Mentioned by Peter more than a year ago, I’ve just started reading The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. M.T. Anderson’s prose is consistently impressive. Check out these two sentences as an example of the consistent gymanistics he pulls off throughout:

He worked with me word by word, leaning over my shoulder as I parsed my way through Tacitus and Homer; which instruction must have seemed to him not unlike the sea-captain, who having braved the catastrophic blasts and giddy precipices of the maelstrom, and but skated to their side; having passed with expert haste through the clashing Simplegades; having sat in the green eye of the hurricane, sounded by the hulking wrecks of other, less fortunate, fleets; now wades through with a little nephew in the warm shallows, collecting trash and pretty bits of shell. He must have looked out to sea with his glass sometimes, and wished for the spray, and men with whom he could truly speak of the rigors of navigation.

Looking at another of his books, Feed, I’m really enjoying the way M. T. Anderson’s playful flare in utilizing language demonstrates YA as a legitimate, “serious” form of literature.