After years of being told by my geek idol, Stephen Fry, that I should get off my duff and read some Evelyn Waugh, I finally did.

I was dreading it; I know not why. Wait, yes I do: because I’m lazy and I thought this infamous twentieth century satirist would require me to use my stupid brain, and I don’t like reading if it feels like homework. But Waugh isn’t homework. He (not she; like Lindsay and Leslie and Aubrey, I guess Evelyn is a man’s name or at least used to be until women, like they always do with everything worth having, stole it for themselves) is good times.

Waugh is the classic British humorist; dry, biting, and homosexual. There’s just nothing about him and his first novel, Decline and Fall, that I didn’t absolutely love. This book caused quite the scandal in its time, being a thinly veiled treatise on the lives of the idle rich and the people who wished they were rich enough to be idle. Parties are thrown, modern art is commissioned, reputations are ruined, tea is served, butlers raise eyebrows, and in the end everything turns out all right, if absurd.

I thought that Waugh would butt heads with my love of Wodehouse, who is a kinder, gentler British humorist working in much the same topic at much the same era. But it’s a complimentary love, so I’ll allow it. Highly recommended to anyone who wants a proper English guffaw.

Currently reading: Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr

OK so here’s the deal. I never had to read Harper Lee’s American classic To Kill a Mockingbird in school. So I didn’t.

Them’s just the breaks, guys. I didn’t read a lot of books that most kids had to in school because I was part of a super-secret quasi-European intensive training program designed to keep high school students from ever being invited to parties. We had to read Hamlet, Ethan Fromme, French existentialists, Romeo & Juliet, Scandinavian drama queens, 1984 (twice), Animal Farm (thrice), Fahrenheit 451, Macbeth, Things Fall Apart, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Julius Caesar, John Donne, The Scarlet Letter, and I THINK Frankenstein. After that riveting all-star lineup, can you really blame me for not touching any high school recommended reading I wasn’t going to be tested on?

But then, to my complete and total shame, I saw that it was To Kill a Mockingbird’s 50th anniversary. And I had still not read it. So I dusted off an old second-hand copy I had found years ago and shoved on my shelf. And I got reading. And now I finally get why all my bookish friends can always cry “Mockingbird” when asked what book affected them most as a child.

Having never read the book or even seen the classic film, I was willfully ignorant of what TKAM was about. I knew vaguely that it had something to do with a lawyer and racism but that’s like saying the Empire State Building has something to do with floors and steel girders. It’s true but MAN does it miss the important things. The book manages to be this time capsule for this era I’ve never seen while at the same time feeling like a modern story, with little girl who could have been me when I was growing up (minus the dramatic fire, court case, and violent showdown).

Probably the most ridick part of reading this book was when I was about halfway through and got spoiled by a scene in ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars. The high school characters are discussing the book in their English class (like normal students) and totally ruined the ending for me! UGH! Like, okay, I know that after 50 years I probably can’t ask for spoiler alerts but still. I wanted to be surprised.

Anyway! I guess my point is it’s never too late to pick up a classic you missed out on when you were young. That’s what makes them classics.

Currently reading: seeeekret manuscript thingy

Once in a blue moon, I will chat about a book I’m working on at HarperCollins. I’ll be sure to be transparent about that when it happens, so here you go: Wings is a HarperTeen book, and I work for HarperTeen, and when I was brought on I was giving a gigantic stack of shiny YA books which I intend to plow through little by little.

So! Wings by Aprilynne Pike is the first in a series of YA books about Laurel, a girl who moves to a new town, starts going to public school for the first time, and discovers she’s a faerie. Except instead of sprouting gossamer butterfly-like wings, her “wings” more resemble a huge-petaled flower. That’s because she’s more plant than animal, as she discovers through her sciencey human friend David and her mystical faerie friend, Tamani. Both these dudes are way hot and want to smooch Laurel tons. Oh! And there’s also some evil trolls trying to find the hidden gate to Avalon, the faerie kingdom.

A quick word on love triangles: they’re a really good way to incorporate conflict into a story, and maybe you’re sick of seeing two guys fight over one gal. But what I liked about this love triangle was that Laurel was a strong enough character to say, “Geez guys, I think we have these huge evil troll things to worry about right now. I dunno, maybe we can worry about who smooches who when we’re out of certain danger?” Fist pump, girlfriend!

