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Two Books About Death
May. 14th, 2012 02:32 amI am obsessed with death. Or, rather, I am obsessed with fiction that deals directly with the problem of death.
Like (I presume) many preteens/teenagers, at some point I went through a lengthy, stereotypical existential crisis, which involved reading a lot of Nietzsche (while understanding maybe 20% of it), fretting over various religious texts, and generally wanting to shake people and shout, "We all die in the end! What the hell's the point of it all?!"
It still shocks me that so little YA fiction (to my knowledge) directly deals with this experience—because I'm pretty sure every young adult goes through something like this. But for whatever reason, YA is content to continually grapple with Staying True To Yourself and Fighting Bad Guys, which is fine and good, but even when I was a kid I thought those were givens, and what I really wanted was something that was worried about death and wasn't some philosophical tome.
When I was going through this phase, I managed to hit on two books that really struck me: Le Guin's The Farthest Shore and Rosoff's Just In Case.
( More about those books, and excerpts. )
If anyone else knows of any other really excellent YA fiction (or, hell, just fiction in general) that is concerned directly with mortality, I'd be very happy for the recommendations.
Like (I presume) many preteens/teenagers, at some point I went through a lengthy, stereotypical existential crisis, which involved reading a lot of Nietzsche (while understanding maybe 20% of it), fretting over various religious texts, and generally wanting to shake people and shout, "We all die in the end! What the hell's the point of it all?!"
It still shocks me that so little YA fiction (to my knowledge) directly deals with this experience—because I'm pretty sure every young adult goes through something like this. But for whatever reason, YA is content to continually grapple with Staying True To Yourself and Fighting Bad Guys, which is fine and good, but even when I was a kid I thought those were givens, and what I really wanted was something that was worried about death and wasn't some philosophical tome.
When I was going through this phase, I managed to hit on two books that really struck me: Le Guin's The Farthest Shore and Rosoff's Just In Case.
( More about those books, and excerpts. )
If anyone else knows of any other really excellent YA fiction (or, hell, just fiction in general) that is concerned directly with mortality, I'd be very happy for the recommendations.
