13-year-old brother salvaged for the black market thousands of Chinese and western classics that had escaped the Red Guards. Chang was able to devour Shakespeare, Shaw, RL Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle in Chinese translation, along with Turgenev and the Russian novelists who spurred the "romantic side of my nat-ure". Among Chinese writers, she felt liberated by Lu Xun, for his "enlightened humanism" in the 1920s. "He said penetrating things about the repressive nationalists, but his attacks could as well apply to the regime I was living in."

 

Exiled to the Himalayan foothills, she worked as a barefoot doctor, steel worker and electrician, before her "rehabilitation" allowed her to study English at Sichuan university in the early 70s. Two years after Mao's death, she studied linguistics at York and was the first person from China to earn a doctorate in Britain. She taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and wrote Wild Swans after a visit from her mother in 1988. "She talked every day for six months; I had 60 hours of tapes." Chang learned that her grandmother had been a Manchurian warlord's concubine, and her mother had joined the communist underground at 15. After her doctorate in 1982, she married a Singaporean Chinese pianist and professor at London's Royal College of Music. They split up in 1986; Halliday, whom she married in 1991, also plays the piano: "Both Jon and my previous husband introduced me to music. When I was growing up, there wasn't much, except nice tunes singing the praises of Mao."

 

While Chang has seen a diminution of fear in China, she says, "because of its dramatic changes, it's a place full of contradictions", and publications are "under tighter control than for a century". She and Halliday were deterred from giving Mao to Wild Swans publisher HarperCollins by reports that its owner had blocked a book by Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong. "We knew Rupert Murdoch had a friendly relationship with Beijing, and we didn't trust him to publish Mao," she says. She is torn on the subject of western software companies colluding with China to restrict internet freedom. "If I were these companies, I'd go on doing business with China - it helps us all. But I'd try to push the line, and not do any self-censorship - or risk lives."

 

In her introduction to a 2003 edition of Wild Swans, Chang wrote: "We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves." She still feels "people don't always regard Chinese lives as being as valuable as European lives", citing a "preposterous remark" by Ken Livingstone. The mayor of London said last month: "One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women. That alone justifies the Mao Zedong era." Foot binding, Chang points out, as suffered by her grandmother, was outlawed in the early 20th century. "And nothing justifies 70 million deaths in peacetime."

 

Once the Chinese translation of Mao is out, says Chang, "I'm putting my feet up and drawing a long breath and no doubt some inspiration." As for her next project, "I hope it won't take 12 years."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk

[Jenjie]

Sam Mills's top 10 books about the darker side of adolescence

 

Sam Mill's first novel, A Nicer Way to Die, is a dark thriller about a group of 30 pupils who travel to France on a school-trip. A horrific coach crash kills 28 of them, leaving two boys behind: Henry and James, two stepbrothers who share a troubled relationship.

 

"When I was growing up, there seemed to be two main types of teenage fiction around. The first was fluffy (Sweet Valley High et al) and portrayed growing up as a hunky-dory experience, where beautiful boys met beautiful girls, the greatest trauma in life was not being selected for the cheerleading squad, and all lived happily ever after. The second type, which I feasted on with glee, explored reality. They captured just what a difficult and jagged experience growing up can be. Some teen books can be terribly depressing; they focus too heavily on 'issues' (drugs, teen pregnancy etc) and become unrealistic in their bleakness. The most interesting books about teenagers are not afraid to explore the darker side of adolescence, but with humour, insight or humanity. As a result, they become classics because their readership is universal; their protagonists may be teenagers but anyone aged 13 to 80 can enjoy them. Hence, the list I have chosen is a blend of books that have been either published as teen or adult fiction..."

 

1. Lord of The Flies by William Golding

Lord Of the Flies was published in 1954 but is still utterly relevant today. It centres on a group of boys who, following a plane crash, are stranded on a desert island. At first they work together, building shelters and gathering food. But soon group tensions split the group as Ralph tries to maintain reason, order and structured discipline, opposed by Jack and his band of painted savages. Primal instincts take over and civilisation crumbles into animal savagery and violence. Golding uses the playing field of adolescence to explore the roots of evil, tracing the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral of the story is that the backbone of a society depends on the ethical nature of the individuals who founded it, and not any government, or politics.

 

2. The Outsiders by SE Hinton

SE Hinton wrote The Outsiders while she was still a high school student, inspired by her determination to change the negative stereotype of teenagers who were labelled 'greasers.' She tells the story of two groups of teenagers whose bitter rivalry stems from socioeconomic differences: the greasers, the lower-class hoods, who continually clash with the Socs, the rich kids in town. The novel is narrated by the 16-year-old Greaser Ponyboy and, like many of the finest teen novels, Hinton pins down her hero's colloquial voice perfectly. Though it is a violent and at times bleak read, Hinton offers a spark of hope as Ponyboy begins to realise that the hardships that greasers and Socs face may take different practical forms, but that both groups share the same fundamental difficulties of growing up. Published in 1967, The Outsiders was a groundbreaking piece of fiction that set the precedent for the uncompromising, realistic fiction for young adults that soon followed it.

 

3. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Burgess's novel far excels Kubrick's film. This is a novel which explores the very darkest side of adolescence. 15-year-old Alex and his friends set out on an orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex relates his tale in an idiom called Nadsat, a glorious invention by Burgess: a kind of musical Russian-English slang. When Alex is arrested, the book takes on Orwellian overtones when he is used in a scientific experiment to regulate adolescent violence in a new and alarming way. The original American edition of the book (and hence the film) failed to include the final chapter of the book, where Alex grows up and gives up his violent ways. Burgess believed that all individuals, even those as violent as Alex, could reform, and that moral growth could come with age - but his US editor felt the last chapter was too 'bland' and forced him to omit it. Later Burgess got the chapter reinstated, arguing that he objected to his work being used to send a message that some humans are simply evil by nature.

