Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Book-A-Day #29 (8/15): Prador Moon by Neal Asher
I read this for SFBC, so I'll be brief: it's a big zippy space opera in a small package, in which Asher's Polity encounters intelligent aliens for the first time: gigantic warlike crabs that discover that they love the taste of human flesh. The science is not, as you might guess, as hard as it might be. (And that's perfectly fine with me.)
Incoming Books: 15 August
I went out to a bookstore at lunch today to get one book, and came home with two. (Well, I actually bought three, but one was for work, and stayed at work.)
I went to buy Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey (and I notice that this is, as far as I remember, the first time I've ever deliberately gone out of my way to buy something the first day it was available -- I even had to ask for it at the counter in the kids' section, and they grabbed the stack out of the back to put them out), and also brought home Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic by Stephan Pastis.
The first I'll read at bedtime to the boys over the next day or two, and the other one will probably get read in bits either by the computer (after I finish the other two volumes of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes) or in bed (after I finish Chip Kidd: Book One). So they don't, for once, seriously increase the to-be-read shelves.
I went to buy Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey (and I notice that this is, as far as I remember, the first time I've ever deliberately gone out of my way to buy something the first day it was available -- I even had to ask for it at the counter in the kids' section, and they grabbed the stack out of the back to put them out), and also brought home Pearls Before Swine: Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic by Stephan Pastis.
The first I'll read at bedtime to the boys over the next day or two, and the other one will probably get read in bits either by the computer (after I finish the other two volumes of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes) or in bed (after I finish Chip Kidd: Book One). So they don't, for once, seriously increase the to-be-read shelves.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Book-A-Day #28 (8/14): The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Book One by Bill Watterson
First of the three books in the big slipcase.
This is a gorgeous edition, with all of the watercolor art (collection covers, the new storybook-style stories, and other random stuff) interspersed where it makes the most sense and with all of the strips in chronological order (with dates!) except occasionally where the Sundays aren't in the same continuity as the dailies. It's an absolutely wonderful book, as well it should be for the arm and a leg it costs.
The only possible criticism is that its so damn heavy, but that's a feature as much as it is a bug -- it's published on very nice paper, and that stuff is heavy. (As is the half-cloth binding and big thick boards.)
Of course, the great thing about an edition like this is being able to read straight through several years of a strip, and see how it changed. Watterson's art style changed only a bit; he started out a bit looser and with more blacks, but tightened up quickly and, as far as I can see, keep the same style consistently from about the summer of 1986 through the end of the strip in 1995. As far as stories go, he clearly got more confident as time went on, and was willing to run a story for two or three weeks, but Calvin & Hobbes was the same kind of strip several years in as it was when it began (and I'm pretty sure I'll find when I hit Volume 3 that it ended as the same kind of strip it had always been).
This is a gorgeous edition, with all of the watercolor art (collection covers, the new storybook-style stories, and other random stuff) interspersed where it makes the most sense and with all of the strips in chronological order (with dates!) except occasionally where the Sundays aren't in the same continuity as the dailies. It's an absolutely wonderful book, as well it should be for the arm and a leg it costs.
The only possible criticism is that its so damn heavy, but that's a feature as much as it is a bug -- it's published on very nice paper, and that stuff is heavy. (As is the half-cloth binding and big thick boards.)
Of course, the great thing about an edition like this is being able to read straight through several years of a strip, and see how it changed. Watterson's art style changed only a bit; he started out a bit looser and with more blacks, but tightened up quickly and, as far as I can see, keep the same style consistently from about the summer of 1986 through the end of the strip in 1995. As far as stories go, he clearly got more confident as time went on, and was willing to run a story for two or three weeks, but Calvin & Hobbes was the same kind of strip several years in as it was when it began (and I'm pretty sure I'll find when I hit Volume 3 that it ended as the same kind of strip it had always been).
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Movie Log: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Today I saw two middle-of-trilogy movies with colons in the middle of their titles. It wasn't exactly on purpose.
