Hello Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald

There is a slowpoke. The showoff cure. There was the crybaby cure. And the bully cure. The whisperer cure.

The whisperer cure was the best because it was so funny. Because two little girls kept whispering and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle gave them Whisper Sticks. The Whisper Sticks took their voices away.

The end.

By Zoe

Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary

I liked Ralph S. Mouse. It was a good book. I liked it. Ralph rode a motorcycle. He liked his motorcycle, but his little relatives couldn't ride it, so Ralph got a new car. The End. I liked when Ralph rode his motorcycle.

-- Zoe

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

Four kids lived in England. Their names were Lucy, Susan, Peter, and Edmund. They went into Narnia. Lucy went in first. Lucy met a faun. The faun's name was Mr. Tumnus. Lucy went to Mr. Tumnus's cave. The witch was magic. She turned animals and people into statues.

They all fought the witch. Aslan helped them. The magic worked backwards.

I liked this book. It was a good book.

--Zoe

Tehanu

Tehanu by Ursula K. LeGuin. A great end to a great series. I read them, four in all, over the course of a couple of years. I highly recommend her. The first book is, A Wizard of Earthsea. Another great book by LeGuin is The Lathe of Heaven, voted one of The 100 Oregon Books from the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission (check this out if you like books from Oregon authors).


-Jeff

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

This book is about pictsies. Pictsies drink and fight and steal. They help Tiffani. They fill buckets up with milk and they help her fight the Queen. The Queen likes stealing children. She stole Wentworth, Tiffani's brother.

The best part about the book was when everyone was OK. And that's all I can remember. It was a good book.

-Zoe

Rock On! by Dan Kennedy

This is a non-fiction memoir of Kennedy's stint in the record business. It's from the perspective of someone who loves music, but then gets a job in the music industry which has very little to do with "music" and a lot to do with "industry." Moderately amusing.
-Amy

A Long List from a Lazy Blogger

February 9: Horseradish by Lemony Snicket. A book of anti-inspirational sayings.

February 25: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. A YA book with all the themes Alexie loves to throw in - poverty, racism, alcoholism, basketball, and finding your identity. A good read.

March 1: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I reread this because my 8th grade class was studying it. It's a lovely, rich book.

March 2: Define Normal by Julie Anne Peters. A YA book about finding your identity (hey, is that a theme of teen-lit?) and not judging people until you get to know them.

March 4: Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. A graphic novel loosely based on some fairy tales.

March 6: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. Written from the point of view of an autistic boy who is trying to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog, and in the process discovers some things that his parents thought should be hidden. Very interesting because of the point of view.

March 8: Down the Street by Lynda Barry. A collection of cartoons. She rocks.

March 12, 22, and 27: Harry Potter books 1, 2, and 3; sometimes it's really nice to reread some escapist fiction.

March 26: The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland. A YA novel about a boy in medieval England who has a connection with the legendary King Arthur. Well written.

Whew! I'm glad I haven't been reading that much, or this laziness in blogging would have taken a lot longer to fix.

-Amy

Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry

Euh [shoulder shrug]. Nothing special thriller. He does mention Medford, however.

-Jeff

The Dark Wind by Tony Hillerman

Okay, okay. Tony Hillerman is my guilty pleasure. I have read all of his mysteries at least once: this is the second or third time for The Dark Wind. If you like the southwest and you like mysteries, you will probably like Tony Hillerman. Pick one up (they don't take long to read).

-Jeff

Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney

A very good translation. The rhythm is never stilted and there are no forced rhymes. If you haven't read Beowulf, or haven't read in a while, this is a good one. And don't forget: there is lots of blood and drinking of mead.

-Jeff

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle's Farm by Betty MacDonald

It was funny when the little girl, Phoebe, is afraid of everything. Mrs. Piggle Wiggle does everything that a farm needs to do. She helped the people by curing them: The Can't Finder's Cure; the Fraidy Cat Cure; the Forget Her Pets Cure. All of them were my favorite ones. It was a good book. And that's all.

-Zoe

Ramona and her Father by Beverly Cleary

It is about her (Ramona's) father getting a job. I liked when she dressed up like the sheep. The dad decided to stop smoking. That was hard. But it made Ramona and Beezus happy.

I liked the book.

-Zoe

Ramona the Brave

by Beverly Cleary.

I liked when she got her shoe back from the dog. I also liked on the first day when she went to first grade. We are going to recommend it to people.

-Zoe

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I liked when Almanzo hauled the logs. He hauled them with a bobsled. It was a little silly when he got up in the middle of the night when it was Christmas. I also liked the part about Almanzo's birthday because I liked when he got the yoke. This was a good book.

-Zoe

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

This was an amazing book. I would recommend it to everyone in the whole world, but it would be very difficult to read if you don't know any Spanish, which is peppered liberally throughout the book. It is also full of references to various sci-fi and fantasy tales (many metaphors are from The Lord of the Rings), but even though it is the tale of the people in a family which is cursed, it is not a fantasy book. Even though it is a tale of surviving (or trying to survive) horrible circumstances, it is not an Oprah book. And even though I learned a great deal about the Dominican Republic, it is not a history book. It was a very good book, and I really liked it.

