Dreaming dystopia

Anyone who spends time with books and teenagers spends a lot of time in dystopias. Novels like Matched (Ally Condie), Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), the Uglies series (Scott Westerfeld), Truancy (Isamu Fukui), and Unwind (Neal Shusterman) inhabit stage-directed worlds in which nothing is quite what it seems and dark secrets abound. These are eerie, dangerous crystal kingdoms set up to be shattered by their teenage protagonists.

Because of their popularity, the nation's top literary critics just can't avoid these stories, mostly crafted by adults to be devoured by teenagers. What do these books say about the way teens view the adult world? What does it say about their dreams of the future? What does it say about their anxiety in the present? Last year, Laura Miller wrote a brilliant review of The Hunger Games series in the New Yorker. I'm re-posting it here.

Charles McGrath, acknowledging that these stories might find even larger adult audiences in movie theaters as film adaptations, says in the New York Times Magazine today:

"Where grown-up dystopian novels — books like “Oryx and Crake,” by Margaret Atwood; “The Pesthouse,” by Jim Crace; and “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy — lately seem to dwell on a vision of a bestial, plague-ridden world where civilization has collapsed, these new Y.A. books imagine something far worse: a world where civilization feels an awful lot like high school and everyone is under pressure to conform."

 Read the rest of Charles McGrath's story here.

I love that these stories are getting the attention that they deserve, but I disagree with the idea that these books are a lot like high school. The conformity is the potential nightmare of the adult world, an existence teens might be heading for if they're not alert. Kids are not afraid of the lives they are living, they are afraid of living the lives of their parents.

Children's Author on Libraries

I keep saying I'm going to stop writing about the closing of public and school libraries and make this blog a little more fun. And really, I will. But it's hard for me to ignore the issue since things keep getting worse, at least here in Southern California.

I'm newly riled up by impending budget cuts and the need for Measure L, which will increase city funding of Los Angeles libraries, currently closed entirely on Sundays and Mondays. (This frustrates me not only as someone who cares about the field, but as the mother of a book-loving 4 1/2 year old.)

Susan Patron, a wonderful author whose book The Higher Power of Lucky won the 2007 Newbery, has a well-argued op-ed in today's LA Times.

Patron, who worked for 35 years at the Los Angeles Public Library, starts off by talking about the role libraries played in her life as a kid in LA.

Then she describes about the political and economic issues:

The measure doesn't call for a tax increase. It calls for a change in city priorities, a change in how we allocate the funds Los Angeles already collects. That change of priorities is crucial. The city's leaders have shown that they cannot be trusted to weigh the worth of our library appropriately as they grapple with L.A.'s deficits. Their unwillingness to give the library its fair share means that the voters must step in.

Measure L will restore six-day-a-week service to all our libraries, and eventually seven-day-a-week service to our Central Library and six regional libraries. It will increase support for afterschool and summer programs, and provide funding for books and other materials.

Measure L has been endorsed by a wide range of business and civic leaders, including former MayorRichard Riordan and authors Ray Bradbury, Joseph Wambaugh and Janet Fitch.

Children have little say in their quality of life; they entrust that to us. I'm voting yes on Measure L — yes on open doors, yes on big ideas, yes on a welcoming refuge at their branch library for every kid in every neighborhood.

Please pass Susan's piece around if you share my strong feelings about books and reading, and if your life has been made better by them.

A holler in Britain, a (long-awaited) peep in L.A.

I'd just locked up the library and jumped in my car when an NPR story about protests in Britain over public library closures grabbed my attention. The main activist in the movement, mom Lauren Smith, who said that she'd never fought for a cause before, summed-up the scope of the tragedy brilliantly:

"Smith said politicians in London don't appreciate the role libraries play — as gathering spots for young children to read ... 'all the way to a 93-year-old lady whose husband had died, she only spoke to one person on a Tuesday, when she went to the library, and that was the person in the library branch, behind the counter.'"

If only library-closure protests looked like this one.

Sounds so familiar. In one protest, desperate patrons went to a threatened neighborhood library and checked out every single book.  A musician is doing a library tour. Read -- or listen -- to the story here.



After being amazed by the groundswell in Egypt and witnessing its effects, I've often thought about the lack of protest over so many lamentable things in America. On a local note, it's been a little sad to see the lack of outrage over the Los Angeles Public Library closures. Are library lovers just not the types to raise a ruckus over something that impacts their lives weekly?

Now there is something that those quieter people can do. Just got the list of endorsements for Measure L, the "fund the library" measure for the city, and was happy to see some of my friends (like David Kipen) and favorite writers (Pico Iyer, Ray Bradbury) speaking out for it. Check out Measure L's endorsements here.

L.A. residents need to take a tip from the British -- time for some news-grabbing protests here, before it's too late.

