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Committee Meeting
10/11/15 21:45YA Coordinator: So what should we put on the Mock Printz list?
Me: Symphony for the City of the Dead
Librarians: Did anybody read The Boys Who Challenged Hitler?
Me: It's good but it's not as good as Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarians: Did anybody read Most Dangerous?
Me: It's good but it's not as good as Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarians: Do we need another nonfiction on the list? It seems like there's good nonfiction this year. Did anybody read Stonewall?
Me: I actually was not very impressed by it. I think we should just do Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarian E.: I think we should let Emily present on Symphony for the City of the Dead
YES. THANK YOU. THAT IS ALL I'M ASKING FOR HERE.
(Symphony for the City of the Dead: Some things M.T. Anderson is great at include a perspective on the wide sweep of history, a keen sense for looking past the surface events to the deeper issues, and writing about music. When he writes about Dmitri Shostakovich being in fear for his life and wellbeing because party leaders found his music insufficiently ideologically correct -- while the definition of good communist music was constantly shifting and seemingly based more in keeping people in line than anything real you could point to -- it's not only genuinely frightening, but it's sobering, and makes me want to think harder about what it means to want art to do ideological or moral work. Amazing Shostakovich anecdote: He has an appointment to get interrogated, and he goes to it sure that he's going to get killed. So he gets to the door, and he explains about his appointment with the interrogator, and it turns out that the interrogator has just been executed for treason, the day before.
There's a lot in here I didn't know about Germany and Russia as enemies in World War II -- how Stalin was so afraid of a military coup that he massively weakened his own army, how he was only listening to his generals who said that they needed more cavalry, not more tanks(!), how inexplicable it was that he trusted Hitler not to invade Russia... but ultimately it's a book about art, and the political purposes for which art gets used and misused, and how difficult it is to navigate in that world as an artist when you have very little choice but to exist in that system where every artistic statement that you make is vulnerable to being used and misused, used to make it look like you support the regime or don't support the regime.
The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: ENTERTAINING AS HELL book about teenage saboteurs in Denmark during WWII. Full of excellent anecdotes. My favorite is the one where Knud Pederson, one of the leaders of the resistance movement, who's already doing things like stealing guns from soldiers, speaks with the girl he has a crush on and he's so freaked out by it that he has to leave school and go home in the middle of the day.
Most Dangerous: I did not know ANYTHING about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers before I read this book, much less the connection to Watergate, so it was exciting to learn that story! Especially the part where G. Gordon Liddy BREAKS INTO Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office hoping to get his files and get some dirt on Ellsberg! Very Relevant in terms of debates about Edward Snowden and under what circumstances it's right to leak confidential information.
Stonewall: I wish it had been longer, and I wish it had engaged with the subject at a deeper level -- it was a very straightforward, on-the-surface history narrative, and definitely one that centered cis white male perspectives. It ends up not working that well as either a comprehensive YA intro-to-gay-history or a history specific to Stonewall.)
Me: Symphony for the City of the Dead
Librarians: Did anybody read The Boys Who Challenged Hitler?
Me: It's good but it's not as good as Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarians: Did anybody read Most Dangerous?
Me: It's good but it's not as good as Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarians: Do we need another nonfiction on the list? It seems like there's good nonfiction this year. Did anybody read Stonewall?
Me: I actually was not very impressed by it. I think we should just do Symphony for the City of the Dead.
Librarian E.: I think we should let Emily present on Symphony for the City of the Dead
YES. THANK YOU. THAT IS ALL I'M ASKING FOR HERE.
(Symphony for the City of the Dead: Some things M.T. Anderson is great at include a perspective on the wide sweep of history, a keen sense for looking past the surface events to the deeper issues, and writing about music. When he writes about Dmitri Shostakovich being in fear for his life and wellbeing because party leaders found his music insufficiently ideologically correct -- while the definition of good communist music was constantly shifting and seemingly based more in keeping people in line than anything real you could point to -- it's not only genuinely frightening, but it's sobering, and makes me want to think harder about what it means to want art to do ideological or moral work. Amazing Shostakovich anecdote: He has an appointment to get interrogated, and he goes to it sure that he's going to get killed. So he gets to the door, and he explains about his appointment with the interrogator, and it turns out that the interrogator has just been executed for treason, the day before.
There's a lot in here I didn't know about Germany and Russia as enemies in World War II -- how Stalin was so afraid of a military coup that he massively weakened his own army, how he was only listening to his generals who said that they needed more cavalry, not more tanks(!), how inexplicable it was that he trusted Hitler not to invade Russia... but ultimately it's a book about art, and the political purposes for which art gets used and misused, and how difficult it is to navigate in that world as an artist when you have very little choice but to exist in that system where every artistic statement that you make is vulnerable to being used and misused, used to make it look like you support the regime or don't support the regime.
The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: ENTERTAINING AS HELL book about teenage saboteurs in Denmark during WWII. Full of excellent anecdotes. My favorite is the one where Knud Pederson, one of the leaders of the resistance movement, who's already doing things like stealing guns from soldiers, speaks with the girl he has a crush on and he's so freaked out by it that he has to leave school and go home in the middle of the day.
Most Dangerous: I did not know ANYTHING about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers before I read this book, much less the connection to Watergate, so it was exciting to learn that story! Especially the part where G. Gordon Liddy BREAKS INTO Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office hoping to get his files and get some dirt on Ellsberg! Very Relevant in terms of debates about Edward Snowden and under what circumstances it's right to leak confidential information.
Stonewall: I wish it had been longer, and I wish it had engaged with the subject at a deeper level -- it was a very straightforward, on-the-surface history narrative, and definitely one that centered cis white male perspectives. It ends up not working that well as either a comprehensive YA intro-to-gay-history or a history specific to Stonewall.)