Parenthetical.net

Post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian fiction! It’s: a) pretty much all I read as an adolescent, b) what made the hippie I am today, c) ridiculously popular all of a sudden in YA lit, or d) all of the above?
D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from [...]

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1. No Brownies at Bake Sales, but Doritos May Be O.K. raised my blood pressure way more than a whole plate of brownies (mmm… brownies):

Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items [...]

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This is the next book by the author of Marcelo in the Real World. I wanted to adore this as much as I adored Marcelo, but it didn’t quite come together for me.
Pancho is a troubled young man with one goal: to avenge the mysterious death of his sister. She was his legal [...]

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Here’s a chance for you, my friends and readers, to tell my kids what to read: what book do you remember most fondly from your 6th-8th grade years? Get your suggestion to me by Thursday night and I’ll probably put it on my school’s middle school summer reading list! (I still want to [...]

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Now that the Cybils winners are all official ‘n stuff, I can review the finalists from the Middle Grade Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Here they are, in one speedy blowout:

The Prince of Fenway Park, Julianna Baggott
Check this premise, people: the famous Curse on [...]

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Snowfall in America brings with it, inevitably, a blizzard of “jokes” about the alleged absurdity of global warming. All of these jokes have two things in common: 1) they mention Al Gore, and 2) they’re not actually funny.

So begins the ever-brilliant Slacktivist’s recent post about the emphasis on blame in the climate change debate: if [...]

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Following up on last week’s post about books in libraries… the NYTimes Room for Debate blog posted some of the comments from students. Most didn’t say much new, but here are a couple of thoughts I liked:
One signed just “a thought”:

Also, books (or any other printed material) cannot be changed by any means without [...]

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For the last month I’ve been reading middle grade fantasy & science fiction and discussing it with my fellow panelists, but I couldn’t blog about any of it. Now the winners are official! Yay!
Our Middle Grade F & SF winner is a sequel, Dreamdark: Silksinger by Laini Taylor. I don’t really do [...]

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That’s right, Parenthetical.net has been synonymous with me for eleven years. That makes internet-me the same age as LiveJournal and the word “blog.”
I started my “web journal” as a perpetually single 20-year-old on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was really, really bitter about it.
Dear 20-Year-Old Me, this video is for you:

(It’s from [...]

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(The idea of posting these “recipes” is to give an idea of my thought process as I cook. Some of you seem interested when you’re in my kitchen watching, so maybe you’ll be interested if I write about it? It amuses me, anyway. If I were less lazy and a better photographer, [...]

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