<p>I introduced S to Truman Capote, he introduced us to Michael Chabon( we all loved Wonder Boys the movie, but he was the first one in the family to read the book) . Our tastes are similar with rare exeptions( Augusten Burrows being one( S loves I don’t) and Michail Bulgakov another( vice versa)) .</p>
<p>Hanna, I just finished proof-reading my 10 year old’s Bridge to Terabithia homework. (He hates to write, and would answer every essay with one sentence if he didn’t know I’d be checking.) I’ll have to read it now. </p>
<p>It’s been made into a Disney movie scheduled for February release:</p>
<p><a href=“Disney Movies | Official Site”>Disney Movies | Official Site;
<p>Still OT–Hanna, totally agrree with you about the ending of DC. Bleak House, which I otherwise adore, also has a few similar miscues toward the end.</p>
<p>For intelligent, complex characters from beginning to end, Dicken’s best is probably Our Mutual Friend.</p>
<p>My son hated whiny Holden Caufield just as much as I did. :)</p>
<p>Hope you like it! And I don’t know how I forgot to mention Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. Extraordinary story about a black farm family in Mississippi in the 1950’s. (It’s part of a series that also includes Let the Circle Be Unbroken and The Road to Memphis.) It’s another book told from the perspective of a ~10-year-old that has plenty of substance for an adult to chew on; it makes you feel like you’re there in the segregated schoolhouse and the cotton fields.</p>
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<p>Better not read Thomas Hardy then! Especially Tess.</p>
<p>Oh Hanna, I loved the Great Gilly Hopkins, Bridge to Terabithia and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (both as a child and as an adult)! I’ve never read The Chosen…I’ll have to get it for my kids and myself. A good book for girls (10-12) is The True Confession of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi (boys like it too, but the heroine is a girl). Other great (fun) reading for that age group is The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare (historical fiction), The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, by Frances Burnett, and Daddy-Long-Legs, by Jean Webster (about an orphan turned college student in the early 1900’s).</p>
<p>I moved to this country from Mexico when I was eleven years old, and my favorite thing (by far!) was the library!! I loved reading books, the smell of books, everyhthing about books (and I learned English really fast!)…There’s nothing better than a good read!</p>
<p>I remember really enjoying a book called Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech when I read it in 8th grade English. Its a wonderfully crafted book about a girl coming to terms with her mother’s life and death as she befriends another child whose mother has disappeared. Of all the young adult books I read in middle school, I remember considering that one by far the best. I also second Hanna on Roll of Thunder.</p>
<p>I’m hesitant to mention this one, because it has an extremely anti-religious message, but if you don’t mind that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is a fantasy trilogy that I find far superior to the Harry Potter books, although it should be read by a somewhat older audience (probably 12+, vs. 9-12 for the Potter books). Although the protagonist is a girl, it has enough action/adventure to satisfy any boy not inclined to prejudge it based on that.</p>
<p>Ah – Stephen Jay Gould – there is so much good stuff mentioned here that I’ve forgotten over the years!
May check some of these out for myself as well. One of the nice things about living near town is living near the library (the same one I went to as a kid). D’s are in there 2-3 times a week. Loved the last part of your post, curiousmother – me, too!</p>
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<p>Of course that line is satire, but that line also sets out the central theme of the book – which, as Marite says, is love and marriage. In P&P it’s the main device for advancing the plot.</p>
<p>Couerur, I mentioned this thread to TheMom over dinner and she said, “While I like LOTR very much, Tolkien can’t write female characters worth ****.”
