Teen Angst and Picture Books About Books!

I'm continuing the challenge that I saw on  I Push Book's blog to surprise yourself by randomly selecting a book from your TBR list. I think this used to be an official sign-up type of challenge, but it lapsed. Lucky for me people with expanding TBR lists kept it up long enough for me to notice it. Anyway, I plug in the size of my goodread's TBR list and then read the book that a random number generator spits out.

Last month I finished the June book, Kiss Me Deadly, a collection of paranormal love stories (mostly ending poorly, at least in terms of the love part) edited by Trisha Telep.I'm pretty sure I found this book because of Sarah Rees Brennan, because I love her take on teens, even angsty teens, and will stalk her all over the world and the internet to read her stuff. Her story about Peter Pan as a British secret agent made me smile, especially with the great-great-granddaughter of Wendy and her mace and her sensible attitude. That one ended well, although not in terms of the love part. The rest of the stories featured other young paranormal types struggling with their vampiric natures, their sense of themselves as monsters, and other common tropes representing the feelings of adolescents. I, as an old fogey, did get a bit tired of all the roller coaster emotions by the end, so I was happen that the last story came from the point of view of a parent, dealing with the loss of a child in a world where many people come back as zombies after a "death event."  There were other authors I knew, a few writing in worlds that I knew, and a few whose worlds look interesting enough to revisit, although none that I immediately tracked down. A fun book of short stories, in other words.

The July book gives me a chance to be caught up, because it's a picture book! Zip! So I can go back and look at the books I missed because of my library fast during the beginning of the year. Anyway, the library brought me The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore by William Joyce. Beautiful and unsettling but also searingly lonely. I always hope books bring me to other people through their stories, but the people in this book are completely isolated. (I don't think kids will worry about that though -- it's a happy book on the surface.)