I had heard the vague talk that Dead Man's Chest had certain similarities with another middle-of-trilogy adventure movie (The Empire Strikes Back), and I can certainly see the parallels:
This is not a movie to think deeply about: it's a hell of a lot of fun, laugh-out-loud funny in a number of places, and it did make nearly two and a half hours pass very quickly. I saw the first one at home a week after watching Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, both of which made it suffer a bit. I saw Dead Man's Chest on a big screen in a theatre with nice comfy chairs and good sound, as God and Gore Verbinski intended.
Other random thoughts:
I had heard the vague talk that Dead Man's Chest had certain similarities with another middle-of-trilogy adventure movie (The Empire Strikes Back), and I can certainly see the parallels:
- blonde hero learns more about and confronts his presumed-dead father
- blond and brunette heroes are now apparently in competition for The Girl
- heroes travel to an odd location where one of the very few black featured characters helps them out
- brunette hero is trying desperately to avoid a debt he owes to a large slimy associate
- brunette hero is left in rather an unpleasant position at movie's end
- movie does not so much end as stop
This is not a movie to think deeply about: it's a hell of a lot of fun, laugh-out-loud funny in a number of places, and it did make nearly two and a half hours pass very quickly. I saw the first one at home a week after watching Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, both of which made it suffer a bit. I saw Dead Man's Chest on a big screen in a theatre with nice comfy chairs and good sound, as God and Gore Verbinski intended.
Other random thoughts:
- The Wife actually recognized Bill Nighy under his makeup, for which she deserves some kind of prize
- Elizabeth's father has surprisingly little power for a British Governor in the high days of imperialism; the redcoats should all take his orders, not those of some jumped-up businessman
- the two squabbling pirates are worth the price of admission all by themselves ("the dichotomy of good and evil?")
- And it sure rains a lot in this movie...
Movie Log: Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
Boys' Movie Saturday rolls around once again, and Thing 1 wanted to watch Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones and leave Howl's Moving Castle for next week. (And you can't blame him for it; the last Miyazaki movie he saw was the scary Princess Mononoke and he doesn't know how bad Attack of the Clones is.)
For that matter, I didn't really know how bad Attack of the Clones was; I'd never seen it before. I'd heard a lot about it, and I'd played through the storyline in Lego Star Wars on the GameCube, but I'd never actually sat in front of a screen on which it was playing. Well, now I have.
I won't beat this very dead horse too much, but boy! was that a waste. Hayden Christensen was lousy, Natalie Portman and Samuel Jackson (both of which I've seen actually acting in other movies) were stiff as boards, and only good ol' Ewan MacGregor was able to successfully impersonate a human being. The dialogue was bland and uninspiring, and the actors not directed to do much with it. (I kept thinking that a really good script would have been able to counteract Lucas's problems directing people, or that a really strong director could have salvaged Lucas's script -- but, doing both, he magnified his weak points.)
This could have been a damn good movie -- it has real ideas poking out of it at odd angles, and its events, tweaked slightly, could have made an excellent, gripping story. But Attack of the Clones is not that story. Lucas relies too heavily on special effects, and many times (as when character's faces are computer-pasted onto a CGI dummy), those effects make the characters move in obviously unrealistic ways, so that the viewer keeps being reminded that he's just watching a movie...a dumb, ham-handed movie that would have been wonderful if Lucas handed his plot to a decent scriptwriter and produced the work of a director who can actually get actors to show emotion. (The only emotion we do get, anywhere in this film, is Anakin's whiny petulance -- and we get that far too often.)
So I don't hate Attack of the Clones because it's dumb -- it was a summer skiffy movie, and those are supposed to be dumb -- but because the good movie it could have been is always faintly visible like a ghost, and that haunts it from beginning to end.
For that matter, I didn't really know how bad Attack of the Clones was; I'd never seen it before. I'd heard a lot about it, and I'd played through the storyline in Lego Star Wars on the GameCube, but I'd never actually sat in front of a screen on which it was playing. Well, now I have.
