by Elizabeth
Posted on February 1, 2009 at 3:26 pm

See, I actually think that sounds like a very cool premise (and I haven’t read the book), but boy, do I agree with you about the self-conscious pop culture references.

I actually inaugurated my own blog with a post about how Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist did not, in fact, speak to my own NYC high school experience (despite my growing up in the middle-class white NYC world they’re describing), but a fried of mine said it better: it’s set in “a very concentrated pseudo-hipster 16-year-old version of New York.”

Like, dudes. We get it. You’re cool. You express your cool through your music. You want us to know how cool you are, and mostly you want us to feel cool that we get your references. But maybe you could focus a little less on that and a little more on the plot of a book you neither planned out nor edited?

by Amy
Posted on February 1, 2009 at 5:18 pm

Snap, Elizabeth! “Maybe you could focus a little more on the plot of a book you neither planned out nor edited,” indeed! You said it much better than I did.

by Elizabeth
Posted on February 2, 2009 at 12:57 pm

Yeah, you know, when I was reading it I thought, “It seems like they just passed this back and forth and didn’t really edit it afterwards, which… mistake.” But then I thought, could they have done that, really? I mean, they’re professionals, right?

And then yesterday when I was procrastinating I wound up at David Levithan’s own website, where he says straight up that they didn’t really plan, they just wrote, and went with what they wound up with. I feel that it shows.