Summer reading club.

Here's what summer is made for.

1. Reading children's books. I just cracked the spine on The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, and can't believe it never found its way to me when I was younger. It's got that nerdy, puzzly, E.L. Konigsburg vibe that has rocked my world since I was about seven, and I'm pretty grateful that Mac on Veronica Mars made a reference to it to bring it into my life.

1a. Pausing to think wistfully about Veronica Mars, and how great it is.

2. Diving head first into teen books you should have read when they came out but forgot to check out because you're no longer lucky enough to work with some bitchin' teen librarians who tell you what to read all the time. First on my list: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.



2a. I've had a real thing for John Green for a really long time, and that passion has not waned. If I'd discovered him as a teenager I think I'd have been so much more comfortable with my own geekiness, and also, so very much in love.



3. Folk rock road trips. I'm off to Perth to the Stewart Park Music Festival, arguably this country's best free fest. I'll be the one throwing myself at Dan Mangan and drinking pinot grigio out of a Nalgene bottle.

Stop, look, listen.

I drove from Hamilton to Ottawa yesterday, hopefully for the last time. Trust me when I tell you that this is the longest, stupidest, boringest stretch of driving on God's green earth, and the frequency with which I'm forced to make this trek is a mean cosmic joke. The only bit of excitement I ever get is when I pass by the inexplicably-named KABOOM.com store just east of Toronto on the 401 and I yell out "KABOOM...dot com" and giggle and then look over to my empty passenger seat to see if my non-existent road buddy thought it was funny too.

Anyway, usually I make a point of throwing together a very meaningful mix CD for my road trips, but this time I forgot. On the way down to the Hammer I listened to my husband's new triple album over and over again, to the point where I fell in love with it so hard I wasn't really sure if I could ever listen to anything else. So yesterday I decided to forgo music all together and I threw in a book on CD. I used to listen to audiobooks all the time when I had to drive to work every day, and I'm looking forward to doing it again when I start my new job, even though I nearly always endanger myself and my fellow drivers by listening to hard. Seriously, I had so many almost-accidents when I listened to this essay by David Sedaris.

I am a total snob when it comes to the narration on audiobooks. A good reader can make or break the story. My old boss had a real thing for British narrators, and I totally jumped on that bandwagon. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell remains one of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to and while the story of a young boy growing up in 1980s Britain is indeed heartbreaking and lovely all on its own, what made it for me was the handsome-sounding BBC-style narrator. Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot is pretty much the greatest book ever written about becoming a woman, and the version I listened to, with Bank herself as the dry, slightly-Brooklyn-accented narrator, made me fall in love with it even more.

On the flip side, a crappy reader can completely ruin a wonderful story, like the American narrator reading Tracey Chevalier's decidedly British Falling Angels (cockney slang delivered in a CBS newsanchor dialect = death). Sometimes a voice is just wrong for the character it's trying to embody, which is the problem I encountered with Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson, which I listened to yesterday. The protagonist is a frustrated, introverted teen guy, someone who probably would have joined the trench coat mafia if he'd had the opportunity. After a summer spent working alongside his school's janitorial staff as part of his community service for a crime that's revealed bit by bit, Tyler returns to the minefield of highschool a muscled, misunderstood legend. He's not really sure who he is, and neither is anyone else. Anderson's one of my favourite teen writers, and this book is every bit as moving as her other instant classic of teen crises, Speak. But when the tribulations of the reluctant antihero are told by a too-old male voice with all the subtlety and shyness of a Bud Light announcer, something just doesn't compute.

I'd conclude this in a more thoughtful way but I'm still on holiday, and there's a half-finished batch of sangria in my kitchen that really needs some attention. Happy Friday, my ducklings. Here's ten minutes of Liz Lemon to ease you into your weekend.

Forget about it.

I just finished reading Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin. It's one of those teen books that actually makes you want to go back to highschool, or at least, that's how it made me feel. Maybe that's because it has all my favourite teen plot devices:

Physical trauma!
Adorable boy best friend who loves a girl who has no idea!
Quitting yearbook!
Dumping your friends for better ones!
Descriptions of semi-esoteric playlists for subtext-ridden mix CDs!
Kissing!

Meaningful mix CDs aside (I had those in spades, or rather, on tapes), I longed for all the things on that list when I was a teenager. Okay, okay, I didn't completely hate all my friends, but don't all teens (or all people, for that matter) sometimes wish they could just screw the life they've landed in and run off to a different crowd? I think that's the plot point that works best in this book--when Naomi wakes up after her fall with no memory of her teenage years, one of the first things she realizes upon returning to school is that her old friends suck. And since she has no idea who she was before, she has nothing holding her back from starting over completely. Coupled with that is the absolutely terrifying realization that while she doesn't remember anyone, everyone remembers her--she doesn't know who she is, but she's surrounded by people who think they do. Naomi's amnesiac life is existential, and it's creepy, and it's a pretty awesome representation of the kind of daily paranoid angst that plagues teens. At least, it plagued me. And still does. Ah, fake adult life.

I also always wished feverishly for a boy friend who would become a boyfriend, but I guess every girl does that. Pretty In Pink didn't help much (I always sympathized with Duckie more than Blaine).

In honour of its mention in the book, and also its significance to me, now especially and forever for sure, I give you I'm so tired.

weekend warriors

Oh boy you guys, it's going to be a big weekend around the First Avenue homestead. I'm talking documentaries on DVD, cheap read wine, overdue library books big. Here's the first of what I hope will be many weekend plan posts, just to give you a richer picture of just how exciting my life is.

Here's what's on the list for this weekend...

The Collected Short Fiction of W. Somerset Maugham Someone mentioned Up At The Villa to me the other day and I realized I'd never actually read anything by Somerset Maugham. The literature nerd in me died a little.

Hero Type by Barry Lyga I just finished Barry Lyga's amaaaaazing book, Boy Toy, which is an incredibly powerful, sensitive story about abuse and sexuality and the horrors of those things for a teenage boy. He writes about the psychology of being a boy like no one else. I can't wait to start his latest.

Steel Magnolias. Another piece of fallout from my drunk Oscar night ordering binge at the library. THIS IS A VASTLY UNDERRATED FILM. I don't think I've seen it since I was a teenager and I am so stoked to have a good old fashioned weepfest. Possibly Julia Roberts' greatest work, which isn't saying much.

Speaking of Julia Roberts, she is hilarious in this interview.



The Tracey Fragments. I read this book last year and it was so messed up. Anything that opens with a girl wrapped up in a shower curtain is okay with my books. Also, anything with Ellen Page.

This might be the last somewhat chilly weekend of the year. While I welcome spring with the wild, unbridled enthusiasm of a SADS sufferer, I will also kind of miss the readymade excuse to hunker down that is an Ottawa winter. I am an expert burrower. Alone time is the cause of, and solution to, all of my problems, and I am totally okay with that.

But enough about me. What are you reading this weekend?