The Belgian posted:

but camus is YA

pospysyl posted:

You mentioned you read Cormier when you were a kid (I did as well). Do you still read his books? Do you find yourself returning to them? I can't see myself doing it. Even when I was a kid, I thought many of his books were puerile and ridiculous. Beyond the Chocolate War, for instance, saw the precocious bully and his friend from the previous book engaged in a battle of wits involving death traps and complicated murder plots. It all reads as ultra-masculine brinksmanship more than anything else. I find much of his work intended mostly to shock, and while that's enough precocious, bookish twelve year olds, I think you can do much better.

CountFosco posted:

I read Cormier as an adult and enjoyed them. They're a bit ridiculous in terms of sketching a world which is a bit more extreme and heightened than our own, but I enjoy that in literature. I don't feel compelled to return to them, there's too much new stuff that I have on my to-read list, but I could see rereading I Am the Cheese, definitely.

Seldom Posts posted:

Do any of you YA-haters also hate Robert Cormier?

I generally don't like YA very much but I make an exception for him. The Chocolate War I would argue is actually a better introduction to existentialism then The Stranger and is actually pitched so a teenager could understand it, without giving up depth.

chernobyl kinsman posted:

would it be at all possible to shut the gently caress up about the chocolate war

pospysyl posted:

You mentioned you read Cormier when you were a kid (I did as well). Do you still read his books? Do you find yourself returning to them? I can't see myself doing it. Even when I was a kid, I thought many of his books were puerile and ridiculous. Beyond the Chocolate War, for instance, saw the precocious bully and his friend from the previous book engaged in a battle of wits involving death traps and complicated murder plots. It all reads as ultra-masculine brinksmanship more than anything else. I find much of his work intended mostly to shock, and while that's enough precocious, bookish twelve year olds, I think you can do much better.

Seldom Posts posted:

I think the real question is why people think that if someone says they like a genre book, they need to be treated like they're in dire need of education and a life coach. I appreciate that you used the "good cop" approach, though thanks.

Seldom Posts posted:

they like a genre book,

Seldom Posts posted:

I think the real question is why people think that if someone says they like a genre book, they need to be treated like they're in dire need of education and a life coach. I appreciate that you used the "good cop" approach, though thanks.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Probably because

Seldom Posts posted:

they like a genre book

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Yeah and I like the chocolate war

Seldom Posts posted:

Mel Mudkiper posted:

just try not to get probated for something by then

CountFosco posted:

You don't have to read TCW to get a taste of New England catholicism, but it does help. Sort of like how watching a Harold Lloyd film helps give you a sense of the flavor of life in NYC in the twenties. Actually, in a very literal sense you don't have to read anything. In fact, I'd recommend you stop reading entirely, given that you seem to be consumed by an anxiety that you might read something that would spoil the image you have in your head of yourself as a very mature adult, the sort of adult that has progressed far past finding dickbutt amusing.

CountFosco posted:

You don't have to read TCW to get a taste of New England catholicism, but it does help. Sort of like how watching a Harold Lloyd film helps give you a sense of the flavor of life in NYC in the twenties. Actually, in a very literal sense you don't have to read anything. In fact, I'd recommend you stop reading entirely, given that you seem to be consumed by an anxiety that you might read something that would spoil the image you have in your head of yourself as a very mature adult, the sort of adult that has progressed far past finding dickbutt amusing.

CountFosco posted:

You don't have to read TCW to get a taste of New England catholicism, but it does help. Sort of like how watching a Harold Lloyd film helps give you a sense of the flavor of life in NYC in the twenties. Actually, in a very literal sense you don't have to read anything. In fact, I'd recommend you stop reading entirely, given that you seem to be consumed by an anxiety that you might read something that would spoil the image you have in your head of yourself as a very mature adult, the sort of adult that has progressed far past finding dickbutt amusing.

