Parenthetical.net

Happy New Year! We get a new President in a few weeks, I’m now officially 30, and I just got home from celebrating my nth New Year’s in a row with dear friends in snowy New Hampshire. All else is immaterial.
Except books, of course! The new year is traditionally a time for [...]

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Boyfriend E, video game fan extraordinaire, caught sight of this lying on my coffee table and cracked up. He played the original game as a kid, of course (if someone wants to fix that Wikipedia page, by the way, it could apparently use some fixing), and expected from the cover that this would be [...]

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Miriam at The Oyster’s Garter tagged me on the “5 Things” meme, so I guess I better comply! She can beat me up.
5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago:

Attending a rockin’ New Year’s party at the home of jcn, Latemodel, and some other people whose URLs I don’t know.
Turning twenty. (Eeep!)
Teaching myself [...]

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(The full title, for the record, is Salt Water Taffy: the Seaside Adventures of Jack and Benny, v. 1: The Legend of Old Salty.)
Ok, get a load of this plot summary: Jack, Benny, and their parents go to a small coastal Maine town to spend the summer. Upon arrival, they meet a crusty old [...]

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Chiggers are a bug that get under your skin and itch; let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. In this book, they’re the plot device that gets one girl out of Abby’s cabin at camp, and a new girl, Shasta, in. Shasta claims to have been struck by lightning, [...]

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(Janes in Love is the nominated book, but I went back and read The Plain Janes first, so I’ll review them together. It’s not necessary background, but it certainly helped.)
PJ opens with a terrorist bomb going off in Metro City, killing a number of people, and injuring more — including Jane. She’s fine, [...]

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On a walk through the English Downs, the author discovers the ruins of a house, and in it, an old chest. When he breaks the lock, he finds that it contains the effects of a fellow photographer named Isaac Wilde — including phonograph recordings, on which Wilde told the story of a very strange [...]

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Dave’s life was going along just fine, until he applied for a job at a convenience store and ended up hired to work nights… forever. Turns out that Radu, the store owner, is a vampire, and it’s so much more efficient to sire yourself a night manager than hire one the regular way — [...]

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Ok, people, true fact: I read four of these nominated buggers today. That’s the kind of volume we’re talking about here. I committed to reviewing everything I read, and I intend to keep up with that — mostly because it’s good for me, as a writer and as a person who remembers stuff [...]

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Lonely Portia looks out her window one night and sees a giant purple monster shuffling into the woods near her house. So of course she goes out to investigate — and discovers the adorable, silent, hungry creature she eventually names Jellaby. She brings him home and feeds him tuna fish, and he becomes [...]

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