N.B., the asterisks are my own, provided to save the filter from having to work.</p>
<p>Hanna, I want to slap some of the characters in DC around, particularly Dora or DC when he’s mooning over Dora. And Gip would have accidentally found his way into my microwave.</p>
<p>I don’t much like the term “chick lit” as it seems to be invariably a diminishing term. </p>
<p>Anent of which, the most devastating review I ever heard of said, “Reads like bad Danielle Steele.”</p>
<p>I was in love with Holden Caulfield, and while S was annoyed with him after reading Catcher at age 13, by the time he was 15, Holden was “da man” . S liked Salinger’s other books even more.</p>
<p>TheDad:
You are right that Tolkiien can’t write female characters. But that’s not why my Ss read him. Like you and Hanna, I do not have much patience with Dora and DC when he is mooning over her. I did not have much patience either for some characters in Tolstoy. Levine and his high-flown ideas for improving the peasantry… (well, of course, he was a stand-in for Tolstoy).</p>
<p>Is there a good Danielle Steele? I once read a book by her to find out why she was so popular and could not believe how bad it was.</p>
<p>Sci Fi! Ptoooey. I have read some of the classics to appease H–liked Enders Game and a few others. Recently, however, I asked him about the book he was reading, whereupon he reported that the main character was a Squid–in space. Pullllleeeezzze. Who can have an intelligent conversation about Squids in Space?</p>
<p>Forget the LOTR books–I did. Then, I had to see all three movies because the boys love 'em. I don’t know how many times I went to the lobby to make the time go by faster. LOTR Plot Summary According to cheers: He runs, he fights, he runs, he fights, he runs, he fights. Whoops! He dies. Or Whoops! He almost dies. <em>chick’s eyes glaze over</em></p>
<p>Funny, Dad, that’s the review I recently gave a book I read over Christmas–The Emperor’s Children. Was Knopf smoking crack when they decided to publish that book? All the agony of Danielle Steele with none of the sex. what a disppointment.</p>
<p>I am reading the biography of Thomas Hardy–did you know he was a lower class smarty pants who trained to be an architect but realized he didn’t have what it took to push his way into posh society where he could collect clients? Great read so far (Claire Tomalin).</p>
<p>S wrote a short essay about one of Hardy’s poems and discussed the relevance of his origins to interpreting the poem (it had to do with tombstones–of interest to a would-be architect son of a stonemason, if I recollect). Another lower-class smartypants was D.H. Lawrence. They were my window into the English class system.</p>
<p>Cheers, you are dead on about LOTR. I understand, though, that Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was heavily criticized in Hong Kong for not having enough action and too much romance.</p>
<p>There are authors worse than Danielle Steele. In the late 70s there was a wildly popular series called “Flowers in the Attic” that everyone seemed to be reading. It made Danielle Steele look like a master in comparison. In a Lit class, I remember when the professor asked us what we’d enjoyed reading over the summer, a clueless girl said “Flowers in the Attic,” and the prof was simply puzzled. The English majors in the room all exchanged wide-eyed glances. That girl dropped the course fairly quickly, if I recall.</p>
<p>I’m glad someone mentioned Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which I had forgotten. Both kids loved that trilogy. I can’t say I loved it completely – it starts to spin out of control in the middle of the second volume, and goes completely nuts in the third. The first volume – The Golden Compass here in America; Northern Lights in Great Britain – is super-wonderful. But boys may not connect instantly – it’s another plucky, intrepid girl book. (There is a male protagonist who gets almost equal time, but he doesn’t show up until Book 2, The Subtle Knife.)</p>
<p>The unmitigated good thing about the trilogy (apart from good characters, good writing, etc.) is that it inspires lots of thought about the relationship between religion, morals, and science, etc., and it also animates a lot of European history about the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. However, Pullman’s extreme – and I mean really extreme, by American standards – anti-clericism and anti-Catholicism could be a problem for lots of parents and kids. This is a book in which being a priest (or having any involvement with the Church) equals being evil, and there are quite a number of priests.</p>
<p>Part of the fun of the books, though, is that they would never have been published here had they not been quite successful in England, first. There are not many young adult authors here who would dare to have God die, literally (and it’s a decrepid, demented God), on camera, or who would plot a book so that the salvation of the universe depended on two 14-year-olds having sex before being separated forever. Many adults are corrupt and/or deluded, including the main characters’ parents. In other words, not your usual YA point of view, and kids appreciate the difference.</p>
<p>Well, I must not be a very discriminating reader, and neither are my kids. I absolutely adore anything written by Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters, but I also loved LOTR. I love SciFi, and Helen Fielding. H is currently reading “The Solzhenitsyn Reader” but also likes Shaara. S2 is currently reading both a James Bond novel and “The Red Badge of Courage” – he seems to enjoy them equally. I don’t think any of us read in order to analyze the writing, we just enjoy good stories. The only one who doesn’t seem to read much lately is college son, but I think his heavy load as a physics major leaves little time for fun reading. His addiction to WOW might also have something to do with it.</p>
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<p>Okay, so what do you call it then? What is the PC term for the genre?</p>
<p>“Hanna, I want to slap some of the characters in DC around, particularly Dora or DC when he’s mooning over Dora.”</p>
<p>I read DC in my freshman English seminar at Bryn Mawr. My wonderful professor talked to us about Dickens’ life and how he, like DC, married a helpless airhead, but that Dickens’ real-life Dora stayed stubbornly alive; he apparently killed off DC’s Dora to free his literary alter ego from the stifling marriage he couldn’t escape himself.</p>
<p>“The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare (historical fiction)”</p>
<p>This is a great choice, as is The Sign of the Beaver, by the same author. I learned a ton of social history from these books. For fiction set in more recent American history, look at Yoshiko Uchida’s series including A Jar of Dreams and its sequels (about a smart 11-year-old Japanese-American girl living in Berkeley during the Depression) and Journey to Topaz (about a California family’s internment during WWII). For a look at the other side of WWII, Testuko Kuroyanagi’s novelized memoir “Totto-Chan” concerns an eccentric little girl who is kicked out of regular school and moves to an equally eccentric alternative school. My father read this book 20 years ago, at age 45, and still metnions it as one of his all-time favorites.</p>
<p>I have often thought about becoming a children’s librarian when I retire. I love all these books so much.</p>