I won't beat this very dead horse too much, but boy! was that a waste. Hayden Christensen was lousy, Natalie Portman and Samuel Jackson (both of which I've seen actually acting in other movies) were stiff as boards, and only good ol' Ewan MacGregor was able to successfully impersonate a human being. The dialogue was bland and uninspiring, and the actors not directed to do much with it. (I kept thinking that a really good script would have been able to counteract Lucas's problems directing people, or that a really strong director could have salvaged Lucas's script -- but, doing both, he magnified his weak points.)
This could have been a damn good movie -- it has real ideas poking out of it at odd angles, and its events, tweaked slightly, could have made an excellent, gripping story. But Attack of the Clones is not that story. Lucas relies too heavily on special effects, and many times (as when character's faces are computer-pasted onto a CGI dummy), those effects make the characters move in obviously unrealistic ways, so that the viewer keeps being reminded that he's just watching a movie...a dumb, ham-handed movie that would have been wonderful if Lucas handed his plot to a decent scriptwriter and produced the work of a director who can actually get actors to show emotion. (The only emotion we do get, anywhere in this film, is Anakin's whiny petulance -- and we get that far too often.)
So I don't hate Attack of the Clones because it's dumb -- it was a summer skiffy movie, and those are supposed to be dumb -- but because the good movie it could have been is always faintly visible like a ghost, and that haunts it from beginning to end.
Reading Into the Past: Week of 8/6
This week the magic number was eight, and these are the books I was reading this week in 1998:
- George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (8/2)
Second in the series of big fat fantasy tomes that are also serious novels about moral responsibility and family ties, but, for God's sake, don't start here -- A Game of Thrones is the first one. - Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (8/3)
I'm very fond of first person narrators, and I also quite like artificial structures in my novels, so the diary form was a lot of fun here. (The sequel, however, is lousy; avoid it.) It is not a book to take seriously at all, and it might read a bit differently these days (especially as it has spawned an entire sub-genre), but it was wonderfully fun at the time, especially read at full speed. - Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Making Book (8/10)
A collection of essays and miscellania, mostly about books and the editing life. Books like this appeal only to a relatively small readership, but I'm smack-dab in the middle of that readership, and this is a great example of the type.
Movie Log: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
I saw three movies in about a 25-hour period, Friday to Saturday, so these might be quick.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was from Netflix, and I knocked it off on Friday night. I was stunned to see that the movie was from 1990, and that I'd somehow managed to miss seeing it before now.
The play was one of my favorites in high school (which will tell you quite a bit about what kind of teenager I was -- introspective, moody, found of theatricality and philosophizing), so perhaps the movie just came along a couple of years too late for me to have jumped right on it when it finally appeared. (In 1990 I was just graduating college.)
For those who've never heard of it, R&G Are Dead is a Tom Stoppard play (if I'm remembering right, his first produced play, from about 1966) which takes two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Ham's old college buddies, the guys in the title) and puts them through some very post-Beckettian situations weaved in and around the events of the Shakespeare play. The movie was scripted and directed by Stoppard, so it's definitive in a sense.
It's a movie of quick dialogue, and I had to turn my DVD volume up all the way; it seemed to have been mastered very quietly. It also had no subtitles, which was annoying -- I've come to rely on them for movies like this, to make sure I don't miss anything at home (where I can't set the volume to shake the house, since there are two sleeping boys above me). So I missed more of it than I would have liked.
It's a good version of the play, and exploits space in a movie-like way rather than feeling like a filmed play. It is somewhat depressive, of course -- it's a serious mid-20th century play, how could it be otherwise? -- as the central themes are death and the impossibility of avoiding fate. Neither the play or the movie can really be summarized; either you know Hamlet or you don't, and what happens to R&G outside Shakespeare's scenes is interesting in a theatrical sense, but not really heavily plotted. The movie, like the play, is for people who like artifice and stagecraft and impending doom. I still do, so it worked for me, though I'd like to see it again, someday.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead was from Netflix, and I knocked it off on Friday night. I was stunned to see that the movie was from 1990, and that I'd somehow managed to miss seeing it before now.
