Countdown to readers’ favs of 2019 – Happy 2020!

Here’s the finale – the most read posts of 2019 – beginning with the runner-up, first published March 26, 2019:

Where the boys are – oh, those elusive young male readers

My mission the North Texas Teen Book Festival last weekend was to find books my adolescent grandsons would read. From tots who demanded nightly story readings and elementary schoolers who insisted on taking their chapter books to bed with them, they had grown into preteens (now early teenagers) who preferred to spend their spare time watching Youtube and playing video games.

Were they doomed to join the demographic of males who seldom (maybe never!) crack open a book outside of academic required reading? Where were the books aimed at teen boys that I remembered from my own and my daughter’s growing up years?

With that in mind – and temporarily ignoring that many women have written books for boys – I underlined every discussion that included male authors in my copy of the Teen Book Festival’s program and set out for the Irving Convention Center on a rainy Saturday morning.

image: Pixabay

Top of the list was the “New Kids on the Block” panel, where four out of the five debut writers were guys. I also came prepared with extensive knowledge of my boys’ favorite topics. They’re avid drawers who create their own comic books (and loved meeting personal idol Dav Pilkey) at last year’s festival. The boys had also loved the magical school stories of the Harry Potter and Rick Riordan’s demigods series. Relationships with girls, however, were still iffy – they’d been aghast that one of their male classmates had gone on a (gasp!) date. With a girl.

I crossed anything resembling romances off the festival’s offerings but added its “Getting Schooled,” “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Read Them,” and “Getting Graphic,” all with multiple male authors – to my list of must-sees.

I was a little surprised – but shouldn’t have been – when teacher (and debut author) Alicia D. Williams of the “New Kids on the Block” panel mentioned that even boys enjoyed reading her girl-coming-of-age story Genesis Begins Again. After all, girls have a long history of reading stories written for boys, even stories written by women. It was the Black Stallion series for me, The Outsiders (by female author S.E. Hinton) for my daughter. And of course, for my grandkids’ generation, the Harry Potter books written by Joanne, (now better known as J.K.) Rowling. 

Still more surprisingly, Williams and the other debut authors (Ben Guterson, Matt Mendez, Ben Philippe, and Justin A. Reynolds) didn’t recommend specific books. Rather, they said, I should to take my grandsons to a library or bookstore, let them browse the shelves for themselves, and ask librarians and store employees what books kids with their interests actually read. 

(Probably not surprisingly, librarians and audience members at the panel had some suggestions for 13-year-old boys: Shannon Messenger’s Keepers of the Lost Cities series, Ghost Boy, and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet (“or really, anything by Paulsen”). (Check for these at Richardson & Dallas libraries.)

The “Getting Schooled” panel introduced me to the likes of Max Brallier, Jen Calonita, Jerry Craft, Stuart Gibbs, Sarah Mlynowski, and Raina Tegemeier, with plenty of possibilities for readers negotiating the tricky halls of junior high schools. (Brallier, Craft, and Tegemeier, along with Terri Libenson, also appeared on the “Getting Graphic” panel of writers and illustrators of graphic novels.)

And the “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Read Them” panelists – David Bowles, Alexandra Bracken, Adam Gidwitz, Yoon Ha Lee, Lisa McMann, and Christina Soontornvat – made me recall my grandsons’ fascination with the phenomenon of “cryptids” and monsters.

Given that I didn’t hit the festival’s bookstore until after the last panel ended, some of the books I sought had already sold out. Still, my take-home bookbag included A Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe; Winterhouse by Ben Guterson; The Last Kids on Earth by Max Brallier; New Kid by Jerry Craft; The Chupacabras of the Rio Grande by David Bowles and Adam Gidwitz; and Spy School by Stuart Gibbs. I hesitated before adding Justin A. Reynolds’ Opposite of Always (which he described as a rom-com with time travel) to the bag, promising to read it for myself. Or maybe I’ll let the boys see it when they’re old enough not to be appalled by the idea of dating. . . .

