Hello, all.  I have officially returned from a holiday at home; I was back in London at the tail-end of last week but we enjoyed a few more days off de-compressing from our time away.  Glasgow was … temperamental weather-wise; one day I was driving along a flooded street in torrential rain, water up to the chassis and such a badly steamed-up windscreen that it was like driving blind in a cloudy bubble (quite possibly the most horrific driving experience I’ve yet had) and the next I spent the day on the patio with a book, strawberry-flavoured beer whilst I left the BBQ in the trusty hands of my boyfriend.  As always I didn’t read nearly as much as I would have liked but a great time was had with loved ones, even if the sun was not always splitting the skies.

I did check in online last week as the pre-Booker anticipation built; I was on tenterhooks awaiting the longlist announcement and quite excited by the result.  I am not going on record by saying that I will read the entire longlist this year but I should have them all in my possession this week and we shall see where my reading then takes me …  At present I am itching to read Room by Emma Donoghue (which I shall begin later today), The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner; I was delighted at fellow Scot Warner’s inclusion on the list as The Sopranos (to which The Stars in the Bright Sky is a sequel) is a favourite from when I read it about a decade ago.

I also came across this article in Bitch magazine (online) last week.  Its focus on the importance of positive female role models in young adult literature is a subject I feel strongly about; in a society where Bella Swan passivity is culturally embraced, the need for strong heroines in literature is paramount.  The examples of empowered young females in both the piece and its subsequent comments have me adding to my wishlist and nostalgically reliving my own childhood and young adult reading.

Whilst I was away a new literary prize was established, celebrating the writing of gay men.  So forward-thinking and diverse is this prize that it has already caused controversy and undergone a name-change! More about The Green Carnation Prize can be found here.

Today I  feature in Triple Choice Tuesday, a weekly event hosted by Kim of Reading Matters that highlights three books that mean a lot to the participant.  It was a pleasure to take part in a feature that I greatly enjoy but I found the task of narrowing down beloved books to three far more difficult than I anticipated.  Please have a look at Kim’s site for my final choices.

This week I hope to catch up with some outstanding reviews as well as share with you some of my summer reading and more of the same can be expected over the coming weeks, interspersed -I imagine- with some Booker reading.  In the meantime, did you miss me and what have you been reading and writing about?  Please do alert me to any posts you think I should read as I’m putting off opening my Google Reader and suspect I will mark all posts as read once I do.

John Green’s writing has been described as being privy to “a secret you can’t wait to divulge” and “like a John Hughes film… quirky and funny [mixed with] Sofia Coppola” (both in relation to his first novel, Looking for Alaska); Nymeth -recommendation reliant- is of the belief that “John Green can do no wrong”; my ready-made blurb is that Paper Towns is like Dawson’s Creek minus the incongruous dialogue and the narcissistic, whiny Dawson.

The reason I have opted for a television comparison (much like the film directors point of reference) is that Paper Towns will translate to screen extremely well (it already has a film option); the prose is very cinematic and also vividly realistic.  I could envisage myself being there overhearing the pithy exchanges and observing the sugar-fueled road trip.  Too infrequently can novelists create a world that you can readily step into as voyeur but John Green is one who can; I experienced events along with Q, as a willing participant caught up in his coming-of-age story.

Quentin Jacobsen (known as “Q” to his friends) has always loved the enigmatic Margo Roth Spiegelman, his next door neighbour and -once-upon-a-time- playmate.  One night Margo appears at Q’s window (ahem, are you flash-backing to Joey Potter climbing in Dawson Leery’s window?) and enlists his help in an all-night revenge attack, promising him the best night of his life in return.  What ensues is a life-changing night of adventure and ingenuity, Margo style; beyond that night is a mystery that Q embroils himself in -with the help of his friends- when Margo disappears.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