The play was one of my favorites in high school (which will tell you quite a bit about what kind of teenager I was -- introspective, moody, found of theatricality and philosophizing), so perhaps the movie just came along a couple of years too late for me to have jumped right on it when it finally appeared. (In 1990 I was just graduating college.)
For those who've never heard of it, R&G Are Dead is a Tom Stoppard play (if I'm remembering right, his first produced play, from about 1966) which takes two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Ham's old college buddies, the guys in the title) and puts them through some very post-Beckettian situations weaved in and around the events of the Shakespeare play. The movie was scripted and directed by Stoppard, so it's definitive in a sense.
It's a movie of quick dialogue, and I had to turn my DVD volume up all the way; it seemed to have been mastered very quietly. It also had no subtitles, which was annoying -- I've come to rely on them for movies like this, to make sure I don't miss anything at home (where I can't set the volume to shake the house, since there are two sleeping boys above me). So I missed more of it than I would have liked.
It's a good version of the play, and exploits space in a movie-like way rather than feeling like a filmed play. It is somewhat depressive, of course -- it's a serious mid-20th century play, how could it be otherwise? -- as the central themes are death and the impossibility of avoiding fate. Neither the play or the movie can really be summarized; either you know Hamlet or you don't, and what happens to R&G outside Shakespeare's scenes is interesting in a theatrical sense, but not really heavily plotted. The movie, like the play, is for people who like artifice and stagecraft and impending doom. I still do, so it worked for me, though I'd like to see it again, someday.
Book-A-Day #27 (8/13): third in the aforementioned contemporary fantasy series
And that will be it for now. If all goes well, I'll be sticking these three books into one volume for the SFBC some time in the late fall.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Book-A-Day #26 (8/12): Scotch and Toilet Water?: A Book of Dog Cartoons by Leo Cullum
Some days, I'm really too busy to do much reading. Today, for example: I took the boys on a two-hour hike in Ramapo Reservation (it was supposed to be with Thing 1's Cub Scout group, but everyone else was at the other entrance to the park -- but we had a good time anyway), dragged them back home to have lunch while watching Star Wars Episode II, took a quick trip to the library, and then dropped the boys off at my mothers' house for a sleepover.
Next The Wife and I will go out and see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, have some dinner, and come back home and collapse. It's a full day, and I haven't touched the book I'm supposed to be reading.
On days like this, I foul one off to keep my count alive. Today it was a book of cartoons (mostly from the New Yorker) by Leo Cullum, all with dogs in them. It doesn't take very long to read in the first place, and I'd read most of it a few weeks ago and put it on my emergency-books pile (for just such times as this). Voila -- I finished a book today, and my streak is still alive. (And I also get a blog post out of it, keeping that streak alive, too.)
Oh, the cleverness of me!
Next The Wife and I will go out and see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, have some dinner, and come back home and collapse. It's a full day, and I haven't touched the book I'm supposed to be reading.
On days like this, I foul one off to keep my count alive. Today it was a book of cartoons (mostly from the New Yorker) by Leo Cullum, all with dogs in them. It doesn't take very long to read in the first place, and I'd read most of it a few weeks ago and put it on my emergency-books pile (for just such times as this). Voila -- I finished a book today, and my streak is still alive. (And I also get a blog post out of it, keeping that streak alive, too.)
Oh, the cleverness of me!
Friday, August 11, 2006
Quote of the Week
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it the right way, did not become still more complicated."
-Poul Anderson
-Poul Anderson
Book-A-Day #25 (8/11): Ex Machina Vol. 3: Fact v. Fiction by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Tom Feister
Third collection of comics stories about a metahuman mayor of New York City; one of the few comics ever to have attempted something like real science fiction and not been a horrible embarrassment.
Horswoggler says: check 'em out.
Horswoggler says: check 'em out.
Incoming Book: 10 November
Yesterday approximately 500 pages of Mae West: "it ain't no sin" by Simon Louvish came home with me to La Casa de Hornswoggler.
I'd read a good review of it somewhere (probably Publishers Weekly), and then saw a bound galley (does anyone in the trade still call them "bound galleys?" we do at Bookspan/Doubleday Entertainment, but that might just be because we're all crotchety and set in our ways) a few days later and snapped it up.
