Can I just say how very, very happy Jezebel Magazine's Fine Lines columns make me? In each column, Lizzie Skurnick revisits a beloved YA novel from her teenage years, with a lot of wit, a bit of snark, and a huge dollop of nostalgia...and since I'm guessing we must be somewhere around the same age, in almost every single case she's chosen to talk about a book I also read as a teen. Most of them are books I loved at the time (even the ones that make me wince nowadays!), but many of them are ones I'd completely forgotten about until reading the columns. This morning, after my writing session, I caught up on the last several "Fine Lines" columns, about EL Konigsburg's The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Lois Duncan's A Gift of Magic, Madeleine L'Engle's The Moon by Night, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, and many more...which of course led into a huge session of searching my local library catalogue for old favorites (with, sigh, very little luck), adding a bunch of them to my Amazon wishlist...and generally feeling immersed in the nicest kind of nostalgia.

There's something about the books I read as a kid - I think I actually experienced them differently than I experience books now, in a sort of delirious joy of discovery (OMG, I can't believe these exist!). Even though I'm still an obsessive and addicted reader, my reading experience is qualitatively different now even with books I adore, and of course that gives me a lot of fondness for the books I read and loved as a kid, even the ones I'd find unreadable now. Fine Lines is just exactly the right kind of 80s/90s nostalgia for me, in a way that retro fashion trends and even the best Molly Ringwald movies just can't touch.

In other, more up-to-date news, though: I forgot to mention yesterday that Christopher Barzak is one of the nominees for the Logo NewNowNext Awards 2008, and everyone and anyone can vote for him online! He's written some of my very favorite contemporary fantasy short stories of recent years, he's an amazing writer in general, and he won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel in 2008 for his novel One for Sorrow. Plus, let's have some genre pride - he's one of the only spec fic authors nominated for this award. Show him some support! You can vote for him here. (And if you want some extra persuasion, check out his wonderful stories in the Strange Horizons Archives - "Plenty" is my personal favorite of his stories, but I've never not liked a story by him.)