Daily Links 9-30-13

Ernest Hemingway's Reading List for young adults, just because a book is labeled "young adult" doesn't mean you should ignore it, Instragramming your meal, and more in today's link roundup.


********************

Ernest Hemingway once wrote out a reading list for a young man. But that's only the beginning of the story.
(Hat tip: Buzzfeed)

********************

Young Adult Fiction is better than you think. Or as my daughter (who pointed this out to me) put it, a good story is a good story.

********************

Disney quote of the day:

Any day spent with you is my favorite day. So, today is my new favorite day. –Pooh
— Disney Words (@disneywords) September 21, 2013

*******************

Want to Instragram your meal? Bobby Flay is okay with that:

“Listen, if you want to come to my restaurant, where you’re paying for your meal, and you want to take a picture of my food and advertise it all over the world and the internet, be my guest,” Bobby responded.

Hat tip: Food Riot

*******************

When someone says to you, "God Told Me", how do you react?

Hat tip: Blogging Theologically

*******************

No Shirt, No Shoes, No Sagging, No Service? (via Food Riot)

Daily Links 8-27-13

Good morning. Here are a few links to start the day:

Why telling your story is NOT the best way to share the gospel:

The problem with this method is that it doesn’t work anymore. It might have worked 20 or 30 years ago,  but in 2013 any post-modern worth his salt will respond “that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” And well he should. If the person sharing his faith is saying that you should try this because it worked for him—if he is basing his argument for following Christ on his own experience—then it’s only fair that the person responding should be able to say that his experience is just as valid.

In a way, the Christian who uses only his own experience to tell non-Christians about Jesus is giving the post-modern the home-field advantage. He is implicitly agreeing that what matters most is personal experience, not truth.

-----------

Why we need better young adult fiction:

This is why good taste matters so much when it comes to books for children and young adults. Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take away are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel,  Scars which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.

-------------

Audience member gets to sing For Good with Kristen Chenoweth, video goes viral.

Read the full story here. 

Depravity and Young Adult Fiction

As a father of two teenage girls, I am very concerned about what books they read. Thankfully, neither of them like to read what's currently being offered in "young adult fiction" and for good reason. Look no further than Meghan Cox Gurdon's excellent essay in the Wall Street Journal:

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it.

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

Ms. Cox Gurdon bravely exposes the dark underbelly that is young adult fiction and goes further to show that this recent advent in publishing has been an increasingly detrimental trend. Take time to read this excellent essay.