Q: How embarrassed am I? A: Not a whole lot.

So, I've been corrected. Sort of.

Remember my earlier post about the Gossip Girls books and others like them? Well, I was browsing some used magazines for sale recently, ran across a March 10, 2008 issue of The New Yorker and found an article that just oozes praise for these novels, describing the books with compliments like "wickedly satirizing the young," "gleeful political incorrectness," and "the reader she seems to have firmly in mind as she writes is a literate, even literary, adult."

And that's all in the first paragraph.

I appear to have completely misread the intentions of the author, Cecily von Ziegesar. These, apparently, are works of social criticism and intelligence, "full of literary allusions."

Let me reiterate I haven't read a single Gossip Girls book. Previously, I tried to be interested in them, but found articles on quantitative studies of the effect of muzak on shoppers more palatable. Perhaps I'll be able to stomach the novels now that I know they're fonts of eruditeness.

I wonder if the readers of these works are taking away the message that Janet Malcolm, writer of the article, "Advanced Placement, The wicked joy of the 'Gossip Girls' novels," seems to find in them. Are they developing a taste for "Goethe and Tolstoy," or do they just enjoy the fact that the main character plans an, ahem, (can we say romantic, I mean really?), rendezvous at a swanky hotel with her boyfriend? I would have blushed and had the urge to go to confession if I had been reading that as a young'un. Did I tell you Malcolm refers to these books as "children's literature?"

To be fair, Malcolm states that "[von Ziegesar] is writing a transgressive fairy tale, not a worthy book for a school list." You've got that right, Janet.

Referring to the novels as that beloved brand of sweets made for children, she also says, "There are no Brussel sprouts hidden in her Rice Krispie marshmallow treats." Yet she claims that "[t]he books are full of literary allusions," as though that were some kind of medicine going down with the spoon full of sugar. Am I mistaken that this is a bit oxymoronic?

I've got nothing against fairy tales for children or adults, for that matter. What else is most of what we read at the beach or watch on television, if not fairy tales minus the mythological element? But I balk at the way this particular brand of fairy tale is manufactured. Fine the girls have endless credit card limits. Fine they can take rooms at the Plaza hotel when they feel miffed. Fine they have unconventional families. Who wouldn't love that? It's all fun. But, somehow, I just find that the black silk underwear, the nauseating amount of references to upscale clothiers, the swearing, the crassness seem to spoil that feel-good frothiness that fairy tales are supposed to deliver.

But that's just me. After all, I have been corrected.

Litter-ature, and a note about negativing...

Sorry. By the end of this post I will have been guilty of negativing. I don't really mean to negative anything. But when speaking about certain aspects of literature these days, I find it difficult not to negative. Actually, they seem to deserve to be negatived.

Now then, I think I have sufficiently introduced into my vocabulary the verb negative, (presumably rhyming with derive or revive.) The verb negative, you ask? Yes, I timidly answer. But I confess that I, too, am not convinced it's a true verb. Having run across this odd usage of the word in some scholarly tome about English language negation, I've been peppering my informal conversations with it as a way of expressing 'to be negative about,' (as in, That's a perfectly good score for such a difficult final exam, so just don't NEGATIVE it!). And, since my discovery of this term dovetails with my plan to reflect on my rather dim impression of some of today's young adult literature, I thought I'd put it to written use.

I believe that will conclude my use of negative. Don't want to overdo it all at once...

Unfortunately, it does not conclude a bit of a rant on a sub-category of books which I think would warrant much more use of the term.

A disclaimer: I haven't read these novels. I'll admit it. But I've tried. As a matter of fact, I have two of them, both library books, sitting on my desk waiting to be read, but I doubt I'll be able to do much more than just skim them. The A-List by Zoey Dean and Don't You Forget About Me by Cecily von Ziegesar are each one of a series called the A-List books and the Gossip Girls books, respectively. But I lump them together, books of this ilk. To me they're just those awful-looking books that we adults are feeding kids, the mental equivalent of serving junk food for dinner.

Why awful? Aren't I being terribly unfair? Well, I have tried to read them, as I said. So, I'm not totally their stranger. And I've read about them, for what that's worth. Check out this article by Naomi Wolf from the March 12, 2006 edition of The New York Times entitled, Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things.

While covering mature themes, these books do not seem to aim to educate. They seem, to a self-confessed non-reader, to glamourize the inane and the mean. At least, this is what I've gleaned from surveying their covers, captions and content. The titles are catchy, I'll grant you, but what do they mean to impart to the people of that impressionable age for which they're written? Nothing, I imagine, but a sense of fascination that will persuade these kids to plunk down their money in exchange for insipidity like All I Want is Everything, Nothing Can Keep Us Together, Dial L for Loser, Best Friends for Never. The cover art is often photos of glaring, sullen teenage girls glossed up and looking disdainful of whomever dared to pick up the book.

It's not hard to find fodder for criticism. Even if the inanity only goes as far as a few twists on popular sayings, why give that particular age group more superficiality to absorb? And why try to make it attractive? Who does it help? I assume it helps the publishers and authors, but does it do anything for the kids reading the books? This is a far cry from the the young adult reads of yesteryear. Wet bars? Martini's? In a kids' book?

But I guess it's par for the course in today's world. Still, does the book industry really need to be aiding and abetting in the dumbing down and spicing up of the upcoming generation's entertainment? And, if there are saving graces buried somewhere in these books, why must they have titles that reflect and promise to deliver such negativity?

So, now I don't know. Should I actually go ahead and try, again, to read one of these books? There are only so many hours in a day and there are so many actually good books I wonder if the investment of time is worth it. Unless I find a redeeming quality there, somewhere.

Maybe, I'm just negativing.