Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Moorchild is dedicated "To all children who have ever felt different." I don't believe I read this dedication the first time round - I was not in the habit of reading dedications when I was eleven - and it is perhaps just as well, because I already identified with the book so hard that I might very well have picked it as ( Read more... )

”A woman’s work is something fine and noble to grow up to, and it is just as important as a man’s. But no man could ever do it so well. I don’t want you to be the silly, affected person with fine clothes and manners whom folks sometimes call a lady. No, that is not what I want for you, my little girl. I want you to be a woman with a wise and ( Read more... )

In lieu of the Wednesday reading meme (because I accomplished basically no reading this past week, except a reread of Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary), I'm going to answer lycoris's December meme question: Tell me about your favourite book that you think I might not have heard of ( Read more... )

I haven’t seen The Giver movie and don’t really intend to - the poster strongly suggests to me that its producers don’t actually understand the book - but its existence has gotten me thinking about The Giver again, so in that sense I’m rather beholden to it ( Read more... )

My freshman year of college, I took an immeasurably dull class about the History of the Middle East: the kind of class where I could have read the textbook and achieved more entertainment and information retention. It was worth it, however, because one of the books we read was Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an ( Read more... )

Although the supposed theme of this 100 books list is "100 books that influenced me," it's not always easy or even possible to pinpoint any measurable influence from a particular book. But Jeanine Basinger's Silent Stars is an exception: it had a clear and concrete influence on my life and my movie-going habits ( Read more... )

Bill Bryson was once my secret authorial love. I adore his books and await each new one eagerly, but until this year I didn’t have anyone to share them with. This year, however! This year, I lent Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself to Emma, who lent it to Rick, who lent it to Caitlin, who lent it to her mother, at which circuitous point the ( Read more... )

Did anyone else read Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books at a tender age? I loved them. I liked the characters, and the stories were okay, but beyond everything else I adored the illustrations. They’re so intricately detailed, cluttered even, storerooms with masses of stuff on shelves all the way to the ceilings - and then clusters of mushrooms ( Read more... )

For years after I read Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, I liked to drop small change on the ground in emulation of the heroine. Stargirl is always doing little acts of kindness: she drops change, leaves anonymous cards, keeps all her trimmed hair for birds to make nests with. Whenever one her classmates has a birthday, she sings “Happy birthday” to them ( Read more... )

On the ask me questions meme, nagasasu asked for a review of Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s The Far Side of Evil, which is technically the sequel the Enchantress from the Stars. However, the two books tell quite different stories with quite different tones and are tied together only because they share a heroine: Elana, a member of the Federation’s Anthropological ( Read more... )