taking "vanity press" literally

Time is short at the moment, so I can't write much. I don't think I have to; one could imagine my comments, and chagrin, at this. Even the generally negative media attention isn't making me feel much better.

Wonder Wheels

This morning, as I threw together some breakfast, the SO and I were chatting (as we do) about a range of topics. Somehow, discussion of a new book led to a reference from Scrubs which led to me remembering this weird subplot about boxers vs. briefs in an old book I'd read one or six times, Wonder Wheels.
So over breakfast, I skimmed this book to refresh my memory. It's about a guy who works at a grocery store, but lives for his time at the roller rink (the book was published in 1979). He meets this girl, and of course they fall in love. I'd remembered that she gets killed by an abusive dad, but no - it's a possessive and crazy boyfriend, who kills himself and her in the car by carbon monoxide poisoning. Whoa. Our grief-stricken hero goes on (and rises above, blah blah blah) to have a fabulous skate to the blessedly fictional song "Calliope Girl", and he gets the skating job he wants.
Anyway, I was gobsmacked when I realized that the author of this little gem is Lee Bennett Hopkins. Hopkins is best known for the dozens of children's poetry anthologies he has edited, so it was startling to see that he'd written Wonder Wheels back in the day.

perfect size 6 figures

I was appalled to read reports about the revamped Sweet Valley High books - see here and here for details. Why update the books, when fashion is cyclical anyway? As the links point out, the brand names in the original series were made up, which (slightly) extended the shelf life of the books.
But I'm beyond cranky about how the Wakefield twins lost their often-mentioned "perfect size 6 figures" in the rewritten series. Now, they are size 4. Given that they're 5'6", size 4 seems underweight for them.

more about huge meals

A couple of months ago, I posted about Farmer Boy, and about all of Wilder's descriptions of these incredibly huge meals. I always thought these meals were a glorified childhood memory, or some sort of Depression-era wish fulfillment (like Enid Blyton's books - she wrote about lavish meals in the midst of food rationing).
But no, apparently it was true. I went on from Farmer Boy to re-read a bunch of other LIW. I've been meaning to blog about this for a month or two, but kept forgetting. Here's a description of the Wilder family breakfast in 1924 or 1925, written in an article by Rose Wilder Lane*:

"There is a lavishness, an exuberant abundance in farm life....Here are bowls of oatmeal, large dishes of baked apples, the big blue platter full of sizzling ham, with many eggs disposed upon it; here are hot cakes piled by tens and dozens, with melting butter and brown sugar between them, and hashed brown potatoes, Graham bread and white bread, fresh butter, honey, jam, milk and the steaming pot of coffee.
Here are doughnuts or gingerbread to accompany the coffee cups' second filling, and then - for he [Almanzo] was a boy in New England - my father likes just one medium-size wedge of apple pie, to top off the meal and finish the foundation for a good day's work."

*I took this from an article called "Thirty-Mile Neighbors", originally printed in the Country Gentleman on 6 May 1925, reprinted in A Little House Sampler, ed. William T. Anderson (University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

'the other had fair fair, too'

The title for today's post comes from Sayers's Gaudy Night. A mysterious woman corners a beautiful young man and tells him two things: that "Shrewsbury College was a place where they murdered beautiful boys like him and ate their hearts out; secondly: that 'the other [another young man] had fair hair, too'."
That bit of Gaudy Night has been in my head for the last day or so, as I continue reading Mercedes Lackey. She has plenty of main characters - the ones I read about were Darkwind, Elspeth, Skif, Lavan, Firesong, Dirk, Karel, Kris, Talia, Selenay, Alberich, Vanyel and Kerowyn. Some of them (Talia, Skif, Vanyel) have horrible childhoods, while others have trauma in their adult lives. (Talia gets raped and tortured, Selenay's husband tried to kill her, etc. Both of them, however, are as little scarred by these events as possible).
But I think it's worth noting that in my list above, only four aren't happy in the end. Karel's blinded, which is too bad, though Lackey makes it clear that he'll still keep his girlfriend and his career. So I'm not sure how unhappy he really is. In contrast, Lackey tries to make it seem as though Firesong is pretty happy, but really he's settling for something less than what he wanted, now that his once-beautiful face is scarred. The other two beautiful men, Kris and Vanyel, are the only ones in my list to wind up dead.
(And by the way, Kris, Vanyel and Firesong are the only ones in the series who are aware of their good looks. Especially Vanyel and Firesong, who dress carefully to match them. And oh, by the way, Firesong and Vanyel are the only openly gay characters, which makes all of this even more problematic).
Everyone else winds up more or less happy - ugly Dirk and plain Alberich are fine, and the attractive women are fine. So why does Lackey have this disturbing propensity to wreck the lives of her good-looking (and, in two cases out of three, gay) male characters? A friend suggested that Lackey makes everyone go through angst, to make the story more heroic, and my friend is (as usual) right. But in every other case, the hero lives through the horrible events.
I can't remember whether Lavan in Brightly Burning is especially good-looking. He certainly winds up dead, though.
So - I don't know. I don't have the answer to this. Despite my colleague's good sense, I can't help but wonder whether Lackey's psyche is something like Shrewsbury College.

Meghan's world

Jean Feiwel, the publisher who released Ellen Emerson White's Long May She Reign and is re-releasing the first three books in the series, has some fairly inexplicable taste in book jackets. She decided to re-release the books with covers that are versions of famous paintings. The results are less than appealing to the average teen.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind any of these paintings, especially Christina's World. But what on earth was Feiwel thinking?