two hundred public words 9/30
Jul. 21st, 2010 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Damn this is hard!
I again have to pretend like this is still today (which is IS, really) July 20th, and not July 21st (which it ISN'T, not really).
And it's fairly late, so I am less into writing about books and writing now than I might normally be. I saw an enjoyable Netflix instant watch tonight -- a Luc Besson film that involved a lot of parcour (parkour? I don't remember how they spell that pastime), District B13. The banlieues of Paris looked like themselves. The violence was comic book and/or balletic. The nuclear bomb was less annoying than I usually find them.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
I think her writing is excellent. She's been writing since the 1960s, at least. She reminds me of E. L. Konigsburg (and vice versa; they remind me of each other), in that they are both intelligent women who write intelligent, thoughtful books for young adults. Probably one of Snyder's best known books is her The Egypt Game, which is about some kids who have excellent imaginations and who construct an imaginary game based on ancient pharoahs and temples and play their stories in the back yards and alleys of an unnamed city. There is something deeply mesmerizing about the game itself, and there is also some unclear sense of menace surrounding the kids. It's a great book, and won an award, I think. A Newbery Honor Award -- not the medal.
I love her mid-seventies trilogy, about the land (or planet, I guess) of Green Sky -- it's this three book long treatment of pacifism and how democracy could work. I make it sound dry, but it's not, not at all. There's also some meditation on drugs as a way for people to escape, and corruption. It's a real world-building exercise. Good sci fi. Titles:
Below the Root
And All Between
Until the Celebration
She has of late done more sort of contemporary YAF novels, often about misfit intelligent kids. I've missed the last several, I see, looking at her website. But a late 90s one, Libby on Wednesday, was excellent in its treatment of precocious intelligence, cerebral palsy, and abuse.
She's good. I would like to own the Green Sky trilogy electronically, one way or another.
ETA: Plus, she just has the coolest damn NAME:
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Zilpha
I again have to pretend like this is still today (which is IS, really) July 20th, and not July 21st (which it ISN'T, not really).
And it's fairly late, so I am less into writing about books and writing now than I might normally be. I saw an enjoyable Netflix instant watch tonight -- a Luc Besson film that involved a lot of parcour (parkour? I don't remember how they spell that pastime), District B13. The banlieues of Paris looked like themselves. The violence was comic book and/or balletic. The nuclear bomb was less annoying than I usually find them.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
I think her writing is excellent. She's been writing since the 1960s, at least. She reminds me of E. L. Konigsburg (and vice versa; they remind me of each other), in that they are both intelligent women who write intelligent, thoughtful books for young adults. Probably one of Snyder's best known books is her The Egypt Game, which is about some kids who have excellent imaginations and who construct an imaginary game based on ancient pharoahs and temples and play their stories in the back yards and alleys of an unnamed city. There is something deeply mesmerizing about the game itself, and there is also some unclear sense of menace surrounding the kids. It's a great book, and won an award, I think. A Newbery Honor Award -- not the medal.
I love her mid-seventies trilogy, about the land (or planet, I guess) of Green Sky -- it's this three book long treatment of pacifism and how democracy could work. I make it sound dry, but it's not, not at all. There's also some meditation on drugs as a way for people to escape, and corruption. It's a real world-building exercise. Good sci fi. Titles:
Below the Root
And All Between
Until the Celebration
She has of late done more sort of contemporary YAF novels, often about misfit intelligent kids. I've missed the last several, I see, looking at her website. But a late 90s one, Libby on Wednesday, was excellent in its treatment of precocious intelligence, cerebral palsy, and abuse.
She's good. I would like to own the Green Sky trilogy electronically, one way or another.
ETA: Plus, she just has the coolest damn NAME:
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 05:19 pm (UTC)Anyway, about the 'not believing you' -- yeah. It is pretty excellent seventies utopia/dystopia stuff. I remember how sort of powerfully, frighteningly totemic the GUN was, how Snyder made it seem so amazingly alien an object. The German/French language stuff was interesting, too. At least, I think there was some French mixed into the German. Weird that there wasn't any Russian, as far as I remember.