Day 30 : Young Adult Fiction

I guess I am too late in the game here. I just discovered YA. Before you start babbling on about how either 1. it is the world's most amazing thing, or 2. how it is the worst thing that as ever happened to the world since hipster suspenders. I'll just say that I agree, with both of those opinions. In the last few weeks I've seen and/or read eight YA movies and/or books. Two I liked, a lot. Three were just bad. Four had a brilliant plot point but lost its way in the end. And then there was this one which was so good that let's just say it could easily have been good book regardless of the genre it was associated with.

Most YA stories are basically any Molly Ringwald movie meets noir french depression saga, with a happy ending. There is a group of young people, usually friends or soon to be friends, they do something wacky or adventurous that hardly any high schoolers really get to do. The people doing these stunts are usually the ones that come under the geeks or dorks in the food chain. Yeah right, a geek did a B&E into a house in the middle of the night and shaved an eyebrow off of a jock's while was asleep. Would YOU do that when you were in high school?

Then there is this some sad drama in the middle of the story. Real heart wrenching stuff. Something that would make even the hard boiled bros to go get the tissues. Most of the time those have something to do with cancer. Don't ask me why.

Then after all that, near the end of the story, the protagonist gets a moment of awakening. He learns or discovers something about his past or future or his true self. He unravels the mysteries of life. He (or she, for the PC crowd) realizes how all that has happened or will happen, is for a reason. He goes all Zen on you. This is sort of my most favorite and most hated part of this genre. I love happy endings. I love how people get to figure out things in their lives and get shit sorted out. But I also am a realist enough to know that real life doesn't have these moments of clarity.

Most of us are just specks of dust floating about in the air. Sometimes we are soaring with the wind. Sometimes we are on a pile of crap behind old Mac's backyard. Not a lot of us can tell that we have our lives sorted out, not when we were in age of  the YA-target-demographic. We barely got enough hair in our armpits or enough courage to talk to the opposite sex, whichever comes first.

That is why I guess we need these stories, I guess. That is why we need any stories, really. They help transport us into a world that is more magical than our own. There is no pessimistic, nihilistic outlook on life in that world. Everything is sweet, and young, and beautiful. Sometimes that is enough.

(Plus, it gets a few young people to read a book for a change.)

Day 68 : Mr. Mercedes - Book Review

I am a big fan of Mr. King. So no matter what he writes or says or does, I am going to read/listen/support him come what may. Call be biased, but The King is the living defacto ruler of the horror fiction. Ask any constant reader of his work you will hear only praises for him.

This book is about a mass murderer who just shows up, kills over half a dozen jobless people one dank morning, and the seemingly disappears from the face of the earth never to be heard of again. He’s dubbed Mr. Mercedes by the masses owing to the vehicle he had used to run over his unwary victims. His act had caused a lot of furor and rage, media had gone 'batshit crazy' over this 'national tragedy'. (These words have started to feel so superfluous now.)

This book is also about a retired cop who was the primary working on the investigation to catch this killer. The ex-cop is now living a life of lonesome and TV robot-like addiction. He is one of those retirees who'd left a high-functioning highly-active job and now doesn't know what to do with himself. A man without purpose, at times he sits there with a revolver in front of him, building up courage to use it on himself, to find a way out of his sad lonely life. He is not built to survive in the modern age, he does not belong in the age of so much technology.

This book is also about two other characters one younger and other older in age. One male other one female. One mentally much older than he seems, other too mentally impeded to seem of her age. These characters and their perspective bring the story into the 21st century. And add the Watson to the ex-cop’s Holmes.

This book is about Stephen King trying to bring his style of impending doom and sense of human frailty into the modern literature arena that is now too cluttered with YA books and books fantasy trilogies and sexual deviation trilogies. He has introduced a trio here that he'd use in at least one other new books of his. (Finders Keepers.) A trilogy in the making? Like the Hardy Boys. It does feel queer to think Stephen King writing a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew like books.

This is book is about Stephen King trying to bring technology into his form of scare fest. Here mostly used to solve the jigsaw puzzle of macabre. I suspect we can see something from him in this direction pretty soon. I’d definitely read that!

This is book is for the Constant Reader for whom the writer gives out little easter eggs and wink-winks with mention of his more popular works of the past. The clown, the car, the dog, the hotel.

This is book most importantly for people like me who have followed Stephen King's work throughout the decades and now at this point will ravish any smidgen of genius he outputs.

