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I'm doing my best to get Burned by Ellen Hopkins read by the weekend. I've already passed the one-week mark on this one, I'm sad to say. Even though the book is something like 500-pages long, it shouldn't take me any time to finish.

Hopkins writes free verse novels for young adults -- an interesting concept I'll deal with later in the blog dedicated to this book. As far as I can tell, all her books have tragic themes with tragic heroines with tragic endings. Drugs, abuse, prostitution, gun violence, the list goes on. And this just going off what she said during her presentation at the SoKy Book Fest. Apparently, her most popular novel, Crank, and its sequel, Glass, are heavily based on her own daughter's meth addiction. I'm not sure how I feel about the literal transposition from life to fiction. I mean, when speaking about her loved ones to her readers, the author refers to the real life people by their fictionalized names. I smell a law suit.

Anyway, once I'm finished with Burned, it'll be time to crack open another book. What should it be? I've put a poll in the sidebar for you to add your two cents. Only one person has chimed in, and that vote was cast for The Hunger Games. I bet I know who that was.

The run-down, going on book jackets, hearsay, and assumptions alone:

• Big Fat Manifesto by Susan Vaught is the fictional narrative of Jamie Carcaterra, a high school senior who writes an unapologetic column called "Fat Girl" in her school paper. I saw Susan Vaught last weekend, when I learned that she wrote this book I've been seeing on bookshelves everywhere. P. S. It says "SASSY" on the cover, among other random words.
• M. T. Anderson's Feed is one of those YA books that makes people give me funny looks when they learn I haven't read it. (Even Junior in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian names it as one of his favorite books.) From what I gather, it's a futuristic novel in which society has gone and done what all the technological skeptics fear: put chips in our brains. Everyone has a live feed of info streaming at all times. I think the Brothers Green once compared it to having Wikipedia in your head.
• Victoria read The Hunger Games and immediately suggested I do the same. The premise alone is enough to spur an hour-long discussion. Suzanne Collins' futuristic version of the United States is divided up into something like 12 or 13 districts, and each year, each district pulls one boy and one girl's name out of a hat and enlists them in a televised fight-to-the-death competition. Think "The Lottery" meets the Tri-Wizard Tournament meets Survivor meets The Village. Or at least that's what I'm getting after about ten pages.
• Identical is Ellen Hopkins' (the author of Burned) latest book. It's about a set of twins. Something about sexual abuse. I don't know. Maybe I should've put a different book in this spot on the poll.

Suggestions?

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The absolutely true diary of Arnold Spirit, Jr., struck a nerve in me from the get-go.

When Junior, as his family calls him, finds himself frustrated with the less-than-quality education he's receiving at his reservation school, he chucks his out-dated math textbook – it was once his mom's! – directly at the teacher's face. Now, Junior's not an anti-hero. Even though this outburst happens relatively early in plot, I knew such behavior was uncharacteristic. Junior is intelligent and likable, not at all like any of the students whom I would expect to wallop me upside the head with a Spanish book.

Still, he gets suspended and a home visit from Mr. P, the teacher whose nose he smashed in. Instead of reprimanding Junior further, Mr. P not only forgives the boy, but he makes his own apology, too. It is understandable, he explains, to react the way Junior did to his education. The students on the reservation are being done a disservice by the school, with its hand-me-down resources, and its teachers, who make no effort to educate. (I imagine that very few young adults would ask themselves the question I was asking myself at this point: Should my students be hitting me with their literature books?) Mr. P encourages Junior to find an education elsewhere, the education that he deserves.

Junior does just that. He transfers to Reardan, "the rich, white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly twenty-two miles away from the rez" (45), but not without many a second thought or endless torment from the members of his tribe. Torn between two worlds, Junior struggles to maintain his relationships with his best friend Rowdy, his family (including his alcoholic-yet-harmless dad, his bandanna-wearing grandmother, and his romance-novel-writing sister Mary Runs Away), his tribe, and his new friends (and maybe girlfriend?) at the "white school". The balancing act is tempered with the narrator's prolific drawings. Junior's artistic interpretations of his life are as layered and as entertaining as the narrative. Without a doubt, the illustrations by Ellen Forney are indispensable.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie treats the themes of poverty, identity, loyalty, and death with dignity and incessant humor. I'm glad he made this diary public.