Laurel is a gentle character who still manages to make tough decisions about things like her relationships with these boys, her identity, and her place between the human and faerie world. I know last week I said I worried about how young heroines were sometimes portrayed as boy-crazy airheads, but Laurel isn’t that girl. She’s pretty level-headed, and I think that’s really refreshing.

Can I just say I love books about girls who discover they’re WAY different than all the other kids at school? It’s such an indulgent, delightful kind of story. When I was 6, I believed I was a robot from outer space sent to record human behavior. It was the biggest disappointment to hear from the doctor every year that I was normal, normal, normal. Nobody feels normal, ever, and I think that’s why I love stories that turn that universal anxiety into something concrete.

The other thing I didn’t like about this installment was the long buildup to the action at the end, but that could have just been my geeky propensity to skip the origin story and get straight to the adventure, comic book style.

If you want to check out the first few chapters of Wings, click the widget above. And if you want to sneak a peek at the next book in the series, Spells, click here:

Currently reading: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Recently I read volumes 1-7 of the graphic novel, The Runaways. My roommate had recommended it to me as something that might appeal to my background as a huge comic book nerd.

Before I start talking about The Runaways, a quick word on criticism:

Thinking about criticism inevitably reminds me of my first and only college theatre course. I think it was literally called Theater 101. Anyway, it was a simple class: we went to plays and then we were supposed to discuss them and write papers on them. The course was led by Fred, a 50-something professor who always wore a sweater tied around his neck and highly shined patent leather shoes. I liked him fine; he had great hair. I didn’t like the class much at first, though.

I had never been very interested in the theatre. Growing up in south Florida, what few plays I had ever seen where local productions put on by friends, and attending these events gave me a distinctly uncomfortable feeling, like being embarrassed by the people I knew who were on stage. Once or twice I was driven down to West Palm to see one of the traveling Broadway shows, but the rare spectacle of a musical with a budget shocked the Floridian audience into appreciative silence. Criticism was the furthest thing from our minds.

Because of this background, I found it very difficult to attend the theatre, let alone be critical of it. For the first class of Theater 101, Fred wanted us to go around the room and say something we thought could be improved in the show we had just seen, Chicago. It was a small class and but by the time it got to me, all the technical quibbles I could have had were already taken (the sound was off, the theatre was too cold, etc.). I had nothing to contribute.

Fred wasn’t having it. “It was not a very good performance,” he said. “There must be something you can be critical of.”

I fidgeted and said, “I’m just sort of happy they all showed up and sang.”

Fred laughed for about ten straight minutes. And then he explained why critics (a class of people I had, until that moment, considered somewhere between nightcrawlers and horseflies in terms of usefulness) mattered: because if we didn’t understand what made a good show, there would be no need for theatre companies to try to put on good shows. I didn’t see the logic in that, since plenty of bad shows make lots of money (Mama Mia, for example, once made a friend of mine physically ill), but Fred said it was the principal of the thing.

OK! So being critical, to bring it all back, is a good thing because it provides a service. So I don’t feel saying that The Runaways failed as a story of rebellion, as a story of youth, and as a story of heroism. The premise is that a ragtag group of teens and tweens discover their parents are evil villains who constitute a secret organization bent on destroying the world. The children rebel against their parents and form their own crime-fighting league whose only tenants are that they don’t trust adults. Most of the kids looked up to classic comic book heroes like Wolverine and Captain America, but in the course of their adventures, are disillusioned by these adults. Oh, and also, they end up getting their parents killed.

There’s the usual teen angst and drama, and that wouldn’t bug me at all if the characters weren’t forced to speak in such a stilted, adult-trying-so-incredibly-hard-to-be-a-witty-youngster way. Kids don’t speak that way; nobody speaks that way. The creators wanted to set The Runaways apart from your Spider-Mans and your Iron Mans, but instead The Runaways becomes an amplified version of those corny old tales filled with snappy, punny dialog and predictable plot twists.

