Good if possibly irrelevant news: have had a very positive three-month evaluation. This is important because it's rather harder to fire people once they've passed their six-month evaluation. Unless, of course, the city runs out of money.
I had a bear of a time getting off work in the evening. At 5:58, someone fed a 5-dollar bill into the fine/printing/copies vending machine, and the machine ate the money, so I had to run and get the key and open up the back (which I didn't actually know how to do, but managed nevertheless). Also at 5:59, someone came in wanting an Eric Carle book, and that's easy, but I asked him if there was a specific book he wanted and then he got on his cell phone and I actually told him that we were closed and I had somewhere to be.
I was a little late to the Strand, but I didn't miss anything too important. Peter Cameron, Sherman Alexie, and someone in the book industry were talking about being writers who had achieved some success writing for an adult audience, and then writing a YA book, under different circumstances: Cameron thought that he had written a book like all his others, only to get publishers rejecting it for being not as sophisticated as his usual. I would like to see his usual, because "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" is an incredibly sophisticated book - not compared to YA books, but compared to books in general. And I question the decision to publish it as YA. Alexie had been getting requests from teachers, librarians, and publishers to write a YA book. As he was writing a memoir, he wound up writing a big section about his first year going to a high school where the only other indian was the school mascot. (Alexie is a Seattle/Coeur d'Alene Indian). He eventually excised that section from the memoir, but when his publisher called him to say "Where's your YA novel?" he realized he had an answer.
I haven't yet read any other works by Cameron or Alexie, but I think what their two YA books have in common - what makes them work as YA books - is this incredible sense of voice. It's maybe more conspicuous in "Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," because Junior sounds like any other 14-year-old boy, and James in "Someday This Pain..." has a voice that reads as much older and much more reserved. But it, too, feels like an authentic teenage voice, if only because it caused me to flash back and think, "Oh no, please tell me this isn't what I was like when I was his age."
I'm so glad I got to see these writers.
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