More YA

27 degrees today (80F for my international readers) and I am now trying to pack winter clothes, thus creating a mild cognitive dissonance. The main problem I have (well, currently) is coats, in that I can have a coat that is a) waterproof or b) stylish or c) warm, but I only have two coats that manage even two of these, both of which will take up significant amounts of packing space and one of which is about 18 years old. Hmm. Maybe I should see this as an excuse to go shopping.

( Heather Quarles, A door near here. )

( Ysabeau Wilce, Flora’s Dare. )

( Vivian Vande Velde, User Unfriendly. )

WWII

The librarian did look at me a bit oddly with this lot (I also stuck in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders as a more cheerful re-read, but didn’t get around to it). I have written three thousand words of essay about all of this, so this will be significantly shorter. Hopefully.

( Williams, P., & Wallace, D. Unit 731: The Japanese Army's secret of secrets. )

( Harris, Sheldon. Factories of death: Japanese biological warfare, 1932-1945, and the American cover-up. )

( Gold, Hal. Unit 731: Testimony. )

( Robert Harris, Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: the secret history of chemical and biological warfare. )

( Lawrence LeShan, The psychology of war: comprehending its mystique and its madness. )

( Jo Walton, Ha'Penny. )

Genius

A friend of mine gave me back the stack of books I’d lent him. Holding up volume 1 of Takehiko Inoue’s Real (wheelchair basketball manga, brilliant, am trying to find v2): “Genius”. Holding up Terry Pratchett’s Nation: “Genius.” Holding up Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (still on my waiting for write-up list): “Absolute genius”. Holding up volume 7 of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: “You know, this was very good, but…” This is the disadvantage of lending people all your really good books/manga, in that one that’s merely excellent suffers by comparison.

And Terry Pratchett’s Nation is indeed genius, and one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s set in a slightly different version of our world (something nasty seems to have happened to Australia on the map), and involves a meeting between Mau, a member of a small pacific-island (the Nation) dwelling tribe, and Daphne, a well-brought up English girl who gets shipwrecked. It’s funny, heart-breaking and unpredictable in all the right ways, and it made me cry very early on (I’d just ordered lunch, and when the waitress brought it to me she was terribly apologetic about its lateness, which was non-existent but was probably easier for her to assume as a possible cause). It is scientific (I love the bit where Daphne is talking about checking the efficacy of sacrifices to gods by leaving different amounts of fish on the altars) and spiritual, and things go wrong even when people have the best of intentions. I will write more about it including vastly extensive spoilers in my end-of-year post (which is going to be a mid-January thing anyway), but if you’re hesitating over last minute Christmas reading for yourself and others this would be a great place to start.