YA Guy Reads... Classic Plague Novels!

YA Guy will admit that the title to this post is perhaps the weirdest I've ever written. But as I'm sure I've mentioned, I'm not only a YA writer; I also have a doctorate in American literature and teach at the university level. What this means is that I read a lot of non-YA literature, and sometimes, I find that it dovetails with the YA I read (and write).

That seems to be the case now, though I'm not sure exactly how or why I started reading the genre I'm currently reading: classic novels about plague. Plague novels are super-popular right now, in both YA and non-YA: we have zombie plagues, hot zone plagues, superbug plagues, and so on and so forth. No doubt this plague craze has to do not only with actual medical threats but with generalized anxiety about the state of the world.

And I suppose, though I've never written (and have no plan to write) a novel specifically about plague, all of my novels are similar to plague novels in that they're about people surviving against hostile environments: the desert-plus-monsters environment of the Survival Colony novels, the sentient, predatory Nature of the Ecosystem trilogy, the threatening exoplanet of Freefall. Come to think of it, the draft novel I just completed does feature a disease as one key plot element. So when I started reading plague novels, maybe I was preparing for my own next book.

Anyway, here are the top three classic plague novels I've read, in order of the date of publication. I wish I could say "enjoy," but like all books of this sort, these three are pretty grim.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Written by the author of Robinson Crusoe, this is a fictionalized account of the 1665 plague in London that killed nearly 100,000 people. Defoe's book relies on archival research, testimony from survivors, and other sources, but its narrator is pure invention, as are some of the incidents. That makes it an early example of experimental, hybrid fiction (or creative nonfiction). Coincidentally, the novel I wrote my senior year in college was titled after Defoe's work, which I'd heard of but hadn't read as of then.

Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826). Almost one hundred and fifty years before Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend, Shelley wrote this novel of a worldwide plague that leaves no one but the narrator alive. Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is sometimes considered the first science fiction novel, and you could call this book the first post-apocalyptic novel (unless you think of the Book of Revelation that way). It's nowhere near as influential as Frankenstein--and, truth be told, it's nowhere near as well written, with the first 100 pages in particular being full of turgid prose and Romantic excess--but it's still quite an accomplishment.

Albert Camus, The Plague (1947). Originally published as La Peste, this novel tells the tale of plague descending on a twentieth-century city in French Algeria. Narrated by one of the town's doctors--who avoids death himself but loses his wife, ironically, from an unrelated illness she's escaped the city to cure--the book can be seen as an allegory of the German occupation of France or, more generally, as a work of existential philosophy, with the plague standing for the human condition of inevitable death and capricious fate. Either way, it's beautifully written, focusing much more on people's diverse reactions to the pestilence than to the graphic details of plague itself.

YA Guy Reads... Really Long Books!

YA Guy recently finished reading Frank Herbert's DUNE--all 900 pages of it--and it made me think about other really long books I've read in the past. Since I'm gearing up to read two additional epics--THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and DON QUIXOTE--I thought it would be fun to post mini-reviews of ten previous examples, listed in order from best to worst.

1. THE LORD OF THE RINGS. My favorite book, hands down. I've read it four times throughout my life--once when I was twelve, once during graduate school, once when I taught a Tolkien course to college students, and several years ago just for the heck of it--and I never tire of it. I confess, in my most recent reading, I found the elevated diction and inverted syntax ("Lo! Then did the Lord Aragorn come unto the Plains of Pelennor, and he was as one that was wroth!") a bit forced. But the story, the characters, and most of all the unparalleled world-building were as impressive to me as they were back when I was a kid.

2. DUNE. Another long book I loved as a teen and decided to re-read as an adult. I found it really slow-moving this time around; the first third is pretty much prelude to the uprising that kicks the story into gear. And hero Paul's unflappable, messianic self-confidence was a bit hard to take. But as with Tolkien, Herbert has to be credited for one of the greatest feats of world-building--or universe-building--of all time.

3. ULYSSES. I started Joyce's epic in 1990 and finished it in 2015. But no, it didn't take me 25 years to read it; I started it for a class in grad school, then stopped midway through once the semester ended and never picked it back up until 25 years later. Undeniably a great book, earthy and funny and sensual and smart, with enough daring, dazzling narrative choices to fill up a shelf-full of novels.

