Parenthetical.net

I have a love-hate relationship with the New York Times Style section. Their articles seem to come in two forms: “Hey, two of my friends tip cows ironically / wear elaborately carved and shellacked pumpkins on their heads / eat nothing but mangos! It must be a trend!” or “People have been doing [...]

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I just finished a wonderful book called Graceling, by Kristin Cashore. I’ll wait on the review, because the book doesn’t come out until October, and I don’t want you to forget about it because you can’t read it right now. (I don’t have a lending copy, unfortunately.) But I was talking with [...]

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Some friends and I went to see Prince Caspian last night, the second in the series of Narnia movies. First of all, let me say that it was way better than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. LWW was awfully clean and shiny for a story that’s basically about a big war [...]

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The conclusion of Michael Chabon’s essay “Let Me Entertain You”, published today in the L. A. Times:
…[E]ntertainment — as I define it, pleasure and all — remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from [...]

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I wrote recently about the fact that my mental picture of “apocalypse” is stuck in the Cold War — instantaneous disaster, as opposed to the currently more likely slow(-ish) environmental collapse. I mused about what current YA readers of science fiction will picture, which made me wonder: other than Uglies, what’s being written in [...]

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Background: Two days ago, Roger Sutton (the editor of Horn Book) blogged that “adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.” The comments, predictably (but intelligently), exploded, including a couple of smart posts by my friend Deborah, who expanded on the subject in her blog.
In a comment [...]

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While cataloging Alas, Babylon, a classic 1959 apocalyptic sci-fi novel by Pat Frank, it occured to me how quaint nuclear holocausts seem to me now. Oh, the Russians bombed us into the Stone Age? How terrifying! We tore our short-sleeved dress shirts, and the girls in the typing pool were vaporized! [...]

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It’s September 11. I saw a headline on the front page of a newspaper this morning remarking on “Six Years Later.” And I realized: that means my 7th graders were 6 years old. Their awareness of the world around them has existed only in a post-9/11 world. They will remember 9/11 [...]

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This is more accurately a squeeee than a review. ACM lent me the first five trades of Fables, a series of graphic novels by Bill Willingham, and I am ridiculously hooked. I had read the first one a long time ago and it didn’t grab me, but ACM insisted I would like it [...]

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It only takes $5.60 and one week to get an envelope full of letters from students in a Boston suburb to students in a rural Ghanaian village.
The global infrastructure is an incredible thing.

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