Long live the King.

Day 67 : Poems

I have a friend who is a big fan of poetry. Writes a little of it himself, mostly in tamil. And mostly in old Tamil which consists of two many complicated words that we generally used in common dialogues now. So obviously makes it a lot tougher for me to comprehend. But once he gets around to explaining to me what these words mean, I turn and compliment him on the great poem it was. Then he starts on his usual rant over how poetry is dead.

I am not kidding, this is like a routine now. Every other weak he sends over a text with a peom and voice clip of him reciting it. I reply to him asking a few meanings. He calls up to explain the meaning of them words. I understand them, he reads the whole thing again, I compliment him on how good the poem was. He starts his usual rant. Which goes on for about ten minutes, or the end of the talktime on his mobile, whichever comes first.

I do get what he's saying though. I mean, how many of us really do the whole poetry thing anyway. Everything that we see is in prose (or rap). Even the new Spoken Word fad is really just prose words written in rhyme. I sort of do miss the whole poetry style that we had in the earlier times. And some of them were really good. Poetry can say so much about so many things, in so few words. I love it!

These are the one's that most recently caught my attention - 

Day 29 : The World's Top Earning Authors

Okay. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a bookworm. I love reading them, preserving them, researching them, nitpicking them, annihilating them, sleeping with/on/beside them, forcing others to read them. By extension, I've always had a love-hate relationship with the people who write them.

So, each year I Google for the writers who have made it big the previous year; mostly out of curiosity to see if my favorite ones, and partly out of jealousy and spite. The World's Top Earning Authors

2014 didn't surprise me much. This year as well the big bucks went to young-adult writers, long-standing crime series writers and creators of romance sagas. In other words Janet Evanovich, James Patterson, Nora Roberts. Sure there are still mentions of Dan Brown, John Grisham, Danielle Steel in the list; which is not so surprising knowing that they've written so many books so far that some are bound to sell in some corners of the world. Take Steel for example, 120 books, mostly romance sagas so it's bound to earn her some moola as long as there are teen girls dreaming of their prince charming. Same applies to Nora Roberts with her 145 romances. With the sheer number of tomes with their names/copyrights on it, they are bound to earn their keep each year even if the sit at home twiddling their thumbs all day.

The list also had Stephen King, who’s Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining released in late 2013 so he had earnings coming in from there through into 2014 from his die-hard fans (me included) who'd just gobble up anything his pen outputs. Same goes with J K Rowling, who had two releases in the Cormoran Strike series under the penname Robert Galbraith. The only reason we've helped her earn her paycheck, is because of her past wonderful magical works. I've only read the Cuckoo's Calling so far, umm it's alright, but then you cannot always expect her to churn out another character like Potter.

The real surprise entries in this year's list were Veronica Roth and Jeff Kinney.

Kinney writes the Wimpy Kid series which has been a huge success and has been made into a successful movie series. So as is the trend off late - if you get a movie based on your book, in comes the millions!

Next comes Roth, she's also 26 like yours truly, only she's 17 million dollars richer. She's the writer of the Divergent series, another YA fantasy/action trilogy much like Hunger Games. I've not read the book yet, but according to what I've heard about it's supposed be pretty addictive. There's also a movie based on this book starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, if that is not a recipe for teenager hit I don't know what is. In Wiki it says, it earned more that 150% for its budget in profits, so maybe my assumption is right even if the actors are playing brother and sister in this movie and not the star crossed cancer-patient lovers they were in FIOS. Another movie based on a book, who’s author also shows up in this list.

Plus, she is cute!

Each year, I read this list and each year I wonder. How do they do it? These are the people who have made it big doing what they love doing. Sure their quality of writing may differ (E L James = yuck!), or selling out to marketing hacks for higher profits (Collins), but despite all that they have earned enough to spend the rest of their days basking in the fame and frolicking in the riches. Some even are capable of using all that down time to hone their skills, and produce better their literary output in their later years (Wilbur Smith - "Desert God").

I have immense respect to any man or woman who is able to do something they love, create something out of thin air, and earn money for doing that each day for the rest of their lives. To these people each day is an adventure, not the ponderous torture chamber that it is for the rest of the 9-to-5 masses. That is why I am so jealous of Anthony Bourdain. He gets the big money to travel all over the world, eat delicacies and spout swear-words on camera.

These guys have actually figured it all out. But what is that exactly?

Today, I think I am going spend the day pouting and pondering.