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And finally, the winner, the most-read post of 2019, one of my few reviews for the year. This post was first published January 11, 2019, for a book I find still eerily relevant for 2020:

When only Hitler could kill Hitler

Review of: The Plots Against Hitler

Author: Danny Orbach

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Grade: A

Source: Dallas Public Library

Considering that, according to Wikipedia, at least 42 assassination plots against Adolf Hitler have been documented – and who knows how many remain undocumented – why didn’t any of them succeed? Historian Danny Orbach attempts to answer that question – and debunk myths surrounding the most famous attempt, Operation Valkyrie, with his well-researched 2016 volume, The Plots Against Hitler. 

With a single notable exception, Orbach’s narrative concentrates on the resistance effort of the German military toward Hitler, and examines three key timelines of that resistance, from 1938 to 1944. He also asks – and attempts to answer – what motives persuaded these conspirators to overcome their own cultural and moral qualms about the killing of a leader to whom many of them had sworn personal allegiance.

Some of their motives, such as a hope of securing favorable peace terms with the Allies, no longer strike modern readers as morally acceptable, Orbach notes. Were patriotism and morality synonymous? More to the point for 21^st century readers, can the two motives still be equated? And how are we to make moral judgments today about conspirators as flawed as those Orbach details – sometimes womanizers, anti-Semites, at best “antidemocratic reactionaries” in the words of another writer, at worst, active participants in mass murder? What kind of morality would enable even such a vehement anti-Nazi as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, to join Germany’s military intelligence organization? Should even those who attempted to stop Hitler tarred with the same guilt as their target?

“(T)he story of the German resistance has a crucial moral component. After all, the Nazi era is still viewed around the world, and most of all in Germany itself, through the lens of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and the burden of National Socialist crimes. . . (but) gradually, I came to believe that one must transcend the current moralistic debate, redraw its terms, and reframe it altogether,” Orbach states.

Lest readers fear being overwhelmed by moralistic arguments, the book, even knowing how the story ends, reads like a thriller, with such elements as nocturnal meetings in frozen fields; the elaborate drama of military conspiracies; bombs hidden in briefcases and liqueur bottles; and the dramatic day of July 20, 1944, with its abortive assassination and final, desperate attempt at a coup d’état.

And often it reads like a tragi-comedy of errors. A bomb hidden in a bottle smuggled aboard Hitler’s plane inexplicably fails to explode. Hitler’s penchant for altering his schedule without notice foils still other plots. And all too often, it seems that the sheer multitude of conspiring assassins and their conflicting motives and agendas collide. 

One of the most nearly successful assassination attempts was the simplest – the lone-wolf effort of barely-educated carpenter turned watchmaker Georg Elser, whose 1939 bomb in a Munich beer hall missed Hitler but killed eight others. (Captured soon afterward and ultimately executed, Elser was reportedly devastated by the death of the innocent bystanders.)

So, what was the point of all the conspiratorial misfires, most of them resulting in little more than the gruesome deaths of the conspirators? Yes, some of their attempts saved hundreds of Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps, and may have limited the numbers of Poles, Soviets, and other Eastern Europeans massacred. But ultimately, millions more died. World War II was not shortened, hundreds of thousands of Germans, both soldiers and civilians, died. In the end, following Hitler’s own suicide, Germany as the conspirators knew it, disappeared. Were the conspirators heroes or the ultimate failures?

“Terms like heroes and heroism tend to make contemporary historians suspicious,” Orbach writes. “(But) once we have understood that (heroes’) armor is not shining but rather tarnished and scratched, we can see ‘heroes’ for what they are in the real world: people able, perhaps only briefly, to transcend ideology and selfishness and even existential dangers for the sake of a greater good.” 

And what would we do if we found ourselves in similar circumstances, Orbach asks. “If these questions make you ponder, then I have done the job I set out to do.”

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Still to come: I sink my teeth into 2020 with a calendar full of winter-into-spring literary events – and writing contests!