Scott Westerfeld
Aug. 8th, 2006 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethHome sick. Throat infection. Bleargh.
At Caberet Nocturne last Friday, I was chatting to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jan_event after his victorious return from the San Diego comic con. He told me about a writer named Scott Westerfeld, who had written some interesting sounding YA books.
One was the Midnighters trilogy, about a group of teens born at midnight. Now every midnight, times stops and they get one secret hour to themselves. Except that secret hour is actually the last hiding place of monsters that used to hunt mankind.
andricongirl picked me up a copy of the first one to read on my sick bed. It's a light, fast read (being YA), and I can't read this sort of thing without getting flashes of Buffy. But it was fun. I would have loved it when I was a teen. Especially since the main characters are social misfits in black.
The other book JAn talked about was So Yesterday, about teenage cool-hunters in New York. It sounds like a cross between William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Max Barry's satires.
I haven't read the book yet. But I have been to its website. Which has a really interesting approach to the free sample.
It's a Flash-based photo gallery of New York scenes. And each photo is linked to a paragraph of the novel. Which means you can read enough to get a good taste of the novel. But it's easier to just go out and buy the damn thing than to read it all online.
At Caberet Nocturne last Friday, I was chatting to
jan_event after his victorious return from the San Diego comic con. He told me about a writer named Scott Westerfeld, who had written some interesting sounding YA books.One was the Midnighters trilogy, about a group of teens born at midnight. Now every midnight, times stops and they get one secret hour to themselves. Except that secret hour is actually the last hiding place of monsters that used to hunt mankind.
andricongirl picked me up a copy of the first one to read on my sick bed. It's a light, fast read (being YA), and I can't read this sort of thing without getting flashes of Buffy. But it was fun. I would have loved it when I was a teen. Especially since the main characters are social misfits in black.The other book JAn talked about was So Yesterday, about teenage cool-hunters in New York. It sounds like a cross between William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Max Barry's satires.
I haven't read the book yet. But I have been to its website. Which has a really interesting approach to the free sample.
It's a Flash-based photo gallery of New York scenes. And each photo is linked to a paragraph of the novel. Which means you can read enough to get a good taste of the novel. But it's easier to just go out and buy the damn thing than to read it all online.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 06:21 am (UTC)It's a little far away, but he's gonna be in Melbourne next May. I think he'd be interesting to hear speak.
24-26 May, 2007
Reading Matters Conference
Centre for Youth Literature
Melbourne
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/about/centreforyouthliterature/youthlit.html
Oh, and if "Midnighters" reminded you of Buffy, maybe you shouldn't read "Peeps". From his website:
"Maybe there are too many vampire novels, I thought. But that was part of the challenge, to see if I could do something that felt new and interesting, while still being full of bitey goodness. (Unsurprising confession: I am a Buffy fan.) So the book had to be original, but also icky, scary, funny, tragic, and (ahem) not sucky."
no subject
Date: 2006-08-08 11:50 pm (UTC)Buffy didn't invent the archetypes. But it distilled them so perfectly, you can't help but see it everywhere.
From the Scott Westerfeld interview on the Centre for Youth Literature site:
My favourite book is... It changes every day, but right now it's the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels.
Okay. He sounds cool. We should go hear him talk.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-09 12:36 am (UTC)While reading SY I thought to myself "ah, so this is what everyone else gets out of Harry Potter". It's a book about things I like with characters I can relate to, but because it's YA, it's very easy to read and flies along at a pretty cracking pace.
Obviously I haven't read Midnighters, but I wonder if you had a similar reaction where even though the characters are much younger than us, you can point to aspects of their lives and the culture they exist in and say "there, that's part of me". I wonder if that's normal for people our age or... There's something strange about identifying more with a novel about a 17yo cool hunter on the streets of NY than with myriad other products aimed more squarely at our demographic.
Though it does lend weight to the theory that in order to create, your brain must remain in a more child-like state and thus you'll be attracted to modern/youth culture... though perhaps that's more about creating comics and more popular art; I'm pretty certain John Updike doesn't know or care what a Pokemon is. And, of course, in the case of Westerfelds novels we are talking about youth culture as filtered through a 30ish male, so it's not unfeasible that it's presented in a way that's more palatable for me and that I'm just fooling myself as being "down with the kids".
In fact, just saying that I'm "down with the kids" - quotes or no - probably means that I am not.