“You should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children,” Ruth Graham wrote in Slate last week, stirring the proverbial pot of new adult fans of Young Adult bestsellers like The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park. A host of YA-defenders rose up to shout her down. “You should never be embarrassed by any book you enjoy,” Hillary Kelly responds in The New Republic, unrealistically (we’re embarrassed by quite a lot). For the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg cites examples of worthwhile, complex YA fiction we can certainly support: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Pushcart War, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Westing Game.
To read or NA to read
Go Go Gadget Classical Compositions
Fun Fact: the Inspector Gadget theme song is actually based on Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Seriously.
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Quick Links
The LBC gets name-dropped by the Inside Google Book Search blog.After a too-long hiatus, Tingle Alley is back. Rejoice!The seamy underbelly of the celebrity cookbook industry.
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Because Reading and Driving at the Same Time is Dangerous, People!
“5 Under 35” honoree Lydia Peelle reads you some “fiction for driving across America” at BOMB.
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Music Inspired by Literature
Have you ever wondered how Kafka’s The Trial would translate in music? Philip Glass adapted the novel, and more, to music. Read about other music inspired by literature at Ploughshares. For more on music and literature, check out our Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music column.
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The Island of Last Chances
Have you ever had a script rejected? Did you reassure yourself it had to do with just about anything other than the quality of your writing? Well now’s the chance to put your money where your mouth is – a new Hollywood startup called Adaptive Studios is “rummaging through the trash” and breathing new life into dead movie scripts.
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Autobiographical Revisionism
“‘It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.’ The autobiography of the imagination then is an autobiography of our base desires, the things we haven’t done but have longed for. It is our fantasies, our secrets from which we curate by redaction how someone else sees us. It is an autobiography of instinct, desire.” Emilia Phillips on poetry as the autobiography of the imagination, over at Ploughshares.