 

4. Boy Kills Man by Matt Whyman

Many of the best teen books highlight real problems happening in the world today and Boys Kills Man is a perfect example. Inspired by the true story of child assassins in Colombia, it tells the tale of Sonny, aka Shorty, who is hired by the crime lord El Fantasma to become a assassin on the streets of Medellin. It is a powerful and moving book that swings between tenderness and brutality. Whyman takes care not to moralise or offer easy answers - Sonny is a complex character who does the wrong things for what he believes are the right reasons.

 

5. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

Many of the most interesting novels about adolescence explore the theme of children who are abandoned by their parents or find themselves in a situation where they are free from adult authority. Like Lord of the Flies, the four children in The Cement Garden, are left to their own devices when their parents die. Fearing adoption, they keep their mother's death a secret by burying her in a cement locker in their basement. But, unlike Lord of the Flies, the children do not descend into animal savagery. Rather, they are torn between the impulses to progress and regress. Julie, the eldest of the siblings, takes on the role of a surrogate mother as the children attempt to carry on as normal a life as possible. But, as they seek to emulate their parent's roles, an incestuous relationship develops between Julie and Jack...

 

6. Catcher In the Rye by JD Salinger

The Catcher in The Rye is narrated by 16-year-old Holden Caulfield. At the start of the story, Holden has just been expelled from school and stands poised on the cliff separating childhood and adulthood. Holden's voice is superb: colloquial, savagely comic, and utterly persuasive, sucking you in so swiftly that it is hard not to read the book in one sitting. It is also captures the complexity of adolescence. Holden feels deeply cynical about the adult world; like the 'catcher in the rye' he wishes to wipe out corruption from the world and protect children from becoming a 'phonie' - an adult. Yet, at times, he behaves like a 'phonie' himself and is frustrated by his desire to fit into the adult world and be taken seriously by adults. You can guarantee that any brilliant and honest book for teens will be frequently banned in schools and The Catcher In the Rye has certainly suffered from this fate many a time.

 

7. The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce

Though Joyce's novels are shelved in the fantasy sections in bookshops, his books are about as far away from Tolkien as you can get. The Tooth Fairy begins firmly in reality, exploring - with wonderfully deft observation - the adventures of a boy called Sam Southall growing up in England in the 1960s. At the age of seven, Sam loses a tooth and is visited by a Tooth Fairy. But this is no fluffy sprite: Joyce's Tooth Fairy smells rank, peppers his language with swearwords and makes sinister threats. Joyce blends together fantasy and reality as the Tooth Fairy becomes a superb metaphor for his hero's adolescence, metamorphosing as Sam shifts from boyhood to manhood.

 

8. A Kestrel For a Knave by Barry Hines

A teenage novel about a boy called Billy who is trying to survive his harsh existence in a small mining town in Yorkshire. His family are impoverished, his teachers mistreat him and he is entirely friendless - until he finds a form of love and redemption in a kestrel that he trains and rears from a chick. A profoundly touching novel, its greatest achievement is the depiction of Billy. He might have been an unsympathetic narrator - he is at times violent, ill-tempered and bad-mouthed - but Hines (like Whyman in Boy Kills Man) shows that his troubled adolescent behaviour is a result of the society he is brought up in rather than his true nature.

 

9. The Republic of Trees by Sam Taylor

A dark fable about four English children who run away to the French countryside to establish their own Utopian community. There, in the Republic of Trees, the children hunt, fall in love and educate themselves in the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract. The novel is narrated by Michael and the first half of the book explores his sexual awakening as he falls in love with Isobel and loses his virginity to her. But then a new member, Joy, joins the group, bringing new disciplines and the mood of the camp begins to alter. Gradually their utopian paradise descends into a dystopian nightmare as the novels powers towards a shocking, violent and terrifying conclusion. A fantastic novel with shades of Lord Of the Flies and 1984.

 

10. Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre

Surely the best Booker prize-winner in recent years, Vernon God Little has been described by some critics as a modern day equivalent to Catcher In the Rye. It swings from savage satire to black comedy to sweet lyricism to poignant tragedy from one page to the next - all captured in the voice of 15-year-old Vernon, when he is wrongly accused of a high school massacre. Like many adolescent heroes, Vernon finds himself rebelling against a corrupt adult society.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk

[berrywoman]

I would love to start a book club with you... but they way you read book is like drinking water!! Girrrrrl, you go thru them like fire!!! lol :(

[busybeeburns]

tell me about it. I can take a picture of all her bookshelves if you like ;)

[Black Rose]

It takes me a long time to read though books, I am still reading that James May Book I started a couple months ago.

 

My mum is worse though, whenever she sees a book in a half-price sale near the tills of the local wh smiths, she will buy it, even though most of those books are still in her room unopened

[Jenjie]

Its my big addiction!!! There are worse things I could spend my money on like cigarettes, drugs or alcohol! :D Although, I'm quite sure that Ian would argue that any of those three would take up a lot less space!!

 

 

Anyways, do you like my new stylie thread? Figured I'd start a book thread every sat and post reviews & articles in it during the week, rather than fill up the board with threads which people read but don't post on. Anyone wanting to add to it is more than welcome.