“ I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. ”
books read in 2019 → oranges are not the only fruit by jeanette winterson
“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently.”
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is one of the quintessential queer coming-of-age novels (well, more like a barely veiled memoir, but okay). It tells the story of a young Jeanette, growing up in a strict religious household in a small English town. Because of her upbringing, she has trouble fitting in both at school and in the general community. Her mother bears this outsider status as a badge of honour, but young Jeanette sometimes feels frustrated that some people don’t understand her. And then she falls in love with another girl.
Nine Books To Read Right Now: YA for People Who Don’t Read YA (but also still want to know what it’s about)
It seems like the YA buzz and controversy have continued over into 2015, and I’ve been seeing a lot of lists of “YA Books for People Who Don’t Read YA” and I’ve gotta say that I’ve been rolling my eyes a lot. Don’t get me wrong - I want people to read books that I love. I know the definition of YA is fluid, for the most part, but I’m pretty sure To Kill a Mockingbird wouldn’t be sold as YA, there’s a distinct line between middle grade and young adult, and there are books beyond The Giver and The Fault in Our Stars.
Herewith I present you nine of my favorite YA books published in the last decade or so, in no particular order. These aren’t necessarily superstars of YA, and not all of them are straight contemporary lit. Below I’ve listed the book, a short summary, and who I recommend it for.
Feel free to reblog and add on! I know I didn’t get everything and I know I haven’t read everything that could be on this list, so I’d love this to be collaborative.
Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer, is days away from the life of her dreams when something threatens to expose the shocking truth of her achievement. Within the walls of the Aurora Hills juvenile detention center, there’s Amber, locked up for so long she can’t imagine freedom. Tying their two worlds together is Orianna, who holds the key to unlocking all the girls’ darkest mysteries.
What really happened on the night Orianna stepped between Violet and her tormentors? What really happened on two strange nights at Aurora Hills? Will Amber and Violet and Orianna ever get the justice they deserve—in this life or in another one?
For fans of…Lauren Beukes, Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link
Lara Jean has never openly admitted her crushes, but instead wrote each boy a letter about how she felt, sealed it, and hid it in a box under her bed. But one day Lara Jean discovers that somehow her secret box of letters has been mailed, causing all her crushes from her past to confront her about the letters: her first kiss, the boy from summer camp, even her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Josh. As she learns to deal with her past loves face to face, Lara Jean discovers that something good may come out of these letters after all.
For fans of…Emma Straub, Jean Kwok, Rainbow Rowell
In 1959 Virginia, the lives of two girls on opposite sides of the battle for civil rights will be changed forever. Sarah Dunbar is one of the first black students to attend the previously all-white Jefferson High School. An honors student at her old school, she is put into remedial classes, spit on and tormented daily. Linda Hairston is the daughter of one of the town’s most vocal opponents of school integration. She has been taught all her life that the races should be kept “separate but equal.” Forced to work together on a school project, Sarah and Linda must confront harsh truths about race, power and how they really feel about one another.
For fans of…Zadie Smith, Harper Lee, Octavia E. Butler
When Cameron Post’s parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief they’ll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn’t last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone (as her grandmother might say), and Cam becomes an expert at both.
Then Coley Taylor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship — one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to ‘fix’ her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self — even if she’s not exactly sure who that is.
For fans of…Cheryl Strayed, Jeanette Winterson, Alison Bechdel
She’s eating again, dating guys who are almost appropriate, and well on her way to becoming an elite ballet dancer. But when her oldest friend, Donovan, returns home after spending four long years with his kidnapper, Theo starts reliving memories about his abduction—and his abductor.
Donovan isn’t talking about what happened, and even though Theo knows she didn’t do anything wrong, telling the truth would put everything she’s been living for at risk. But keeping quiet might be worse.
For fans of…Jodi Picoult, Maria Semple, Misty Copeland
Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy’s best friend and trusted lieutenant. Beth calls the shots and Addy carries them out, a long-established order of things that has brought them to the pinnacle of their high-school careers. Now they’re seniors who rule the intensely competitive cheer squad, feared and followed by the other girls – until the young new coach arrives.
Cool and commanding, an emissary from the adult world just beyond their reach, Coach Colette French draws Addy and the other cheerleaders into her life. Then a suicide focuses a police investigation on Coach and her squad. After the first wave of shock and grief, Addy tries to uncover the truth behind the death – and learns that the boundary between loyalty and love can be dangerous terrain.
For fans of…Liane Moriarty, Tana French, Paula Hawkins
The sheriff’s son, Kellan Turner, is not the golden boy everyone thinks he is, and Romy Grey knows that for a fact. Because no one wants to believe a girl from the wrong side of town, the truth about him has cost her everything—friends, family, and her community. Branded a liar and bullied relentlessly by a group of kids she used to hang out with, Romy’s only refuge is the diner where she works outside of town. No one knows her name or her past there; she can finally be anonymous. But when a girl with ties to both Romy and Kellan goes missing after a party, and news of him assaulting another girl in a town close by gets out, Romy must decide whether she wants to fight or carry the burden of knowing more girls could get hurt if she doesn’t speak up. Nobody believed her the first time—and they certainly won’t now — but the cost of her silence might be more than she can bear.
For fans of…Roxane Gay, Alice Sebold, Laurie Halse Anderson
This innovative, heartfelt debut novel tells the story of a girl who’s literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she’s ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.
For fans of…Emma Donoghue, Jami Attenberg, Jenny Offill
Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight - she’s a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king’s thug.
When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace - or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away.
The Graceling Trilogy as a whole really is required reading here.
For fans of…Erika Johansen, Diana Gabaldon, Naomi Novik
There you have it! Some of my recent favorites - what are yours?
“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”
“We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split. I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached.”
“Call it a wild perversity or a wild optimism, but they were right, our ancestors, to celebrate what they feared. What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there be a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.”
—Jeanette Winterson, “The Green Man” | The World and Other Places: Stories
“We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.”
—Jeanette Winterson, from Lighthousekeeping (viawishbzne)
molly fisk winter sun \via@you-photo \ s. osborn blasphemies at the 5th street station \via@you-photo \ jeanette winterson lighthousekeeping\@omenalehto
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson / Ladder
Our primary meaning [of the word happiness] now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive… you know… But earlier meanings build in the hap - in Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, 'gehapp’ - the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play. How you meet your 'hap’ will determine whether or not you can be 'happy’. What the Americans, in their constitution, call 'the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not 'the right to happiness’), is the right to swim upstream, salmon-wise.
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not all the same as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine. If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass - they have to - because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life. There’s the hap - the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use - that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms. The pursuit isn’t all or nothing - it’s all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson / Tree in an abandoned building, Boston
When peope say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It’s a finding place.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson / Faded Mural in Essaouira
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves, both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time. I like the line in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets - ‘that which is only living/Can only die’. That’s time’s arrow, the flight from womb to tomb. But life is more than an arrow.
“Call it a wild perversity or a wild optimism, but they were right, our ancestors, to celebrate what they feared. What I fear I avoid. What I fear I pretend does not exist. What I fear is quietly killing me. Would there be a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.”
—Jeanette Winterson, “The Green Man” | The World and Other Places: Stories