Huck's fate

The other day, an instructional aide at my school asked me how I felt about new revisions to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. "I think it's horrible," I replied. "It's censorship!" Seemed like a no-brainer.

Happily, I actually got a few seconds to scan the New York Times' Sunday Opinion today and had a chance to read a more nuanced view of the situation. I've been thinking a lot about how we need to revolutionize the way we teach reading and novels in high school, and there's plenty of food for thought in writer Lorrie Moore's excellent take on the Twain debate -- and the issue of "the n word" -- "Send Huck Finn to College."

Here's an excerpt from Moore's piece:

"There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which vibrantly speaks to every teenager’s predicament when achievement in life is at odds with the demoralized condition of his peer group, is a welcoming book for boys. There must certainly be others and their titles should be shared. Teachers I meet everywhere are always asking, How can we get boys to read? And the answer is, simply, book by book."

She's speaking as a mother who has, first-hand, experienced the withering impact of giving a child the wrong book at the wrong time. (She seems to have a black son, to whom the novel's language has a special sting -- though the term is used promiscuously in the hip-hop he listens to.)

To read the entire article, click here. Moore, an amazing short story writer, wrote the powerful The Gate at the Stairs, one of the most brutal and beautiful novels that I've read in the past decade.

Brown's Brutal Cuts

It's hard to envision where California will be in five years after the reality of cuts upon cuts transforms our already troubled state. Governor Brown's cuts come on top of devastating library layoffs and weekly closures and they will take down literacy programs.

What will happen when people become used to a closed library and what will be the percentage of the populace who struggles to read -- or is entirely illiterate?

Click here to read the Library Journal's account of exactly where these cuts will hit.

In the article, Paymaneh Maghsoud, head of the California Library Association, says that libraries have done more than their fair share in placing their people and programs on the state chopping block:

"The revelation ... that Governor Brown is proposing to eliminate all $30 million in state funding for three of California's most valuable public library programs ...is both disastrous and disheartening," she said in a press release.

Maghsoudi said that library funding had already been cut 75 percent under the two previous administrations.

"The public libraries have done more than their share to assist with the budget deficit over the years by absorbing painful cuts," she said. "The time has come to stop the bleeding and CLA respectfully asks the members of the legislature to oppose these proposed cuts to our valuable programs."

Shaming the teachers

Recently, I opened the Los Angeles Times online and the big story of the day was about evaluating teachers. A man with white hair and jeans was pictured in action in his classroom, and I assumed that he was one of the top-ranked because of his prominence. Rather, he was one of the worst-ranked. The Times set the scene for his official public shaming.

Most teachers are eager to learn more about their effectiveness and how they can improve. When I posted the piece on Facebook, upset about its inherent meanness and the focus on standardized test scores, former and current teachers laid into me. They were chomping at the bit for something like this.

With this story, the Times has created its own news, stirring up a firestorm that has prompted many subsequent articles and a slew of smart comments. In their relatively new role as LAUSD watchdog, they've exposed some travesties, like the "holding tank" of teachers who can't be in a classroom because of serious charges against them but who are still collecting salaries, sometimes paid to stew for years. Another piece on the ridiculously soft evaluation process was dead on.

This is something different. Here's the original article, "How Good Is Your Child's Teacher?" 

Diane Ravitch, author and education expert who has come down hard against standardized test culture, called the article "disgraceful."

My favorite response to it has been "The Measure of Our Worth," an Op-Ed in the LA Times by Ivanhoe Elementary fifth-grade teacher Kim Jones.

Arne Duncan says that releasing this data (based on a "value added" approach that many experts distrust) is about looking at success. It's more about looking at failure -- the failure of an education system that is becoming more about standardized test scores and less and less about nurturing creativity and curiosity.

Where's the middle class hero?

It seemed for a little while that Congress was going to be the superheroes for public schools and laid-off teachers, but, alas, their interrupted vacations were for naught. Rather than spend the money now to rehire educators, most districts have decided to sit on the funds and prepare for the budget-cutting storms to come. Here's the New York Times story about the crushed hopes of laid-off teachers.

The face of the teacher in the photo echoes Dorothea Lange's brutal Great Depression photographs -- which is apt.

Whenever I read the comment threads about these stories, somebody inevitably says something to the tune of, "What makes teachers so special? They need to take the hit like so many others." Problem is, Sir (and it's always a sir), that we're not just talking about people's jobs; this is about children and our already over-strapped, struggling public school systems.

It makes sense in these dark times that so many people are turning to Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson's blockbuster fiction trilogy. Lower class, tiny, female, fragile, furious, doll-like, brilliant, anti-authority, anti-consumer, and vengeful, Salander is a great hero for our troubled times.