Birdwing by Rafe Martin

I have a feeling that even if the plot of this fairy tale had been disappointing, I would have still loved it despite itself. Luckily, the coming-of-age adventure of Prince Ardwin did not disappoint. I had not expected that a winged boy would become the one character in all of literature with whom I most identify.

This is one of the many books that I've purchased because of its attractive cover, even though I later learned that the artist's rendering of the protagonist, the one-armed-one-winged Ardwin, is inaccurate. (No, the wing is on his other left, I'd say.) I picked it up at the Scholastic Book Fair that the book club sponsored in the library at school. I mean, I had to buy books to support the student organization, right?

Not surprisingly, though, the book landed on my bookshelf unread until a month or so later when Victoria asked me for reading recommendations and I, despite having read the book, suggested it. She and I once had a tryst with the Brothers Grimm, and this story reimagines and expands the Grimm's tale "The Six Swans". Birdwing seemed like a match. She took it, read it, loved it, and foisted it back at me so that I could read and love it, too. Done and done.

Rafe Martin's writing style drew me in immediately, and I suspect it would carry me through an even poorly spun yarn. The tale is written in prose, but it is nothing short of lyrical. Martin is fond of alliterative and original adjective pairs, prepositional possession, intriguing names, and weighty nouns and verbs. His characterization is vivid and his setting is timeless in the way that the realms of the best legends are. The cast line-up is full of archetypes (orphans, evil step-mothers, and wizened wizards), but Martin develops them into a unique humanity despite their otherworldliness. The themes of love, loss, betrayal, and belonging are worked out with heartbreaking and redemptive reality.

Birdwing's narrator is omniscient, which explains my frustration with the thought processes and choices of Ardwin, the young hero. The reader is far more enlightened about reality and its consequences than he, so the attempt at dramatic irony sometimes fails because the plot twists are apparent to the reader long before the twists occur. This makes Ardwin seem very naïve, but this may just be part of the tale's theme. This youthful naivety juxtaposes nicely with the young man at the end of the novel.

I would have loved this book no matter what because I am a sucker for a nicely turned phrase, but Birdwing is more than a pretty book. It is a journey that takes us – Ardwin and the reader – fearfully into our insecurities and brings us victoriously out of ourselves.

Bound and determined.

I have a problem. I cannot stop buying books.

Once after acknowledging our similarly overflowing bookshelves, Niaz and I half formed a pact in which we vowed to allow ourselves to buy only one new book after reading three already-purchased ones. That sounded nice, didn't it? A good way not only to get through my ever-lengthening reading list, but also to give my bank account a break. I don't know about him, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he too surrendered like I did to the siren song of bookstores. I think I read one whole book before going to Barnes & Noble and buying enough books to make my 10%-off Member Card worth the membership fee.

I have never been good with resolutions – New Year's or otherwise – and it's becoming increasingly apparent that I might have an addictive personality. This probably explains the almost-one-hundred dollars I dropped at the Southern Kentucky Book Fest in Bowling Green on Saturday. While unpacking from the weekend last night, I somewhat proudly and somewhat ashamedly added seven or eight freshly-bound books to my collection, dividing them up among the large bookcase, the small unofficial YA shelf, and the stool-turned-nightstand beside my bed. I stepped back, surveyed the situation, and one thing was abundantly clear: It's time to rededicate myself to the not-a-resolution I considered back in February.

I refused to make it public then because I'm fairly convinced that telling other people about my goals has approximately the same effect on my progress as high school sweethearts professing their love to one another via a yearbook ad has on their relationship's longevity. The endeavor is doomed before the intentions are even published.

So I knowingly enter into this with great trepidation, but here it is: My goal is to read one book a week. To an average reading adult, this seems doable, but in the two months since I half-heartedly began, I've finished three books. (Time to buy more?! Okay, so I've already taken care of that. Plus, I've decided not to impose a book-buying embargo on myself because I learned long ago that I'm too smart – er, weak – to fall for my own fictitious rules and deadlines.) I can blame in on the lifestyle of being a new teacher, but let's face reality. The height of the book-stacks has reached mountainous, and intervention is critical.

I'm bound and determined to scale this constantly growing mountain. And I'm taking you with me.