shitty YA cheatsheet with Farla – more on Graceling

Farla is a blogger who makes it a thing to dissect a lot of shitty books, many of them shitty YA (insofar that such a thing as “non-shitty YA” exists, which I’m not convinced it does in any appreciable quantity). I’ve been reading her take on The Hunger Games and Graceling, both books that curiously feature emotionally broken “strong” female protagonists, both books that  (witness here a frothing fanboy defending the lack of homosexuality in The Hunger Games) feature unbelievably atrocious world-building, unbelievably idiotic names, and unbelievably terrible writing.

Even by YA standards (and those standards are so very low to begin with) Kristin Cashore can’t fucking write worth one bird dropping.

Since I’ve been reading along I thought I might as well do the meta thing and comment on the commentary. Farla has this irritating habit of equating “third-world” to places of starvation with no electricity–

The fence is supposed to be electrified, but it only rarely is because they only get a few hours of electricity a day. This is the first suggestion this is more third-world than primitive.

–and I imagine it’d blow her mind to realize that some of us have not only electricity (constantly and reliably!) but also plumbing and Internet access), and this kind of third/first-world thing comes up a whole shitting lot in her analyses.  It’s that mindless, casual thing a lot of westerners do and they don’t even think it’s offensive in any way. This is why we want to kick you in the mouths, folks, and laugh as you choke to death on your own teeth. This is also why:

This is all particularly inane given that it’s standard in Western society that you can’t actually force someone into a marriage, there has to be some nominal amount of acceptance

Non-westerners, of course, constantly rape women and marriages aren’t even about nominal amount of acceptance oh fuck you. But, unfortunately for people who like Graceling this doesn’t mean I disagree with her views on Cashore’s steaming pile, so let’s get to that.

 

THE FUTURE OF US is a “Like” sign slapping the face of humanity, forever

It’s 1996, and less than half of all American high school students have ever used the Internet.

Emma just got her first computer and an America Online CD-ROM.

Josh is her best friend. They power up and log on–and discover themselves on Facebook, fifteen years in the future.

Everybody wonders what their Destiny will be. Josh and Emma are about to find out.

I’ve read tie-ins. I’ve read the worst of what the SFF genre has to offer.

I have never read a single book more vacuous, more pointless and hackneyed than The Future of Us. This book is what happens when a pair of people who can’t write decide they can. This book is what people who have nothing of worth or merit in their skulls would produce under the misapprehension that they have something  faintly clever to say. Other books have been offensive; other books have been varying levels of terrible… but nothing beats the vapid, useless, pointless, talentless blackhole that is the combined force of Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. There isn’t a single solitary page in this novel that provides any value outside of being fuel, toilet paper, or wastebasket lining.

It’s a novel you can only write if you think there’s nothing outside of your white, straight, middle-class American world, your midlife crisis, and a nostalgia for your even more vapid white, straight, middle-class American teenage years. This novel is the essence of what makes Americans mockable. It’s the embodiment of utter mindlessness, a laser-point focus on shit that doesn’t matter, an ode to the glory of having no imagination stuffed with painful pop-culture references worthless to anybody with a real culture to appreciate. The fact that Amazon reports a sales rank of #3722 overall and #89 in “Teens > Science Fiction and Fantasy” at the time of this writing should tell you all you need to know about the great American reading public.

 

Lord of Neckbeards – Tolkien rape/suicide/pedestal watch

PADDLES OUT, FRIENDS; IT IS TIME TO BEAT THE ROTTEN CARCASS OF A DEAD WHITE MAN

This is just a longer sequel to my post on Tolkien, to further highlight the sexism problem and refute the idea that Tolkien is a “nicer” fantasy than the grimdark of R. Scott Bakker, Mark Lawrence, or George R. R. Martin–that, at its core, its treatment of women is not as significantly better as most would like to believe (barring lovingly written graphic rape). Topics covered: women who are raped, who commit suicide, who are used to further manpain, who are put on pedestals, and who are otherwise defined solely by their relationships to men. It’s probably easier to name women in Middle-earth who don’t fall into one or all of these categories, but this may provide a useful resource. So: onward and upward! Never again take “yes well um um um TOLKIEN WRITES STRONG WOMEN and he doesn’t include GRATUITOUS RAPE OKAY” lying down.

 

giving up on GRACELING and why I’m done with YA

I got through 38 pages of Graceling before calling it quits. This isn’t because it’s an offensive book in any way. It’s because the writing, in two words, is intolerably shit.

Now you may tell me that it’s an excellent, pro-feminist book; you may tell me Katsa is a fantastic character with believable whatever. And you know, I believe you, really I do. I believe it’s a pro-feminist book, reviews of it have suggested it is so. I’m sure you enjoyed it and have perfectly valid reasons to love it. I recognize that a girl-positive novel is important, especially a YA one.