Perhaps to appeal to a generation of young female readers in a bid to get them hooked on comics, the gang includes tons of girls. I give that a thumbs up; chick heroes are good times. But the same tired tropes get applied to this new generation as the old. The girls are almost exclusively tied up in relationship drama, whereas the male characters are more rounded, more concerned with issues of fate, honor, loyalty, and strength. Even the one exciting point in the story, when the female leader is confronted with a version of herself from the distant future who promptly dies, she doesn’t seem as worried about her fate and career as a superhero as she is with her boyfriend. I mean, COME ON. Future!You zooms all the way to the past, dies from wounds sustained in a Very Important Battle, warns you with her dying breath, and your reaction is to smooch some more with the dude who is clearly your intellectual inferior to the point of caricature and who doesn’t ever have any powers fercrissake!

Deep breath, Teej.

Reading The Runaways was not the fun romp I like to get out of a comic book, and it wasn’t as interesting as a story should be, and its characters weren’t as developed as teens or people. It was okay, and the art was pretty rad, but I wouldn’t read any more of it.

And now, some jokes about critics:

Currently reading: Wings by Aprilynne Pike

I–I swear, this has never happened with any of the other books I’ve been with. I’m not the kind of gal that does stuff like this! But I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I got to quit you.

It’s not your fault. I loved Kavalier and Clay. I was so excited to read you, but I guess I just wasn’t ready.

I’m at a weird time in my life right now! Lots of changes, lots of uncertainty. And I guess the hardboiled, nouveau-noir prose was just too much for my frazzled nerves. The deluge of Yiddish phrases that I couldn’t keep up with probably didn’t help. But I hate feeling like a quitter! I’ve stuck through more difficult books than this! But I was younger then, and my free time was less precious, and my brain could take the taxing.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago. I had invested almost 6 hours into the FX show Rescue Me, which I know is a good show and I know I should watch it. But watching it was just so hard. It made me sad, and I’d rather not feel sad on the weekend. Does this mean I’d rather feed my brain fluff? You bet your Ayn Rand it does.

Maybe this is just a phase and I’ll be back to tackling heavy books in a month or so. But maybe it’s not; maybe this is the reader I really am: impatient, whiny, easily hurt or confused, and given to massive headaches at the sight of lots of consonants all jumbled together. And as much as I hate to surrender, I’ll just have to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Currently reading: The Runaways graphic novels

I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I had read his Virgin Suicides back in college, but I didn’t remember much of that book. So I went into Middlesex as a kind of blank slate.

One sentence summary: Cal, who is affected by a rare form of hermaphrodism, tells the epic story of his Greek family’s history and his rocky childhood as a girl. (I like one sentence summaries because it’s probably the thing that got the agent, editor, sales coordinator, and bookstore buyer all riled up to begin with. So there you have it, the simplistic thingie that got the book on shelves.)

Cal is a disarming narrator, and he makes good use of his hermaphrodite body to tempt us through the century of backstory he slogs through. I say “slog” because it’s the anticipation of The Reveal that keeps you reading. You feel disgusting thinking it, but the truth is our innate curiosity about people who are different–especially if they’re different below the belt–makes us do crazy things. Like root for incest. But Eugenides gives us all a pass when Cal performs in a sideshow as a sexual freak, only to realize the audience is genuinely attracted to him. It frees him from thinking there’s anything wrong with him, and it frees us from thinking we’re going to hell. Hooray!

Through the wonders of Teh Internet, I happen to know some people who are trans or intersex or eunuch-identified, and it’s a very difficult thing not to run to them and say, “So heeeeeey, Middlesex. Thumbs up or down?” It would be the equivalent of walking up to a British person and saying, “So heeeeey, new Doctor Who. Are you guys for him or no?” One would hope one could form one’s own opinion about the value of a work that could so easily represent or misrepresent a segment of the population. So leaving all my quasi-normative guilt aside, I say thumbs up for Middlesex. It was good in a way that the narrator’s voice followed me around for a little while, and that’s pretty neat.

Also, did I mention the rooting for incest thing? It might sound creepy, but props to anyone who can get a reader to do that!

The moral of the story, if we dealt in one-sentence summaries for our lives themselves, would probably be: Good books make you feel things you didn’t want to feel, and they’re so good, you can’t even feel guilty about it.

Currently reading: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon