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Tag: for young people

Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

This weekend I did a lot of things I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, including covering my paperbacks with contact paper.  And in the process of doing this, I got started reading Harriet the Spy, which I haven’t read for ages and ages.  What a good book it is!  Harriet is an eleven-year-old girl who wants to be a spy, and she goes around spying on people and writing down everything she sees, and trying to figure out grown-ups. I identified so strongly with Harriet when I was a kid.  I once got into huge trouble for writing a…

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Chains, Laurie Halse Anderson

This is one of about five billion books my father got for my mother for Christmas.  My mother loves to get a bunch of books for Christmas, so this year my father made a humongous effort to think of and buy books for her that she would enjoy, so at the end of the day she’d have a great big stack of new books to read.  What’s nicer than that, eh?  And I swiped it today and read it on the drive to the farm for our family Christmas. (Hm, that paragraph sounds ridiculously wholesome.  I made a sneery face…

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The Society of S, Susan Hubbard

One time a few years ago, I had strep throat, and my parents were out of town so instead of going to the real doctor, I went to the Student Health Center on my campus.  They didn’t want to see me, but when they said they couldn’t see me because I wasn’t enrolled for the next semester (I was going to England), I started to cry, and I cried and I cried and I cried and they agreed to see me after all.  And – perhaps in revenge – they gave me an antibiotic that gave me shocking mood swings. …

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The Naming, Alison Croggon

I think I’ve read this book before. Not in the sense of having actually read it before, but in the sense of read books exactly like it before (but better). Plus it does that thing I hate of having dozens and dozens of capitalized words all the time. Did anyone see this cartoon? I think the same graph can be used but with “Number of Words Capitalized In Order To Make Them Sound Cool And Important” on the X axis. I’ve had a stressful week this week, and every evening before I went to bed, my only free time of…

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling

I’m very emotional.  I – I – I have so many, so very many, feelings. This was the only one of the books I waited for but not with my family.  When the sixth book came out, I was doing a month in London, which was amazing and I saw like twelve plays that month, but it also meant that I got my book from a bookshop in Croydon.  Aggravating melodramatic liar Frank Harris is from Croydon.  That’s all I will say.  Also, nobody stayed up with me to read it.  I was with (a different) Jane, and she and…

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling

I saw this graph one time on something connected with the Lemony Snicket books, and it showed how as time went on, the number of fortunate events decreased. And that is what I always think of when I read the fifth Harry Potter book. It contains so many depressing things – dementors, Umbridge, writing lines in blood, everyone thinking Harry is crazy, an acknowledgement of Harry’s psychological issues, Cho Chang – and the end makes me feel so very, very sad, for Harry and for Dumbledore. I stayed up until midnight for this book when it came out, at the…

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

Holy God, this book is scary. I had completely forgotten how terrifying the scene in the graveyard is. Damn. Goblet of Fire isn’t as unfavoritey to me as I remembered it being. I don’t know why I was so cranky about it. I mean, apart from the Blast-Ended Skrewts, which were a much less important part of the book than I was remembering, and the fact that this book is hard on poor Harry, Goblet of Fire isn’t half bad. I was expecting that I would reread it and decide after all that I liked it even less than Chamber…

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling

Mm, this is the one I’ve been waiting for. My original plan was just to read Prisoner of Azkaban, my most favorite of all the Harry Potter books, but then I decided to read them all, since I knew that would take longer and afford me more lasting satisfaction. In Azkaban, a supporter of Voldemort (and, it more or less goes without saying, murderer) breaks out of the wizard prison Azkaban and is out on the lam, desperate – say the prison guards – to get to Harry and kill him dead. Meanwhile the soul-sucking dementors that generally spend all…

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Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling

You know, if nostalgia was going to cloud my judgment, you’d think I’d like Chamber of Secrets better than I do. It was the first of the Harry Potter books that I bought myself. I remember it really vividly – the Books-a-Million was still open then, and I was young enough that it was a bit of an adventure to buy an expensive hardback all by myself (sheesh, I was a weird fourteen-year-old), and I showed it off to everyone once I got it home, though since none of them had read Harry Potter yet, nobody cared. Except my mother,…

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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

I decided to read these books all over again. The length of my workdays, and the fact that today I was working at one place or another from six-forty in the morning until nine at night, has put the kibosh on any adventurous reading I might feel like doing. I returned all my library books to the library with the intention of reading my books that I already own (but not yet Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me, for which I’m still delaying gratification); and I came up with the bright idea of reading the entire Harry Potter series over from…

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