For those of you who shy away from the young adult genre, please set aside your preconceptions; Paper Towns is witty, intelligent, illuminating and emotionally captivating. John Green writes truths in all their brutality.  Perhaps I have the emotional maturity of a highschool senior but I emotionally connected with this novel and what its characters -at times harshly- learned. I actually had an epiphany with this novel, thanks to Green; we cannot make people into who we want them to be and we cannot expect people to behave the same way we would, which is hardly life-shattering but it took Paper Towns to bring it home to me.  At times philosophical, the novel captures the difficulty of growing up; Q and his best friends, Ben and Radar, are on the cusp of adulthood, graduating from highschool and embarking on their futures.  Q, Ben and Radar are misfits and Green evokes school in all its harshness and petty injustices; the threesome are exceptionally funny, entertaining to be around, exceedingly loyal, and I would happily extend an offer of friendship to them beyond the confines of the novel.  Green creates real characters and the third part of Paper Towns is a hilarious bond-building road trip that I would have gone on in a heartbeat.

Not only does he create real people but makes us realise that we can’t create people into images of who we want them to be, Green also shows us that we dehumanise people that don’t like; whether they are the objects of our love, our esteem or our dislike, we make fictions of people and turn them into characters in our own life stories.  The novel’s title refers to towns that only exists on paper: “fictitious towns which are added to a map either for fun or for copyright reasons” (Wikipedia definition); people can lose their sense of self in other people’s imagined version of them and become as fictitious and as unreal as paper towns on a map.

The strength of Paper Towns is difficult to do justice to but suffice to say that I highly recommend it.  Incredibly funny and also bittersweet, Paper Towns took me on a journey that I would oft repeat; I’ve been to central Florida with Green and next will be going with him to Alaska.

A favourite passage which showcases Green’s prose-style:

Stranding before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

Above is a passage from What I Was by Meg Rosoff that I sampled yesterday in my teaser but that I wanted to quote in its entirety. In my opinion it demonstrates Rosoff’s talent for her writing and her love for language and what often isn’t said. What I Was is ultimately a novel about what isn’t said, what isn’t seen, and what we often want to say but don’t.

I read Meg Rosoff’s debut Young Adult novel How I Live Now a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely so when I read Nymeth’s review last week of What I Was, I requested it from the library and put it to the top of the TMBTLT (too many books too little time – a term stolen from Verity) pile.

I am struck by its resonance and power. It has a twist and one unfortunately that I saw coming (keen eyes and a overactive mind) that changes one’s perspective post-reading. It is a book of longing and loneliness and love. I admire how Meg Rosoff addresses her [target] young audience as grown-ups and tackles adult themes that are essentially teenage themes too. I didn’t once feel as if I was reading a patronisingly twee book for children or that I was reading “beneath” my own reading abilities; instead I was engaged in an intensely poignant tale for young and old.

I highly recommend this book. It is about the friendship and love between Hilary (the 100 year old narrator who is recalling his youth in the early 1960s) and Finn, the friend he makes when he goes to board at St Oswald’s and discovers the hut on the beach where Finn lives alone. Hilary admires Finn and wants to become Finn, or the constructed image that Hilary has in his mind of Finn. The novel is about falling in love with somebody without knowing fully who they are, and whether consequently you are in love with the person or with your perception of the person. Finn represents freedom to Hilary but it is a freedom at a cost.

As a complete aside: I enjoy reading about characters named Finn, as my mum goes by the name Fin and we once had an Irish Setter named Finn (previous owners -friends- were looking for an Irish name and opted for my mum’s shortened version.)

Like dovegreyreader I am loath to divulge anything about it. It is a YA book that is gripping and poignant and highly identifiable: even grey and banal people with no imagination can stretch theirs to imagine how one’s life can suddenly -in an instant- change and the grief and loss that comes with that. For the most part this is an uplifting book that wonderfully weaves the present (the crux of the novel’s plot occuring over one day) with flashbacks of Mia’s -the seventeen year old protagonist- life in admirable seamless stream-of-conscious like connections. It is certainly a thought-provoking read and most definitely a compelling one. I love a good yarn and this is without a doubt one of them.

Read it.