4. TOM JONES. This 1000-plus page picaresque is at once an early masterpiece of the novel form and a parody of the same; it pretty much defined postmodernism 200 years before that was a thing. I read it in grad school and don't remember many of the details, except for the fact that the hero kept getting into various affairs and peccadilloes and the author kept commenting on his own book. But I do remember that it kept me entertained for a solid month, and that's something.

5. GONE WITH THE WIND. Yes, it's racist as hell, and I would never excuse or rationalize that racism the way some people do ("oh, everyone was racist then, so it's not a big deal!"). I would say, however, that as a glimpse into the mind of the South, both antebellum and postbellum, it can't be beat. And Scarlett O'Hara remains one of the great fictional inventions of all time.

6. SHOGUN. I read this way back in high school, after I'd watched the miniseries. It's hard for me to recall from all those years back exactly what I thought about it; I don't think I understood it all that well, and I really had (and have) no idea if its representation of feudal Japan is at all accurate. But I remember that the story kept me engaged, and the characters, both Western and Japanese, struck me as simultaneously realistic and of epic proportions, which isn't an easy balance to strike.

7. PARADISE LOST. The only poem on this list, Milton's masterpiece was another book I was required to read in my Ph.D. program. It's not all that long in terms of page or word count, but the difficulty of the language and the complexity of the theological ruminations make it a book that feels much longer than it is. (That's not necessarily said in a negative way.) Of the central quartet of characters, Adam is a shallow pretty boy, God is a vengeful whiner, Eve is an interesting early example of a woman straining against the bonds of patriarchy, and Satan is a recognizably human and sympathetic villain.

8. CATCH-22. I received this book as a prize in college for an essay contest I won, but I didn't read it until a few years ago. I definitely get what Heller was up to, taking the "good war" and making it every bit as pointless, absurd, and depraved as every other war. But the darn thing is so chaotic and fractured, it took me forever to read. And I didn't feel that I connected with it until near the end, when we finally discover what Yossarian witnessed that drove him mad.

9. MIDDLEMARCH. Yet another massive novel that was required of me--or, in this case, inflicted on me--during grad school. I know many people love this book and its self-actualizing heroine, but I found it plodding, dull, and almost impossible to finish. It was ironic, I thought, that Eliot presented Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies as such a tedious, self-indulgent venture when, to me, her own novel felt very much the same.

10. GAME OF THRONES. Without a doubt, the worst long book I've ever read. I'd heard so many people raving about it, I felt I had to read it--but when I did, I discovered that it wasn't at all what I'd been led to believe. An epic fantasy? What's epic about it? And where's the fantasy? There's a wraith-like creature in the first few pages, and a baby dragon on the very last--and then, for the rest of the book, there's nothing but court intrigue and royals engaging in love affairs and other questionable behavior. Who cares about these people? And why did the author decide to kill the one character I had started to care about in the slightest--Ned Stark--in the most pointless, trivializing way possible? Add to that sexagenarian Martin's creepy fascination with nubile nymphet Daenerys Targaryen's genitalia and the various things that can be inserted therein, and this book was complete and total trash, basically soft-core porn masquerading as fantasy fiction.

So that wraps it up. Any suggestions for other really long books I should sink my teeth into? As I said, I've already got Hugo and Cervantes on tap, but I should be ready for something new by the middle of 2018 or so!

YA Guy Reviews... Non-YA Books!

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, YA Guy's taking a little break from YA this summer. Maybe that's because I've read over 150 YA books in the past three years (plus writing several more), and I felt a need to read outside my genre. Personally, I think YA writers need to read widely; I think you can learn a lot about writing YA by reading things that aren't YA. But leaving aside the benefits as a writer, it's just fun to read other stuff from time to time.

Last summer, I read non-YA science fiction. This summer, I'm focusing on classics. I've read only two in the past month--they take longer to read than YA!--but they've definitely been worth it.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Way back in graduate school, I taught a class on science fiction, including H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man. My graduate mentor visited my class on the day I was discussing the Wells novel, and she was totally confused because she thought I was teaching the Ellison book! But I hadn't read it at that point, and I didn't read it until this summer.