But to me personally and individually it isn’t enough; Feminism 101 is all well and good, but I’m not obliged to love it when it’s done up in mediocrity and generic setting by an author who as far as I can tell has no grasp on narrative structure or characterization whatsoever, and who harbors not a single original thought in her pages. If I’d felt such an obligation, I would have finished Malinda Lo’s Huntress, and if nothing else “East Asian lesbians who do stuff” is a far more interesting premise than “straight white girl who can kill with bare hands zzzz.” I’m just not that desperate. I’ve read Carter and Valente and Sedia, and just freshly I’ve come away from Helen Oyeyemi. Not only do these authors handle feminism at a more nuanced, more mature level, they can actually write–and whatever you may think of Cashore’s prose, you’ll probably agree that she doesn’t stand a chance next to Helen Oyeyemi or Nalo Hopkinson. It’s not that because Oyeyemi and Hopkinson exist Cashore doesn’t need to, it’s just that I’ve read better than Graceling. I’ve just read better, and on a personal level I find no reason to settle for something so direly third-rate when I’ve far from exhausted the first-rate stuff.

So this isn’t going to be a review. I’m just going to share my annotations on the book.

 

TRIPTYCH lolblog p.2 – furry blue aliens and their ribcage cocks

YOU WILL SUFFER. YOU WILL ALL SUFFER.

He has chosen to be a “he.” Humans use pronouns to distinguish between individuals of specific genders. They have two genders among his people as well, of course — almost every copulating species does — but they aren’t as finicky about labelling them. They don’t dwell on sexuality and gender performance on his world…or rather, they did not. He has the reproductive organs of a male, or what the humans categorize as such, so he has decided that it is easiest to simply submit to the use of the aligned pronoun instead of insisting on the neutral.

DO YOU SEEEEEEEEE. Then the “males everywhere don’t know how to deal with an upset female” moment and toilet seats come up and all is lost.

 

TRIPTYCH lolblog p. 1 – on singing kumbaya and time travel

Since I read most of my books electronically now I’ve developed a habit I’ve scientifically termed “highlight the fuck out of everything!” Normally these annotations amount to nothing: I only use a quote or two in the actual review. But by the time I was done with JM Frey’s Triptych I discovered I had made 179 annotations. In a book with 223 pages. That would mean only about 44 pages have no marks or notes that go along the line of “oh for fuck’s sake.”

Gentle readers, you will suffer as I have suffered.

 

JM Frey’s TRIPTYCH – alas, friends, Ursula le Guin did it better

“You know…” she said slowly, and almost so softly that Evvie didn’t hear it.”You know those movies where the aliens come to Earth, and they… I dunno, they try to steal our natural resources, or create a nuclear winter so they can turn the Earth into slag, or they melt the polar ice caps and New York is under fathoms of water, or they clone us for slaves, or create terrifying bioweapons and wipe us all out and use our cities for farmland, or…all that stuff?” Gwen looked up. “It was nothing like that.”

Part District 9, part Lost in Translation, part Stranger in a Strange Land, Triptych is a poignant, character-driven science fiction story about tolerance, love and loss.

You know, if all I ever read of this book was the sample chapter, I would never have read any further. Why? Because the first chapter contains the kind of writing that I can only describe as buttock-clenchingly awful. It’s so embarrassing to read that your buttocks just go a-clenching and there’s no help for it. So by second chapter, you’d expect, you’d be getting constipation and that’s just not something you’d ever want to inflict on yourself, goodness no.

It gets better. But not by much. And I’d like to have said that this book has its heart in the right place–except its heart is of the “bleeding-heart liberal singing kumbaya” variety. What could possibly be more loathsome?

 

Neil Gaiman: sorry unbro, it’s not me, it’s you

Ah, Neil Gaiman.

I started off with Sandman, like many others, and from there followed the trail to his works of prose. At first, I liked them well enough: my first was American Gods and, even though I thought the protagonist was a boring personality-void empty-brained bore, everything else in the book was kind of interesting.

Then I read Neverwhere, Stardust and Anansi Boys and a pattern emerged. It’s like having read one paranormal romance, or Forgotten Realms, or Star Wars too many. After a certain point it’s no longer fun and you ram up against the realization that they are all the same fucking story.

 

Lynn Flewelling’s SHADOWY YAOI STEREOTYPES IN THE DARKNESS

I bought Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows and Stalking Darkness, which came bundled together, in a used bookstore for what amounts to 7 USD at the exchange rate then. To this day I still feel that I paid 7 dollars too many.

TVTropes describes Nightrunner, in its “better than it sounds” page, as: “An angsty Bishounen with a Dark And Troubled Past rescues a cute boy from prison. They Fight Crime.”

It’s not better than it sounds. In fact, it is considerably worse.

 

Anne Bishop’s RAPE JEWELS trilogy

I offer no excuses: this time I walked right into the trap. I started reading Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewels omnibus only because I was looking for something blazingly stupid to tear apart. It’s great fodder for conversation pieces with other book-geeks. Sort of like sharing horror stories. “Yes, Virginia, her two husbands really do have two dicks and a glowing dick respectively.” “Why, old chap, for sure she believes horror writers will burn in hell.” And so on. Sometimes it’ll get other readers curious and then they’ll obtain the book, hopefully through the library or a secondhand store, and then they too will be able to share in the joy. Then you’ll be able to rest in the knowledge that you’ve subjected another person to the same shit you forced yourself–masochistically–through, grinding your teeth all the while and gaping in disbelief. Admit it: it’s much funnier to talk about awful books than good ones.

I believe in starting strong. So imagine, if you will, beginning the conversation with this: “It’s got dragons and unicorns and they all love her, and then when the cock-ring becomes too much he bites someone’s clitoris off.“

WARNING: GIANT RAPE AND PEDOPHILE TRIGGERS ALERT, ALERT RED ALERT RED