All tagged Privilege

Recommendation Tuesday: Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

Recommendation Tuesday: Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas

Sarah Moon
Books

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

Wouldn't we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?

Have you ever read a book that you wanted everyone you know to read so you can talk about it with them? 

Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas, which Racquel over at The Book Barbies has recommended rather aggressively for some time now, is one of those books.

Dangerous Girls opens with a 911 call on Aruba. A group of privileged teenagers on spring break report that they've found their friend stabbed to death, blood covering her room and the glass door broken. Elise, the dead girl, is the best friend of narrator Anna, a relative newcomer to this ultra-wealthy crowd, with her "new money" contrasting with the old New England wealth of many of her friends, including Elise. Before she knows it, Anna is arrested and awaiting trial for her best friend's murder. 

As Anna's fighting the charges, the non-linear narrative explores the complicated nature of friendship, the very idea of truth, and how easy it is for court of public opinion to depict anyone as a monster.

{Opinion} Stop telling me what to read, please!

Sarah Moon
In the News, Opinion

In a blatant (and successful) attempt at link-baiting, the New York Time published an opinion piece on their website last week about how adults shouldn’t be reading young adult fiction. 

Cue the eye rolls.

(No, I won’t link to the article, you can find it if you Google “Joel Stein is a Sexist Ass.”) I’m not going to add to the commentary about how this is an absurd assertion, because loads of people have already done that extremely well, but I am going to ask another question, 

Why the HELL do we even care what people do or do not read?

Seriously. Why is this important to so many people? It seems that at least once a month, there’s some new article (50 percent of which feature Jonathan Franzen bloviating about his supposed superiority) asserting that we should read X, that we should not read Y and that “serious readers*” would most definitely should not read Z. 

If you’ve been reading this blog, you have probably figured out that my reading tastes are all over the place. But, I have a particular enjoyment of the following: 

  1. Contemporary, realistic YA;
  2. Creative, entertaining urban fantasy;
  3. Urban crime fiction;
  4. Post-apocalyptic/dystopian (adult or YA)
  5. Books involving prank wars;
  6. Smart contemporary romance (a la Julie James and Shannon Stacey);
  7. Novels involving zombies;
  8. Novels involving werewolves;
  9. Middle Eastern women’s fiction;
  10. Graphic novel/fiction with visual elements;
  11. Funny memoirs;
  12. Sweet and fun contemporary YA (a la Stephanie Perkins); 
  13. Books involving heists and/or capers; and
  14. Books that don’t suck (to me).