I like reading good biographies, and don't get through as many of them as I'd like. (Mostly because a good biography takes a while to read, and time is tight.) This one will join some others, scattered across by to-be-read shelves, and might make it in front of my eyeballs at an indeterminate time in the next five-to-ten years.
The name Simon Louvish is oddly familiar: I checked out his website, and he's written a lot of things, but I don't think I've read any of it. Still, I have the feeling I did read something of his once...I wonder what it was?
I'd read a good review of it somewhere (probably Publishers Weekly), and then saw a bound galley (does anyone in the trade still call them "bound galleys?" we do at Bookspan/Doubleday Entertainment, but that might just be because we're all crotchety and set in our ways) a few days later and snapped it up.
I like reading good biographies, and don't get through as many of them as I'd like. (Mostly because a good biography takes a while to read, and time is tight.) This one will join some others, scattered across by to-be-read shelves, and might make it in front of my eyeballs at an indeterminate time in the next five-to-ten years.
The name Simon Louvish is oddly familiar: I checked out his website, and he's written a lot of things, but I don't think I've read any of it. Still, I have the feeling I did read something of his once...I wonder what it was?
Movie Log: Whisper of the Heart
I should probably just get a complete list of Studio Ghibli movies and start checking them off one by one, because it looks like I'm going to try to see them all. This one isn't by Miyazaki, the head of the studio, or even Takahata, whom I'm now thinking of as "the other guy." (He's the one who directed Pom Poko, which I saw a few weeks ago.)It's now three days after the last paragraph, and I now have found and printed out a Studio Ghibli list -- it seems that I still have to track down and see
- My Neighbor Totoro (which I own on VHS)
- Howl's Moving Castle (which I own on DVD)
- Grave of the Fireflies (which I might save for last)
- Only Yesterday (which doesn't seem to have been released in the US, ever)
- My Neighbors the Yamadas (which looks like one of those "for the huge audience who already knows and loves it" movies)
- Ocean Waves (A TV movie that also doesn't seem to have had a US release)
- The Cat Returns (probably next)
- and Tales from Earthsea (assuming it gets a US release)
Anyway, the Wife and I watched Whisper of the Heart on Monday night. It's a quiet, low-key movie about characters (which I generally like), and is essentially a very chaste junior-high-school meet-cute-and-fall-in-love story. The animation is lovely, and really has a sense of place; it's set in parts of Tokyo (I don't know which parts, as I don't think they're ever specified), and they feel very real. I do wonder if the whole area is that hilly-slash-mountainous; the movie doesn't make a big deal about it (it's just part of the world), but there's an awful lot of stairs and walking up inclines and just looking out over beautiful vistas.
It's a nice family story, though it gets a bit potted in the last third. (Our heroine, Shizuku, wants to be a writer, so we get some mildly precious stuff about creativity -- it's not bad, or really intrusive, but it shows that the Artistic Creators Are Wonderful And Special meme has touched every corner of the world.) The relationships in Shizuku's family are very believable, and the interactions among the students at school are also very well done (with only a couple of moments of broad slapstick; this is generally a realistic movie).
I'm not quite sure how to put this, but Whisper of the Heart is now bouncing off Gregory's Girl (a movie with a broadly similar premise, though Gregory doesn't swing for the fences the way Whisper does, and Gregory also has much better dialogue) in my head. Coming-of-age stories all have some family similarities, of course, but these two movies interestingly counterpoint each other.
One last thought: Whisper of the Heart is the only animated film I can think of without any fantastic content. (Except maybe The Triplets of Belleville, which has some oddities but very little that could be called fantasy.) There is some pseudo-fantasy in a dream sequence, and more in the story that Shizuku writes, but that's not fantasy on the level of the movie itself. So this is a good argument in favor of animation being able to tackle any kind of story; this could easily have been a live-action movie, but it works very well as animation.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Book-A-Day #24 (8/10): The Sky People by S.M. Stirling
An upcoming novel I read for the SFBC, so I shouldn't talk much about it.
