11 Comments

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  Comment by corinne — July 17, 2014 @ 1:04 pm

  I read the Castle Perilous series by John DeChancie probably 6 times growing up before I realized that the Wizard guy’s name was Incarnadine. I had just been calling him Incarnate the whole time without noticing, I guess because a) I didn’t know the word incarnadine and b) incarnate seems potentially wizardly-relevant.

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  Comment by Bradley — July 17, 2014 @ 3:18 pm

  If ‘Harry Potter’ counts as a YA series than that’s it. But I think the first widely considered to be YA series I got into was The Hunger Games. While I was still in High School I heard a couple people in my English class say they liked it. A few months later I saw the first trailer to the first movie, but it was still months away from release. Made the decision to read the book first and was happy I did! Did not ruin the experience one bit thankfully.

  I currently have a couple chapters left in the last book, trying to extend my enjoyment of series for as long as possible.. DONT JUDGE ME!

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  Comment by Todd Mason — July 17, 2014 @ 8:52 pm

  1. Trivially: it’s rare for me to envy anyone their t-shirt, but that’s a striking t-shirt Ms. Findlay is wearing in the photos. 2: Rather less trivially: (assuming an even more pompous, superannuated tone than usual) It’s always refreshing to hear from an unapologetically articulate, cheerfully opinionated and casually intelligent young woman…reminds me of many of my favorite people I knew when I was that age, and stands as a very useful counterexample to Way Too Many others who seem to get more airtime.

  I started reading YA and adult short story collections before I was much into novels, not least anthologies of horror fiction and the YA anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock that Robert Arthur would ghost-edit (such as ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S GHOSTLY GALLERY or HAUNTED HOUSEFUL or SINISTER SPIES), but not too much later I discovered the Newbery Award lists of winners and runners-up, and found no lack of good to brilliant (and a few lesser) novels and biographies and such…THE LONER by Ester Wier and (indeed) ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS and SING DOWN THE MOON by Scott O’Dell and JULIE OF THE WOLVES by Jean Craighead George (you want to talk heavy…well, the protagonist’s fellow young teen new best friend in THE LONER gets her hair caught in a harvesting turbine and gets chopped up in the first few pages, while JULIE features among other things the rape of teen Julie by her arranged-marriage husband and watching the pack of wolves she’s befriended be shot down from a bush plane flying overhead). But just before that, and not altogether different, the fist novel I remember engaging with utterly would by Eleanor Clymer’s MY BROTHER STEVIE…about a (about) 10yo girl who finds herself, due to parental neglect, needing to ride herd on her junior hellion (about) 7yo eponymous brother…that one managed to outclass even the somewhat lighter Henry, Ribsey and Ramona the Pest series in my earliest free-reading years…

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  Comment by Todd Mason — July 17, 2014 @ 8:54 pm

  Or, even, first novel.

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  Comment by Todd Mason — July 18, 2014 @ 4:57 pm

  And, a harvesting combine. Bad night!

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  Comment by Erin — July 19, 2014 @ 12:19 am

  Holy shit, Vanessa was HILARIOUS today! I don’t know where else to leave a review but here’s the deal – I work in the stream lab at Oregon State University where I sort aquatic invertebrates at a microscope for hours on end, and I happened to stumble across your podcast while searching for something to stave off my boredom. When Vanessa pretended to be that fucking dog in heaven, I was cry laughing. However! Katie Findlay was the most.boring.person.ever. I guess if you enjoy listening to someone talk who is clearly in love with herself, then it might be your cup of tea. But Vanessa and Cole, keep up the good work! Send me a t-shirt why don’t ya?

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  Comment by GuanoLad — July 19, 2014 @ 8:56 am

  Being completely unfamiliar with Katie Findlay, I was instead distracted by how much her voice and personality reminded me of Eliza Coupe.

  I’m not sure what counts as a YA novel, as the division didn’t exist when I was a teen, but I would argue Sword of Shannara fits and I read that one when I was 16.

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  Comment by John in Ohio — July 19, 2014 @ 4:38 pm

  Loved “The Killing.” My first YA book was Judy Blume’s “Are You There, God, It’s Me Margaret” The second one that really stuck for me was also a Judy Blume novel: “Then again, Maybe I Won’t.” I was 12 or 13 at the time, and both those books really helped me not freak out so much about the changes I was experiencing. . . oh, and I invented masturbation about that time.

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  Comment by Todd Mason — July 21, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

  FWIW, YA as a category was somewhat in place by the time the Newbery Awards arose in the 1920s, and certainly was in place by the time such imprints as Dell Laurel Leaf, Scholastic’s TAB (Teen-Age Books), Grosset and Dunlap’s Tempo and other similar lines emerged in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

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  Comment by Alwin — July 24, 2014 @ 3:32 am

  Haha, you too Katie? A previous reply of mine to “Do you want superpowers?”…

  Not sure what to call it, absolute telekinesis, Force powers, the Accelerator ability from Toaru Majutsu no Index? Basically to control the motion of all matter actively, passively, and even internally, for example:
  actively: someone’s about to get hit by a car /pick them up and move them above the car
  passively: something traveling at injurious speed is about to hit me /it’s automatically slowed to a halt to where I can see it after feeling the pressure wave, then decide what to do with it
  internally: flight

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