Timewaster's Guide Archive

Um, fell, there is a movie thread already. You mean music?

Either works for me. I couldn't tell if it was a shadow (from a bird flying above) or the image of something swimming beneath.

Just came home from watching X2. Loved it. We were arguing as we left whether Jean was going to come back next time more powerful than ever, or if she was really just dead. Personally, I don't think she's dead. Anyone who's read the comics, want to enlighten me? Okay, so I guess I'm asking for spoilers for a movie that hasn't been made yet, but I really want to know!

Nonfiction=anything that isn't fiction. That's a lot, according to the Library of Congress, including folklore, poetry, drama, etc. We've been discussing this issue in class, and I think the classification of fiction/nonfiction is too broad--and I think that there's plenty of drama, poetry, and folklore that's fictional! :-)

I do like being able to go into the bookstore and differentiate between gardening books and Shakespeare. I think the biggest problem in my local B&N is that the "adult" section is divided and subdivided, but the children's and teen sections are only divided by fiction and nonfiction most of the time, and the nonfiction is woefully inadequate, especially for someone in a nonfiction class. But oh well.

With Dune, I would call that upper YA, 15 and above? Still falls under "children" because YA is officially children's literature. Heavy, but no more heavy than Feed, which posits a completely consumerist culture, to the point that people have had an internet feed implanted in their heads so they can buy more quickly. It's also made people really stupid, because they don't have to read and don't have to remember anything because they can look it up immediately. Their vocabulary has disintegrated to the lowest common denominator of teenspeak, as well. It's a good read, but has a lot of language, so it's something I'd place beside Dune as far as age group goes.

Sorry, didn't clarify--that was two different things I was talking about, mutant/genetic evolution/gene manipulation-ish books--not too picky on the specifics, just that sort of thing (one) and Starship Troopers (two).

Actually, I don't know why I couldn't include comic books, since I'm defining the material and the audience for the fictional course I'm creating, and X-Men is really what I had in mind, but how accessible are copies of comic books and graphic novels in libraries?

One part of my rewriting of the syllabus is to expand the SF part of the course, which is all of one week right now, so I'm going for both breadth and depth--history of science fiction for children, and well-written SF for children. I'm much stronger on fantasy than I am on SF, because that just interests me more, especially high fantasy.

I've got books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, Among the Hidden (Margaret Petersen Haddix), The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (Nancy Farmer), Ender's Game, Dune, and Feed, for starters. (Feed just came out last year, by M.T. Anderson--good book, but it's yet another dystopic view of the future, which seems to be the trend in serious SF for children for the last 10 or 15 years.) I have several stacks of other books I've pulled off library shelves randomly that I'll be trying to skim-read this week (Starship Troopers is one of those).

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions. More are welcome if you have them--but I can't use suggestions for movies. That's my problem--I can think of plenty of movie examples, but this is a literature course, so I have to stick to books, or at least to print.

Oh, and if any of you might be familiar with high fantasy books (for children YA and younger) that are based on something other than the regular British tradition, I'd appreciate those suggestions, too. (An example is Little Sister, by Kara Dalkey, which uses Japanese mythology, culture, and ideas of rank, a nice difference from the regular Western feudal stuff you usually see in children's lit, at least.)

Glad to hear that--I never saw the movie, though it looked interesting, because I heard it was pretty stupid. But I had heard that the book was a pretty seminal SF book, so it's worth reading.