From the Lists

Interesting what one may find on lists.  I went to the library armed with a list of the best books of the decade.  I don't remember whose list--perhaps Time Magazine.  Whatever it was, I went through the library looking for these books.

Now, I should say that any such list that includes such linguistice teratological extremes as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, must be one in which the term best has a special, specific and applied meaning--a meaning that would elude most of us who would define best as "those books that exceed in quality all of the other books available."  The definition of best in this case seems more like "those books whose sales exceed in quantity all of the other books available."  A reasonable definition of best, if one hopes to make one's living selling books.

That said, upon this list was a book by Meg Rosoff--a writer unfamiliar to me.  It was indicated as a book for Young Adults which in former times might have been classified as teens.  How I Live Now is an interesting book for a number of reasons.  For one, I was horrified at what is presently considered acceptable young adult material.  While there are no explicit descriptions of sex, it is pervasive in the early pages of the book and there are stark innuendoes and outright statements about the main character's father's motive in his new marriage and the nature and extent of sexual relations between a young man and all of his available girl friends.

Okay, I'm still stuck back in the world where this was considered adult material, and as far as my child is concerned, it will continue to be considered adult material, requiring that I read it first so that we are prepared to discuss it when he has finished.

However, there are other interesting things in How I Live Now, matters that in my review, I'll place below the jump so that I don't spoil the book for those who might be inclined to read it.  What is lovely, though is the writing.  It is spare and seems very realistic. The voice strikes me very much as the voice of a 14 year old girl whose father has sent her away to England just before the outbreak of a very odd sort of war.

from How I Live Now
Meg Rosoff

Now here's a good time to explain that footpaths are god's gift to people trying to travel long distances without using roads. I guess in America we'd have to crash a path through the woods but here it was all nice and civilized and half the time they were even marked with little arrows leading to gates to climb over and even when we left the farm and moved much more into open ground without fences you could still see indications of paths.

***********

The package that Baz gave me started out heavy and was getting heavier by the  minute and I was glad to put it down and figure out how to untie the covering and find out whether it was worth lugging around. Inside were all the things we probably should have thought of taking along with us and hadn't, like a  plastic bottle full of water and some flat bread and a pretty big piece of hard cheese, some salami, matches, a big folded-up lightweight plastic sheet, a nylon rope, a little metal bowl. And a gun. I wrapped the matches and the gun back up in the bag for emergencies and added the rest of the food and other things to our blankets and supplies, namely the olives and strawberry jam, which was about the extent of it. To cheer us up on our first day on the road I made jam sandwiches for breakfast and they tasted hopeful.

Now I'm not going to claim that this is the new On the Beach, Alas Babylon, or even the new Davy, but so far, the writing is fresh, the characters and events interesting, and the pace brisk.  I'll let you know how it turns out.  I should finish today.