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Reading the End Posts

Blackbriar, William Sleator

I like it when it rains on a weekend that I don’t have any outside plans.  This weekend, I curled up in my comfy chair and read Blackbriar.  (Originally I opened up my blinds, too, so that I could see the rain, but there was THE HUGEST BUG EVER on the outside of my window, seriously, it was as big as a grown hummingbird, and it wouldn’t go away when I rapped on the window, so I closed the blinds again and just enjoyed the sounds of the rain.)  Ella was right.  It is indeed extremely Gothic. Fifteen-year-old Danny and…

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Books in the post!

I got books in the post from the fantastic Ella at Box of Books!  Not only was this a lovely surprise, but it was all wrapped up in thick brown paper.  I defy you to find a nicer packaging for books than thick brown paper.  And what wonderful books to get in the mail! Changing Planes, a collection of stories by Ursula LeGuin in which a central character called Sita is able to go to different worlds.  Gorgeous cover, and the illustrations in the book are wonderful – I’m looking forward to this! A book by William Sleator called Blackbriar…

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Mother Come Home, Paul Hornschemeier

I was just saying the other day that I never find good graphic novels to read by myself.  So today I was at the library and I decided I was damn well going to learn how to be independent and find a good graphic novel all on my own.  Yeah, and review it here, so other people would know about it too.  Mother Come Home is a graphic novel about a seven-year-old boy called Thomas Tennant who loses his mother, and how he and his father deal (or don’t deal) with the loss. I said in my review of The…

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The Savage, David Almond and Dave McKean

Another book recommendation from Nymeth – since I just read Skellig, imagine how pleased I was to find that that same author wrote a book that Dave McKean illustrated.  Dave McKean used to be my favorite living artist, before I bought my sculpture and discovered Cetin Ates and his genius, so now Dave McKean is my second favorite living artist. I do not love his work less than I used to love it, I just love Cetin Ates’s work even more than that. The Savage is about a young boy called Blue who recently lost his father.  A teacher at…

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Feeling Like a Kid, Jerry Griswold

A slim friendly book about elements that make children’s books appealing to kids.  I read about it on Nymeth’s blog, and I of course had to go get it from the library straight away.  I like reading books about books.  Jerry Griswold mentions a number of things in books that appeal to little children – snugness (yessss!), scariness, smallness, lightness, and aliveness.  I don’t think this is a comprehensive list, but I liked what he said about these five things.  Especially the snug section – I loved reading about people who had found their own little places to go.  There…

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Have His Carcase, Dorothy Sayers

Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, together again, hooray!  Harriet Vane has gone off for a vacation in a watering-place (watering-place.  Brits are so weird.), and she happens upon a dead body, all throat-cut and bloody.  The corpse is dancer Paul Alexis, who is engaged (slightly sordidly) to an extremely rich older woman called Mrs. Weldon, and appears to have been part of a strange Bolshevik type plot.  All of the possible suspects have unbreakable alibis.  Harriet will still not marry Peter, but he carries on badgering her to marry him anyway. I am mildly bothered by Peter’s continual badgering of…

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Books from my childhood

Today I reread Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top and Anne Lindbergh (daughter, not wife)’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare.  These were both favorites of mine when I was smaller, but in particular I liked Travel Far, Pay No Fare.  I loved it.  To me it was the most magical and amazing book of all time – twelve-year-old Owen moves to Vermont, where his nine-year-old cousin Parsley has a bookmark that allows them to go inside books.  They visit Little Women (nobody there is nice), Alice in Wonderland (ditto), The Fledgling, The Yearling, and even the volcano scene of The…

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Lovin’ on Tom Stoppard

Speaking of The Mousetrap, here is a Tom Stoppard anecdote.  If you have never seen The Mousetrap and you don’t know whodunit and you don’t want to, don’t carry on reading this paragraph. You have been warned.  Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound is a parody of The Mousetrap and those country house type mysteries, and it’s also a parody of theatre critics.  And it steals lots of plot elements from The Mousetrap, as the title The Real Inspector Hound suggests, which might have caused the Mousetrap people to object.  But!  But but but!  They couldn’t!  Because if they…

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Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers

So apparently?  Dorothy Sayers did not write her Harriet Vane books all in a row.  Murder Must Advertise happens after Peter has already met Harriet, but Harriet doesn’t feature in it at all.  In between wooing Harriet and solving mysteries with her (and getting woefully rejected), Peter still finds time to gallivant around infiltrating advertising agencies to sort out other problems.  I didn’t know this.  I thought that the books with Harriet just came one after another in direct sequence. This makes me feel better about Peter and Harriet.  You know how the Doctor asks Donna to come traveling with…

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French Milk, Lucy Knisley

This was a gift that I bought for someone’s birthday, and I read it before I gave it to my friend.  I’m sorry! In my defense, I read it incredibly carefully.  I mean just incredibly carefully, you have no idea, I practically had to poke my nose inside the book, because I was opening the covers only the littlest possible bit. Whatever, there is no excuse for me.  This is fine when I do it with my friend tim, or my Indie Sister, or even my mother, because I know they are all doing the same thing with (at least…

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