Minor fandom rant

[daemonluna]

(I thought about friends-locking this entry. I thought about posting to the community from whence the impetus for my rantiness came. Instead, I opted to just post here. Partly, I'm kind of curious what the community response is going to be. And partly, I wanted to get all this out so that if I do go and comment, I can hopefully do so without jumping down the original poster's throat over having the audacity to have *gasp* different opinions than I do on books!)

Dear Gordon Korman fans,

Stop whining about how none of his new books can ever approach the brilliance of Macdonald Hall, No Coins Please, Don't Care High, and other vintage Korman. Please.

Because really, they are fun and I loved them too, but his later stuff? Much better written.

You probably won't feel that same rush of for his new books because truly, you're not twelve any more. And if there's one thing you do better as an adolescent than any point in your life, it's feel things with great passion. (Which is not to say that you're not going to get that same huge love for a good book, it just might be for different books. And perhaps not quite so very often.) If you can go back and read the books you loved when you were younger with that misty haze of nostalgia, I'm all for that.

But please, please, please don't try to convince me nothing these days is as good as the books you read when you were a kid. I've read a lot of kids' books. A lot. It's an essential part of my job to know what's out there, what's new, what's good, and what kids want to read. Very few things annoy me like people bleating on about there being no good books for children these days just because their beloved childhood favourite hasn't stood the test of time, and they haven't read a kids' book since they were ten.

(Minor digression: If I have to hear one more time at a F&SF con panel on children's lit, "I don't see why kids aren't reading the classics these days. What's wrong with Heinlein? They should all be reading Asimov!" I will throw things. Like there's been nothing written in the intervening fifty or sixty years.)

Honestly, though. You're not the target audience any more, especially for his adventure series. Eight to thirteen year olds (especially boys, and often reluctant readers) who like suspense and survival stories eat them up. They're fast-paced, tightly-written, and not meant to be a Macdonald Hall retread.

To be perfectly honest, his Macdonald Hall era books are, um. Not very well written. Don't get me wrong, I love them. But the strongest part is the plot and timing. Large chunks of text are just dialogue. Pretty well all of his main characters are Bruno and Boots over again. (Outrageous friend! Cautious sidekick! Together, they fight crime have wacky hijinx!)

He's developed a lot as a writer. Sure, not every single one of his many, many books is brilliant. (To choose one of his latest, Maxx Comedy was really kind of so-so.) However. Son of the Mob is the same sort of humor as A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, or I Want to Go Home, but his characters actually have some dimension. And though I wasn't big on Jake, Reinvented (moderately successful Great Gatsby retelling), No More Dead Dogs was truly inspired. (As well as being way too much fun to booktalk.)

Personally, I think that it's a good thing that he's grown and changed as a writer. He's made a very successful career for himself, and I really don't think he's sold out.

So, please. Take off your blinkers of best-book-ever childhood nostalgia. (And if not, then please don't rant about it extensively without using cut tags.)

Not Love but Sincerely,
Me

(I'll just be over here, repeating an impromptu librarian mantra on diversity of readers and opinions...)

Comments

[chaleur23.livejournal.com]

Wow! I am guilty of that sometimes, daemonluna, and you are absolutely right. I often wonder how much of my current favorites are unduly influenced by nostalgia :P. I think I'm going to go back and read more of them to see. I know the _Dragonriders of Pern_ series was not quite as thrilling the last time I read it, that's for sure.

Side comment to thelastgoodname. I'd send teens who are interested in science to something like "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" or perhaps better, "Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's Letters to and from Children" before sending them to Asimov or Heinlein. Though I suspect they'd probably be embarassed to be seen with either book.

I guess I'm weird that way.

[daemonluna.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm all for having nostalgic favourites. *g* It's just that it might be... prudent to acknowledge emotional attachment when we're making sweeping statements about the quality of an author's work. (And that obliquely-worded crankiness on my part is due to the post that inspired my rant.)

And I tried listening to Dragonflight as an audio book while at the gym--I quit more because the chapters were really long audio files and I had to spend twenty minutes fiddling with my cheap MP3 plater to get it back to the same spot each time--but oooh, my, are the gender roles definitely a product of the decade in which it was written. Which is not to say I'm not going to dig up my copy and reread it properly.

And hmm, I'm going to have to look up both your book suggestions and see if they'd be at the right level for my library...

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

I would want them to read the old SF not to learn about science or scientists, but to learn about how our views of science have changed so drastically in the last 50 years -- the heroic lone scientist (who has a great sense of humor) is a great notion, but not a very useful one for the types of problems tomorrow's scientists will be facing. However, they can (especially the smart ones) compare the unrelenting heroism of American individual triumph in those books (particularly Heinlein, but a number of others as well) to our current, rather more pluralistic and depressing concerns that show up in a number of more recent books. That's the lesson I would want them to learn, as early as possible.

Also, I think I may be thinking about students older than the ones daemonluna works with.