CountFosco posted:

The Chocolate War is valuable for another reason: it provides a glimpse into 20th century New England Catholicism, which has a very particular flavor of Catholicism. John Bellairs is another children's author who is also worth reading if you want to get a taste of this particular sub-culture. I recently reread "The Curse of the Blue Figurine" and I was shocked at how it seems to source its horror in an underlying anxiety over Clerical abuse of children. For those who don't know, John Bellairs was sort of like R. L. Stine for kids who found R L Stine covers a bit too goofy/gauche, because Bellairs' covers had Edward Gorey covers.

CountFosco posted:

You don't have to read TCW to get a taste of New England catholicism, but it does help. Sort of like how watching a Harold Lloyd film helps give you a sense of the flavor of life in NYC in the twenties. Actually, in a very literal sense you don't have to read anything. In fact, I'd recommend you stop reading entirely, given that you seem to be consumed by an anxiety that you might read something that would spoil the image you have in your head of yourself as a very mature adult, the sort of adult that has progressed far past finding dickbutt amusing.

Seldom Posts posted:

John Bellairs is a good writer who writes good books aimed at children? How many hot takes can this thread support?

John Bellairs is great, but he's best for an audience even younger than Cormier, like age 10-12.

quote:

Like anything that appears suddenly and grows fast, regimes that come out of nothing inevitably have shallow roots and will tend to crash in the first storm.

quote:

Also, there had been a letdown of sorts. What had I been expecting, behind that closed door, the first time? Something unspeakable, down on all fours perhaps, perversions, whips, mutilations? At the very least some minor sexual manipulation, some bygone peccadillo now denied him, prohibited by law and punishable by amputation. To be asked to play Scrabble, instead, as if we were an old married couple, or two children, seemed kinky in the extreme, a violation too in its own way. As a request it was opaque.

quote:

She’ll be allowed to nurse the baby, for a few months, they believe in mother’s milk. After that she’ll be transferred, to see if she can do it again, with someone else who needs a turn. But she’ll never be sent to the Colonies, she’ll never be declared Unwoman. That is her reward.

The Birthmobile is waiting outside, to deliver us back to our own households. The doctors are still in their van; their faces appear at the window, white blobs, like the faces of sick children confined to the house. One of them opens the door and comes towards us.

“Was it all right?” he asks, anxious.

“Yes,” I say. By now I’m wrung out, exhausted. My breasts are painful, they’re leaking a little. Fake milk, it happens this way with some of us. We sit on our benches, facing one another, as we are transported; we’re without emotion now, almost without feeling, we might be bundles of red cloth. We ache. Each of us holds in her lap a phantom, a ghost baby. What confronts us, now the excitement’s over, is our own failure. Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

quote:

That was in May. Spring has now been undergone. The tulips have had their moment and are done, shedding their petals one by one, like teeth. One day I came upon Serena Joy, kneeling on a cushion in the garden, her cane beside her on the grass. She was snipping off the seed pods with a pair of shears. I watched her sideways as I went past, with my basket of oranges and lamb chops. She was aiming, positioning the blades of the shears, then cutting with a convulsive jerk of the hands. Was it the arthritis, creeping up? Or some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers? The fruiting body. To cut off the seed pods is supposed to make the bulb store energy.

Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance.

I often amused myself this way, with small mean-minded bitter jokes about her; but not for long. It doesn’t do to linger, watching Serena Joy, from behind.

What I coveted was the shears.

quote:

Professor Wade and I have speculated in our joint paper, “The Notion of ‘Seed’ in Early Gilead,” that both – like many of the Commanders – had come in contact with a sterility-causing virus that was developed by secret pre-Gilead gene-splicing experiments with mumps, and which was intended for insertion into the supply of caviar used by top officials in Moscow. (The experiment was abandoned after the Spheres of Influence Accord, because the virus was considered too uncontrollable and therefore too dangerous by many, although some wished to sprinkle it over India.)

quote:

Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes.

Here what comes? I said.

You wait, she said. They’ve been building up to this. It’s you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother’s, but she wasn’t intending to be funny.