My sister cracks me up. I was joking that by putting her exciting weekend plans on her IM profile, she was making it very easy for stalkers to find her, and this is what she said: but ti doens't say where excatly i'll be adn what time..and plus, Geoff will be with me so he can juts..um..well, maybe he can't beat anyone up, but it'll be a deterent for a stalker
Just finished reading: The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier. I can see why Cormier originally didn't intend for this to be a YA book, as well as why it's one of the books most often banned by schools. But those details that get blacked out are part of what helps this book ring true for teenagers. And I like the fact that not everything ends well, that an obvious dramatic plot point such as Opie forcing Archie to draw the marbles from the box before the fight doesn't work out like most people would expect it to, because it leaves the reader with a disquieting sense that justice has not been carried out. I know there's a sequel to this, and I'm definitely going to have to look it up, because I really wonder what the rest of the school year would be like for these kids.
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. Very interesting book, structured almost spirally around the events that make this slightly disfunctional Indian family fall apart. Estha and Rahel are twins with the usual authorial techniques of having their own language and understanding each other without words, but they also have a very unique view of the world that infuriates the adults in their lives and makes for some pretty fascinating reading. The non-linear pacing can make the book hard to read, but it has some beautiful language and ideas that I really enjoyed. My favorite:
It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.
To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do. (181)
Off to live in some more stories...
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