{"id":4725,"date":"2016-03-16T22:33:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T11:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=4725"},"modified":"2016-12-16T17:01:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T06:01:07","slug":"what-ive-been-reading-some-really-really-annoying-books-plus-one-enjoyable-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/what-ive-been-reading-some-really-really-annoying-books-plus-one-enjoyable-book\/","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019ve Been Reading: Some Really, Really Annoying Books, Plus One Enjoyable Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'BlackI\u2019m not going to write about the really, really annoying books I\u2019ve just read (even though I have many thoughts about them) because those authors don\u2019t deserve any more publicity. However, I did enjoy Black Swan Green<\/em><\/a> by David Mitchell. This novel, apparently semi-autobiographical<\/a>, describes a year in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason, who lives in a small village in Worcestershire, England in 1982. As Margaret Thatcher revels in the carnage of the Falklands War, Jason concentrates on his own struggle for survival. At home, his father is angry and often absent, his mother is lonely and frustrated, and his sister Julia, an inconstant ally, is about to leave for university. At school, Jason is bullied for being clever, sensitive and worst of all, a stammerer. He spends a great deal of time and energy hiding his true self, engaging in stupid and self-destructive stunts in (mostly futile) attempts to show how \u201chard\u201d he is. There are innumerable ridiculous rules about how boys in his community need to behave in order to avoid that dreaded label, \u201cgay\u201d. Pretty much anything Jason enjoys in life, including being friends with girls, is \u201cgay\u201d and is punished with social exclusion and outright violence. Even some of his teachers join in with the harassment. Fortunately, Jason is resourceful, gathers up some courage and a few supporters, and manages to engineer some sort of victory by the end.<\/p>\n

The novel is supposedly written by clueless thirteen-year-old Jason, although the insights revealed often sound more like an adult narrator looking back on his childhood. At times, I was also irritated by the author’s decision to use a combination of teenage-speak and a very obtrusive form of contractions:<\/p>\n

\u201cSchool corridors\u2019re sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces\u2019re now the silentest.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even worse was when Jason lapsed into poetry:<\/p>\n

\u201cAutumn\u2019s fungussy, berries\u2019re manky, leaves\u2019re rusting, V\u2019s of long-distance birds\u2019re crossing the sky, evenings\u2019re smoky, nights\u2019re cold, autumn\u2019s nearly dead.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But I enjoyed Jason\u2019s thoughts about his development as a writer (\u201cIf you show someone something you\u2019ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say \u2018When you\u2019re ready.\u2019\u201d). And readers who can remember the 1980s will enjoy all the pop culture references and the jokes (for instance, listening to \u201cthat ace<\/em> song, \u2018Olive\u2019s Salami<\/a>\u2019 by Elvis Costello\u201d and getting a Betamax video recorder because \u201cVHS\u2019s going extinct\u201d). While the plot\u2019s predictable for anyone who\u2019s ever read any Young Adult fiction, Black Swan Green<\/em> is an entertaining and often moving story \u2013 Adrian Mole<\/a> rewritten as Serious Literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not going to write about the really, really annoying books I\u2019ve just read (even though I have many thoughts about them) because those authors don\u2019t deserve any more publicity. However, I did enjoy Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. This novel, apparently semi-autobiographical, describes a year in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason, who lives … Continue reading What I\u2019ve Been Reading: Some Really, Really Annoying Books, Plus One Enjoyable Book<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,11],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-4725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-language","category-young-adult","tag-david-mitchell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4725"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6180,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4725\/revisions\/6180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}