It does have a neat setup: the first probes of Mars and Venus in the early '60s revealed planets remarkably like pulp SF -- planets not only inhabitable, but inhabited by humans (and, in the case of Venus, also dinosaurs and warlike Neanderthals). This has led to some interesting (if fairly predictable) alternate-historical changes, and a Cold War ranging over three planets.
This is my first Stirling novel, and I think I personally like my retro-futures a bit less straightforward and more rococo in style (like Colin Greenland's Harm's Way), but mine is a minority taste. This book is a lot of fun, and I expect it will be widely enjoyed. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this series became his most popular work (over the Draka novels and the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy) in the fullness of time; it's that appealing and adventurous and wide-open for storytelling.
It does have a neat setup: the first probes of Mars and Venus in the early '60s revealed planets remarkably like pulp SF -- planets not only inhabitable, but inhabited by humans (and, in the case of Venus, also dinosaurs and warlike Neanderthals). This has led to some interesting (if fairly predictable) alternate-historical changes, and a Cold War ranging over three planets.
This is my first Stirling novel, and I think I personally like my retro-futures a bit less straightforward and more rococo in style (like Colin Greenland's Harm's Way), but mine is a minority taste. This book is a lot of fun, and I expect it will be widely enjoyed. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this series became his most popular work (over the Draka novels and the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy) in the fullness of time; it's that appealing and adventurous and wide-open for storytelling.
Banned Books Meme
Finally, a meme I really like. (I got this one from Keith R.A. DeCandido, source of many memes since his name's fairly early in the alphabet and he's maniacally active on LiveJournal.) I like this one particularly because, when I was in high school, I came across a list of the twenty-five most challenged books (in Playboy, I think), and I made a photocopy and tacked it up on my bulletin board as a reading list. In the end, I gave up partway through The Diary of Anne Frank (I was terribly sorry that those mean Nazis killed her, sure, but I didn't care about her at all) and just flipped through Our Bodies, Ourselves, but I read everything else. The list seems to have changed quite a bit since then, which I guess I should have expected; teenagers don't really want to read about what their parents were like as teens.
The rules: bold 'em if you've read 'em, italicize them if you plan to.
1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling -- all of them; I'm reading Sorcerer's Stone at bedtime to my five-year old right now
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
I note that I don't seem to have read any of the naughty Judy Blume books; I read some of her middle-grade books, way back when, but didn't read her teen novels. I also note that I haven't even heard of a lot of these books and authors; the YA world changes pretty quickly, and I haven't been poking around those shelves regularly for about twenty years now. (But give me about three to four years, and Thing 1 will be heading for that area, and I'll probably be plugged back in -- and, I expect, reading more YA books-without-pictures than he will be.)
I also wonder about the original source of this list; lists of "banned books" usually mean books that were on a curriculum or in a school library and were challenged by someone (usually unsuccessfully). But I find it hard to believe that any school teacher or librarian, no matter how liberal, could find a legitimate pedagogical purpose for Madonna's silly and overpriced art object Sex.
The rules: bold 'em if you've read 'em, italicize them if you plan to.
1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling -- all of them; I'm reading Sorcerer's Stone at bedtime to my five-year old right now
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It's Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth's Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where's Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
I note that I don't seem to have read any of the naughty Judy Blume books; I read some of her middle-grade books, way back when, but didn't read her teen novels. I also note that I haven't even heard of a lot of these books and authors; the YA world changes pretty quickly, and I haven't been poking around those shelves regularly for about twenty years now. (But give me about three to four years, and Thing 1 will be heading for that area, and I'll probably be plugged back in -- and, I expect, reading more YA books-without-pictures than he will be.)
I also wonder about the original source of this list; lists of "banned books" usually mean books that were on a curriculum or in a school library and were challenged by someone (usually unsuccessfully). But I find it hard to believe that any school teacher or librarian, no matter how liberal, could find a legitimate pedagogical purpose for Madonna's silly and overpriced art object Sex.
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