Another Year, Another Pile of Crazy

Welcome once again to BBAW, a festivus for the clutching-books-to-our-collective-breast-of-us.  I am thrilled to be attending this gathering of like-minders, and attempting to sum up for us all the year’s WTF.

Speaking of blogger gatherings (segues!), remember that time a bunch of us went to the Book Blogger Con in NY and it was clever and useful and interesting and had some problems but whatever, it’s still just a baby con?  Not to be confused, as Daniela Hurezano cane-wavingly confused it, with a con full of babies.  Despite the presence of actual, card-carrying dudes and women of a certain age, Hurezano insisted on swathing us all with a frothy pink brush.  All these girls, she wailed.  All these 20-year-olds! Practically infants! While being simultaneously and contradictorily being all mommies!  And what is this tweetering business anyways, with its hundreds of followers?  I hear you, Daniela.  You would like us off your lawn.  But if the snippit weren’t so calculated to be insulting, I’d be almost flattered.  *titters, hands over ID to prove advanced age*

And while we bloggers are certainly not all girlies, or mommies, or even womens, quite a lot of us are one of those things.  Women continue to dominate the writing and the buying and the reading and discussing aspects of Booklandia, and even as one camp is all SERIOUSLY JUST LET US HAVE THIS ONE THING THAT WE ARE BEST AT there are many other camps wringing their hands and exclaiming, Why won’t the boys read?! Possible reasons include: icky, girlie covers; icky, girlie protagonists; a dearth of farts.  Possible solutions include: rugged man-covers made of, like, cow hide and cigars; boy-protagonists doing boy-things like breaking windows and farting; farts.

With its typical schizophrenia, however, the intrapipes is simultaneously fretting that The childrens, they are not reading! and OH NOES THE CHILDRENS, THEY READ!  Particularly when it comes to books that teens (who are really just Large Children, when you think about it *petitions to have YA re-labeled LC*) choose to hide behind their math texts.  Meghan Cox Gurdon’s shocking expose of the unnecessary and gratuitous darkness hidden in YA novels was both eye-opening and even-handHAHAHAHA no, sorry.  I can’t do it.  MCG’s steaming pile of crazy betrays a gross misunderstanding of teenage existence, and raises the question of what she was doing between the ages of 12 and 20 (probably napping).

Unfortunatemente for the Greater Good, no few amount of people read that article and were like Amen, sister (were you people ALL napping through your teens?).   Thank God for Maureen Johnson, Baroness of Twitter and its Environs, who led the #YASaves crusade to remind the world that the teenage years are Actually Super-Shitty and Weird, and that novels involving bullying, sexual abuse, getting drunk and liking it, falling in love with someone you shouldn’t (even if contemporary YA too often substitutes INTERSPECIES ROMANCE AND DESTINY for, say, class or racial divides), that these novels are illustrative of rather than responsible for our current Teenage Wastelands, and that they serve to remind aforementioned Large Children that they are not alone (unless you are in love with a living, breathing, jorts-wearing werewolf, in which case I swear to God you are alone in that).

But everyone loves to get all het up about their books, and there’s no better place for hetting than the nettlewebz.  Like that time when, as kate.o.d. so succinctly put it, ‘Bitch Media made a list of feminist heroines (or something) and they included “Tender Morsels” and then others said “RAWR! NO!” and they said “oops, sorry” then different others said “AUAUGAGGHH WHATAREYOUDOING?” and they said “EEPS! we didn’t even read it” and i [and much of the thinking world] said “you guys are idiots”.’  Remember that?  Knickers in knots all over the pipes.

And sometimes it seems like that’s all the internet is, knotted knickers.  Knickers calling Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak out for being prOn (I mean, if you like reading about the rape of high-school-aged girls), knickers bowdlerizing Huck Finn for containing a Culturally-Insensitive Word and other knickers lambasting the bowdlerizers (I plead all kinds of fifths on this one), knickers the HuffPo claiming young people can’t write good and shouldn’t win Orange prizes neither, or the world’s most misogynistic knicker VS Naipaul saying everything he’s ever said, but particularly that stuff about women-writers.  But sometimes airing your unnecessary bigotry backfires on you, and you become the inadvertent cause behind the #buyabiggaynovelforscottcardday movement.

So even though it feels like we’re living in a Jodi Picoult novel, all drama covered in kvetch wrapped up in some shouting, Book Blogger Appreciation Week reminds us that there is more to celebrate than to shake a stick at, that the Indie Lit Awards and Nerds Heart YA and the INSPYs and other blogger-driven fanfares are more than just the time-wasters of stay-at-home cat-loving mommy-bloggers, but the careful and passionate products of a diverse pile of book fiends. There may be nutters who bite people to get at a pile of ARCs, there may be authors who STILL think a heaping pile of cusses is a savvy response to an unfavorable review (which, at this point, is like sticking your hand into a fire because NO ONE ELSE SEEMS TO HAVE SUFFERED ADVERSE EFFECTS FROM SAME) but those have naught to do with us.  Our knickers are for throwing, not for knotting, and I – in the most respectful and platonic fashion imaginable – do hereby throw my knickers at the lot of you.

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