-Amy

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

Bertie Wooster is an upper-class twit, and Jeeves is his genius butler. There is a silver cow creamer, a stolen policeman's hat, and several quasi-romantic misunderstandings. Wooster has a very verbose style with plenty of unexpected metaphors that I enjoyed. This book was an Agatha Christie, without the mystery, crossed with a Monte Python sketch.

-Amy

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, by Chelsea Cain is a parody of sorts. Nancy Drew claims that the story of her life was told less factually than it was actually lived. In "Confessions" we get snippets of cases that explain and follow Nancy's life until her death in the mid 1990s.

All in all, it is a fun read, even for someone who has never read a single sentence of a Nancy Drew story.

-Jeff

The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendall

An English mystery, with very little blood and gore and lots of psychological twists. Her books also have a smattering of literary references but not so many that it makes you read slowly, so you can read a brain-candy mystery and still pretend that it's making you smart. If you like Agatha Christie, you will probably like this book.

-Amy

Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

This was a good book. It was about Ramona the Pest going to kindergarten. She was kind of bad. My favorite part was when she dressed up like a witch on Halloween, because I like witches.

-Zoe

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

The Queen accidentally reads a novel and becomes obsessed with reading, much to the annoyance of her staff and family. A short, amusing tale of the dangers of loving books.

-Amy

The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass: We meet Lyra in an alternate universe, where everyone has a daemon (a physical, animal, manifestation of one's soul). There's darkness and magic and militaristic polar bears, and scenes of pure childhood joy and scenes of pure childhood terror. The Hero's Journey begins!

The Subtle Knife: Arguably the coolest of the three tools, but messy and breakable. We meet Will, from our version of Earth, and he meets Lyra, and they travel through realities.

The Amber Spyglass. Lyra and Will finish out the trilogy. We learn about "Dust", traumatic upheavals, allegory, angels, daemons, love, death, new beginnings.

-Jeff

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta

An annoying born-again-Christian and a slightly less annoying sex ed teacher have problems that keep on making you want to go and kick some of the characters in the shins. Despite the frustration that you cannot actually harm fictional characters, it is a strangely compelling read, a book that you have to pick up whenever you can sneak five minutes to yourself.

-Amy

The Dead Fathers Club by Matt Haig

The plot is Hamlet. The first-person narrator is an 11-year-old boy whose father just died in a car wreck, and who believes his father's ghost has come back to tell him to kill his uncle. It is seriously creepy. There is an annoying lack of apostrophes that you can get used to. I recommend it for when you want something scary to read.

- Amy

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano

A fairy tale, a graphic novel, a picture book for adults. It is a retold Japanese tale of a fox that falls in love with a monk, and how she tries to save him when an evil magician attempts to kill him through his dreams. A beautiful little story. I think the best line is, "I shall seek the Buddha...but first I shall seek revenge."

- Amy

Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

Chelsea Cain is a weekly columnist for the Oregonian. We like to read her pieces because they are about family stuff, things that we can relate to. Sometimes her columns are a little sad.

Heartsick, her second novel, is not sad, and it is not about families. It is gruesome, and thrilling. Not much blood, but plenty of gore and rotting flesh, and bad craziness. I liked it a lot and would recommend it.

-Jeff

Making Money by Terry Pratchett

Run-of-the-mill Terry Pratchett, which means that it is a very fun read with parts you feel compelled to read out loud to whoever is in the room with you. The guy who was in the Post Office ("Going Postal") stars in this one, so it's very sequelish (well, I suppose they all are, but this one is more so). There's a few golems and some Unseen University scenes, but not much with the Watch. If you are a Discworld fan, of course you must read it. If you are not a Discworld fan, then you need to start reading Terry Pratchett's books, but not with this one.

Amy and Jeff (and soon to be Travis, who kept on trying to steal the book every time we put it down)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I tried to read this years ago, perhaps when I was still in high school. I remember getting through about a chapter and then putting it away because it was so incredibly boring. This winter I decided to try again, because I always felt guilty about not reading it since it is one of THE CLASSIC AMERICAN NOVELS.

The result? I really enjoyed it. Lots of exciting scenes, short chapters, hints of modern novel writing (like chapters written as soliloquies or mini-plays that did not involve the narrator), and many lines that begged to be memorized and quoted at appropriate times (don't worry, I didn't). There were times when I was almost late for work because I wanted to finish a chapter. The things that seem horribly boring in high school (an entire chapter, "Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales," devoted to which ancient scientists/artists/philosophers got things right) seem entirely readable now. And everyone on the ship is really crazy, not just Ahab, because when you hunt a whale it is you, in a rowboat, with a sharp stick, trying to kill something that is 100 feet long and weighs 50 tons. It's ridiculous.

I highly recommend it.

Amy

2007 stats

Zoe read 22 books in 2007, counting only chapter books. Her favorite was Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We read the whole series this year, but this was her favorite.

Amy read 111 books in 2007. The most interesting one was The Omnivore's Dilemma, and she recommends that everyone read it.

Jeff read 43 books in 2007. Postcards from Ed by Edward Abbey, edited by David Peterson was his favorite this year.