Chapter Eight: Passarola Rising

So this one isn't a children's book, it just caught my eye while I was browsing the school library's Australian Fiction section.  It wasn't quite as captivating as, say The Hunger Games, but I enjoyed reading it in a calmer way.  It's a fun little piece of historical fiction with just a note of science fantasy in the titular airship (the Passarola), which is designed like a boat and propelled by wind in its sails, but which is held aloft by vacuum-pumped copper spheres.  Peppered with a bit of Portuguese and French, as well as some old-timey wording, the book's language itself was fun as well.

Chapter Seven: Mockingjay (Hunger Games III)

The final book of the Hunger Games trilogy may have been my favorite!  It kept me guessing right up until the end, which I always appreciate in a book.  I also liked how the plot continued to thicken in interesting and difficult ways; it would have been easy to have this final installment be merely a neat wrap-up based on the end of the second book, but Collins didn't go that route.  Katniss is also presented with even more difficult choices than before, and we really get to see her grow as she struggles with them.
I really liked the ending--it was just what I wanted--but I almost bawled as I read the end, partly from the content and partly because I was sad to be done with the series!  I'll miss Katniss.

Chapter Six: Catching Fire (Hunger Games II)

Once I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of this book (at first the college and town libraries' copies were out), I burned right through it!  While the writing itself remained a bit wimpy, the plot thickened deliciously.  Politics take much more of a role in this book than in The Hunger Games, and this added a really interesting dimension to the book, especially given the vitriolic election season that was gripping the nation as I was reading it.  Katniss is allowed to mature nicely, by no means overcoming all of her flaws, but having another chance to face up to them.  But beware--the ending's a real cliffhanger!  It was all I could do to restrain myself from forgoing my homework and starting the next book immediately upon finishing Catching Fire.

Chapter Five: The Hunger Games

Now that everyone's been talking about Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games for four years, I finally decided to read it and see what all the fuss was about.  While I will admit that the quality of the writing is not amazing, I was hooked by the end of the first chapter.  The plot is fast-paced and compelling, to be sure, with plenty to thrill and terrify and keep a reader turning the pages, but I was also intrigued by the book's heroine, Katniss.  It's nice to have a strong female character, and Katniss is complex and multi-dimensional as well.  She's not always sure about what she feels and whether she's doing the right thing, and in her grappling with these issues of self-evaluation she becomes a really interesting character.  By the end of the book, I was left hungering (if you will) for the next installment, with the characters still haunting my mind.

Chapter Four: Wonderstruck

It doesn't seem quite right to say that I just finished reading Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick's newest work, because about half of this story is conveyed exclusively in beautiful, full-page drawings. (Because of this, despite its huge size, it doesn't take very long to take in the entire work.)  Unlike a comic book or a picture book, where words accompany and explain the illustrations, in the pictorial parts of Wonderstruck you have to depend on the pictures alone to figure out what's happening.  As much as I love words, I was intrigued by the creation of a wordless narrative.  I liked seeing what was happening, rather than being told it.  This is not to say that I didn't thoroughly enjoy the part of the story told in words: I did.  Selznick is as good at spinning a verbal narrative as he is a pictorial one, and both stories are compelling, to say the least, as each follows a different child, each embarked on a quest.  Perhaps my favorite aspect of this work is how the two stories, one told in words and the other in pictures, reflect off each other through a series of almost-parallels and similarities, entwining more and more closely together as the work progresses.  This truly touching story--I almost started crying while reading it at the gym!--is definitely worth a dedicated perusal.  

Chapter Three: Imagine

The colorful cover of this book jumped right out to me while browsing in a local bookstore during the summer, and, although it's not a children's book, I couldn't resist the urge to read about creativity and the imagination.  This non-fiction work is chock-full of the latest interesting scientific and sociological research on how human creativity and imagination work.  Even so, it wasn't too burdened down with technical jargon, and the information was largely presented in anecdotal format, so I found Imagine to be a very engaging read.

P.S. If you're wondering how creativity and imagination work, you're not going to get a quick answer out of me!  There are a lot of factors, so you'd better just read the book yourself if you're interested!

Chapter Two: A New England Girlhood

I decided to read A New England Girlhood when one night during dinner it came out that its author, Lucy Larcom, was somehow a distant relation to me.  She, too, had spent the first part of her childhood in Beverly, Massachusetts, so between our common ancestry and common location, I wanted to check out her works, and her autobiography for young fans seemed like a good place to start.  For me, at least, this book provided some interesting insights into what life in this area was like almost two centuries ago and on my own family's history, but even I didn't find this to be a very compelling read, for the simple reason that it provides more of a contemplative account of her life than a narrative one.  It really felt like more of a history book than a story book, and while it was an interesting history it wasn't much of a story, so I can't see many kids today enjoying A New England Girlhood.  However, Larcom's writing and descriptions of her early life felt very earnest, and I enjoyed this little trip back in time.

Chapter One: A Series of Unfortunate Events

My decision to re-read A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler) was anything but unfortunate.  I've been waiting for a while to re-read this 13-book series, which I read as a kid as each new book was released, and finally the time was ripe.  I remembered enjoying these books when I was younger, and I was pleased to find that I enjoyed them even more the second time around.  So much of what makes these books great is how the author plays with language, and while I enjoyed this as a kid, there was a lot of wordplay that I certainly didn't pick up on the first time around.  Snicket's prose is full of fun alliterations, mysterious initials, ridiculous lists, odd tangents, puzzling baby-talk, and sometimes not-strictly-accurate definitions of words.  Furthermore, Snicket never misses an opportunity to stick in a snide comment about some of the more ridiculous things that adults in our society tend to say and do. And, unlike in some books--for children and for adults--Snicket allows many of his large cast of characters--including the villain and, what's more, the heroes--to have many moments of moral ambiguity, adding an important aspect of realism to a story that could otherwise be called highly unrealistic (and therefore a page-turner).  Brett Helquist's cover art and illustrations are also not to be missed; not only are they well-drawn and fit perfectly with the mood of the books, but also they tend to include little clues as to what is going to happen next in the series.  If you're looking for a linguistically fun read, I highly recommend delving in to this delectable series.

When I encountered this statue of Pan at Tower Hill Botanic Garden,
it reminded me instantly of Brett Helquist's illustrations of the series's villain, Count Olaf. 

Introduction

Books that pop to mind when people insist on asking me what my favorite book is:

• the entire Harry Potter series (by J.K. Rowling, but you probably already knew that)
• anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but especially her Little House series
• His Dark Materials, a fantastic series by Philip Pullman
• everything Kristin Cashore has written so far (Graceling, Fire, Bitterblue)
• anything by Roald Dahl, whether for kids or for adults, but especially Matilda and "Lamb to the Slaughter"
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
• A Wrinkle in Time and its companion novels by Madeleine L'Engle

(Of course, there are plenty of other books that I adore and re-read, but these are the absolute top of the top, as far as I'm concerned, works I can just come back to again and again and again because they're just so solidly excellent.)

Preface

I love to read!  I've been reading for at least 18 years now, which is longer than I've been able to do many other things, and I want to share my love of reading with a wider audience than just myself and those of my friends and family who are willing to listen to me ramble on about my most recent read.  I especially love children's and young adult literature, and while I do read literature for adults as well, it never seems to grab me in quite the same way...  So this will mostly be about the joys I find from reading (and re-reading, and re-reading) great (and not-so-great) children's and young adult literature.  If you're already a fan of this genre, I hope I can give you some good recommendations.  If you're sitting out there wondering why an adult would bother to spend (or waste) their time on books for kids, all I can say is read on!  Maybe you'll be surprised.