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Reading the End Posts

Jenna Starborn, Sharon Shinn

So I read this for my Victorians class, basically because I want to write a paper on it for my final project – that research proposal is due in on Thursday and I’ve given it shockingly little thought in comparison to my usual intensive research schedules with these term paper things – anyway, I’m reading it for my final project, and I didn’t expect it to be any good.  I judge books by their cover, and this cover was rubbish. I also judge them on really cheap jokes.  The fact that she talks into her little voice recorder, the brand…

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The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo

Ick. Edit to add: Edit to add: Yes, ick.  That’s all I have to say about this book.  It creeped me out and I was loath to finish it but I finished it anyway because I was stuck in the airport and I had nothing else to read except for The Ape Who Guards the Balance, which I had already finished, Jenna Starborn, ditto, and my Norton Anthology of American Literature. It was all about how people with power over other people become power-mad and psychologically abusive.  It was creepy.  The Stanford Prison Experiment was creepy, creepy, creepy, in addition…

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The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs

Recommended by: A Life in Books So basically I finished this book late last night and I was dead tired; but I still managed to have many thoughts about it after I had dropped it onto my flip chair and turned off the light, and they all sort of centered around the thought that this man could use some serious cognitive behavioral therapy.  He might really enjoy cognitive behavioral therapy, I was thinking, because of its structured, project-like nature, and furthermore it would make him less crazy (and I use that word in its nicest sense).  I was composing a…

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Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer

Well, I have just finished up Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer’s third trashy vampire book.  In case you were wondering whether all the trashy continues unabated, the answer is a resounded and unqualified YES. Basically, in this book, Bella and Edward have lots of anxieties for several reasons, including 1) she misses Jacob and wants to play with him; and 2) he (Edward, not Jacob) wants to get married and she doesn’t; and 3) she wants to have sex and he (still Edward, not Jacob) doesn’t; and 4) a vampire they pissed off a while ago is making a massive army of…

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Wolf Woman, Sherryl Jordan

I swear to God I will try and say some eloquent things about Night Watch which I am really enjoying, but I can’t even be bothered with Wolf Woman.  Sherryl Jordan?  What happened here?  Have you no sense of humor at all?  This is not an interesting story and exhibits a woeful lack of any sense of humor at all ever even a little bit ever.

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The Juniper Game, Sherryl Jordan

“What I want to do,” said Juniper, “is an experiment in mental telepathy.”  She hesitated, waiting for his reaction.  There wasn’t one.  “I know I have some telepathic abilities,” she went on more confidently.  “I can go through a pack of cards, face down, and guess about fifteen correctly.  And I often know who it is when the phone rings before I answer it.  But I want to try mental telepathy with someone else.  I want to try giving someone else my thoughts.  Images are easier to receive than words.  They’re more intuitive somehow, not so tied up in logic…

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Miss Spitfire, Sarah Miller

Recommended by: Book Nut I love Annie Sullivan.  Every time I think about Annie Sullivan it blows my mind.  She was twenty when she went to go teach Helen Keller, and she’d had no proper parenting, and she was twenty, and she must have been just about the most brilliant and inventive person of all time.  Annie Sullivan.  WOW.  There was a woman who knew how to parent. Anyway, I was excited to read this book about her.  I like young adult books, even though I have now become a real adult and can no longer feel smug, as I…

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Birds in Fall, Brad Kessler

She handed the open tube across the cello.What do I do with this? I asked. You write your name. You’re being dramatic. Am I? she asked. The name of the lipstick was Japanese Maple. Against her pale skin, the letters looked lurid and blotchy. The Japanese maple on our roof was slightly more purple than the lipstick. Its leaves in fall the color “of bruises” Ana once said. She would have looked good wearing that pigment. I held the glistening tube in my hand, not knowing what to write or where. I wanted to write Ana’s name, or both our…

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Emily’s Quest, L.M. Montgomery

A really sad story: One time when I was in England I developed this mad craving to read all the Emily of New Moon books, so I went to great trouble to obtain them.  As things ended up, I had the first two on loan, and the third one I bought at a charity shop, so I read the first two lickety-split and returned them, at which point my yearning to read Emily’s Quest surpassed all imagining.  At this point it was late May, I think.  I was into exams and all.  And I had the bright idea – being…

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Sweethearts, Sara Zarr

Recommended by: God knows.  Some website.  I remember seeing it but I didn’t take note of where and now I can’t remember.  I’m cute but dumb. I actually bought this book mainly out of terror and dismay, as it sounded a lot like a story I’m in the process of drafting, and when I read about it I freaked out immediately and started having depressing dreams in which Sara Zarr (who looked a lot like Scheherazade from the TV movie of Arabian Nights, damn her) came and fussed at me for writing a lamer version of the exact same story…

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