It's a pretty zany book. Some of the scenes--such as the oft-anthologized Battle Royal or the scene in the paint factory where the anonymous narrator's job is to mix black paint into white--are almost preposterously allegorical, and as such they have little realism. But other parts of the book--in particular, the Harlem episodes, including the narrator's struggles with the Brotherhood (a thinly-veiled Communist Party)--are striking as realistic representations of urban African-American experience in the middle of the past century. And the narrator's voice, at once learned and naive, bellicose and timid, hopeful and cynical, is one of the great inventions of American literature.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

You have to go even farther back in my history for my first encounter with this book. I read the Classics Illustrated version of it when I was nine or ten (the version pictured to the right), when my parents were trying to introduce me and my siblings to great literature. (That was the way I discovered a lot of classics I'd later read for real: Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, and more.) I've read many Dickens novels since, but for some reason, I never read A Tale of Two Cities. So I decided it was time to take the plunge.

I'll admit, it took me a while to settle in to Dickens's verbose, orotund style. I've heard that Dickens protracted everything because he was paid by the word for his serialized fiction; whether true or not, it was a bit much to take at first. But once I got into the story, I was able to accept the style. Dickens produces some great set pieces, particularly those surrounding the events of the French Revolution, and some great characters, particularly the ominous Madame Defarge, who scares the hell out of her own creator but who I saw as a precursor of many "kick-butt" female characters of the present day. And the novel's title, I discovered to my surprise and delight, has less to do with the two physical cities in which the action takes place--Paris and London--than with the two metaphysical "cities" sometime protagonist Sydney Carton struggles between: the hellish city of selfish sensuality and the heavenly city of selfless sacrifice. I don't remember much from the old comic book, but I do remember Carton's ultimate action and concluding speech. They were powerful to me back then, and they're still powerful to this day.

So I think I'm going to read either Les Miserables or Crime and Punishment next. Then it'll be back to the great YA novels I've got waiting on my Kindle!

YA Guy Reads... Classic Literature!

For the past several years, YA Guy has been reading almost exclusively YA. (That's one of the ways you become YA Guy, in case anyone was wondering.) I've read a lot of great literature, some not so good, and some really bad. That's the nature of the game, no matter what genre or category you're reading.

But for this summer, as I gear up for my own YA debut, I thought I'd take a break from YA and focus on some non-YA classics I've never read. Remember, I'm an English professor, so I've read a ton of classic literature; but practically everything on the following list is a book you're pretty much expected to have read in my field. I'm planning to read these books not because I'm afraid of being publicly humiliated--that ship has sailed--nor because I subscribe to the preposterous notion that adults reading YA should crawl into some kind of hole. No, I'm planning to read them just because I've always wanted to, and now seems like a good time to do it.

So, here it is: my list of classics for summer 2014. My brand-new Kindle awaits!

1. Catch-22. In my final year of college, I was the runner-up in an essay contest sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Writing Conference, at which Joseph Heller was the keynote speaker. I couldn't attend the conference since I was at that time living in Middletown, Connecticut, but I received an autographed copy of Heller's masterpiece as a prize. For some unknown reason, I've never read it in the twenty-seven years since.

2. Ulysses. In grad school, I took a class on Modernism and read almost all of Joyce's great novel. But once the paper was turned in, I set the book aside and didn't finish it. That's an omission I plan to address this summer.

3. Crime and Punishment. My dad's a huge fan of the Russian novelists (his family's from Russia), but I've never done much more than read a little Chekhov and enjoy Woody Allen's send-up in Love and Death. Clearly, I've got to do something about this.

4. Lolita. A few years ago, a very ambitious undergrad at the college where I work wrote a senior Honors paper on Nabokov's novel. I told her I'd never read it, but since no one else in the department had either, she chose me as her thesis advisor. Ah, academia!

5. Invisible Man. Another grad school story: I was teaching H. G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man one day to a class of freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania when my teaching supervisor dropped in for an unannounced visit. She'd glanced at the syllabus and thought I was teaching Ellison's novel. The puzzled look on her face as my lecture proceeded said it all.

6. A Tale of Two Cities. Like many classics, I first encountered this Dickens novel in comic book form. Unlike many classics, I never graduated to the real thing.

7. Dune. As a science fiction writer, it's pretty much criminal not to have read Herbert's classic, but there it is.

8. One Hundred Years of Solitude. No excuses about this one either. I've had it on my shelf for about one hundred years of neglect.

9. A Princess of Mars. I watched the nearly unwatchable Disney adaptation of this book. It's time to go back to the source material.

10. Herland. Yet another science fiction classic I've always wanted to read but never quite got around to.

That's ten, and I doubt I'll have time for any more this summer. But I'm always open to suggestions. Feel free to add your own favorite (or unread) classics in the comments!