The next question you ask is... "Why?" My answer is... Um... er... why... not?

• The BFG, --one of my absolute favorites by him
• Boy: tales of childhood --TECHNICALLY, this is a memoir, but it was listed in Fiction, so here it is.
• Charlie and the chocolate factory,
• Charlie and the great glass elevator,
• Danny : the champion of the world,
• Esio Trot,
• Fantastic Mr. Fox,
• George's marvelous medicine,
• James and the giant peach,
• The magic finger,
• Matilda,-- my other absolute favorite by him. I used to have this odd fantasy of BEING Miss Honey when I grew up. Not that I wanted an evil domineering aunt or anything. No, I just thought I could handle being a sweet, loving, wonderful young teacher living alone in her tiny cottage (MAYBE I could live with more furniture too). But it turned out I DID end up getting married (which was a good thing) and actually rather sucking as a teacher (which wasn't). So, no, I'm not Miss Honey.
• The Minpins,
• The Twits
• The witches,
• The wonderful story of Henry Sugar and six more

• Seventeenth Summer

• The cat ate my gymsuit ,
• It's an aardvark-eat-turtle world,
• P.S. longer letter later,
• Remember me to Harold Square,
• Thames doesn't rhyme with James,
• This place has no atmosphere

• Good-bye and keep cold. --the only thing I remember about this book was that it took place in Pittsburgh, which is probably why I read it in the first place.

• The door in the wall -- actually I don't remember this book at all. Maybe I just THINK I read it.

• Say goodnight, Gracie

• Sixth grade can really kill you
• Nothing's fair in fifth grade

• Pepperland --naturally, the title of this book first attracted me. It turned out to be about a Beatles fan, which just rocked. All the chapter titles are Beatles songs. How completely awesome. You totally can't beat that. Who cares what the rest of the book was about.

• Because of Winn-Dixie -- especially this one. This is the Best Dog Book ever. Remember it. Read it.
• The tale of Despereaux: being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread,
• The tiger rising

• A Christmas carol
• David Copperfield
• Great expectations -- actually I never finished this book, because the main character got on my nerves too much.
• Oliver Twist -- this book rocks. I read it when I was thirteen and totally didn't notice that it was hugely thick and full of 19th century British English. Well, I probably did notice, but it certainly didn't hinder my reading. It was just THAT COOL a book.

• Little Brother --I still don't know quite what to say when recommending this book, because I DO recommend it for the interesting concepts, the social commentary, and the hope it gives the common people that we CAN fight the system. But on the other hand, the actual writing style totally grated on me. Felt like the dialogue wasn't very true, and true dialogue is, you know, one of my THINGS.

• The hound of the Baskervilles
• A study in scarlet

• Tears of a Tiger --this is a depressing teen problem novel, and normally I wouldn't have much to say about it, except that I did a project of "related materials" for this book in a YA lit class and I used a tape of Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as one. I was pretty well pleased with myself over that one, I have to say.

• Rebecca --this was on Masterpiece Theater or something, and my mom and I were watching it, so I went out like THAT DAY or something to get the book out of the library. I enjoyed both the book and the miniseries, but all I remember about it now was that there was a rocky shoreline there.

• Deep wizardry,
• So you want to be a wizard

• Daughters of Eve --except for this one. I hated this book. It was a little too freaky even for me.
• Don't look behind you
• Down a dark hall
• Gallows Hill -- I chose to do an author project for a YA Lit class on Lois Duncan, and was interested to discover that this book had come out SINCE I'd come out of my middle school horror phase, so of course I had to read it. Awesome. I'd forgotten exactly WHY I'd loved her books so much until I got to read one fresh again....
• A gift of magic --this one is interesting because it's actually not a suspense book like her others. True there is SOME suspense to it, but it reads like an entirely different genre. Fantasy or magic realism, maybe.
• I know what you did last summer --it was a lot easier to take this book seriously when it was JUST a cheesy teen suspense book instead of a cheesy movie. Don't ask me why.
• Locked in time
• Stranger with my face --this one was probably my favorite, but I don't know why exactly.
• Summer of fear
• The third eye
• The twisted window

• Half magic

• Summer's chance

• Where it stops, nobody knows --I remember I took this book out SOLELY on the basis of the author being named Amy. I used to have this weird fantasy that any adult named Amy, especially an author, was actually ME COME BACK IN TIME. I don't remember anything about this book, but I still definitely remember why I checked it out.

• The Neverending Story --so as a kid I watched this movie and enjoyed it, but I also thought, "Isn't 'Bastian' a STUPID NAME?" Ah well. But my real memory of READING THE BOOK has not so much to do with the book as when I was reading it. My roommate that semester of college had a habit of reading a chapter or two of a book before bed. Now I thought I didn't have any time for reading, but suddenly, since SHE was reading before bed each night, I ended up doing the same thing, and it was GREAT. It DID give you time for reading, it was a great before-bed ritual... and I have made a habit of it ever since. Anyway, this book was one of the first I read that way that semester, and it sticks in my head that way.

• Gone-Away Lake

• Jamie and the mystery quilt

• A Girl Named Disaster
• The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm --I love this book. But mostly, I was just fascinated-- not only are there NOT A LOT OF BOOKS out there that take place in Africa, a YA SCIENCE FICTION SUSPENSE ADVENTURE WITH SOME HUMOR that takes place in Africa of the 22nd century is just plain unprecidented. I thought, "How come I don't know anything about Africa?" I still don't really know anything about Africa. But I love this book, and I REALLY REALLY love Arm.

• Duffy's Rocks --soooo... this book takes place in McKees Rocks (names changed to protect the guilty). I read it while I was working in McKees Rocks. The kid in the book wants nothing more than to get OUT of Duffy's Rocks. Go figure.
  Okay, that's all I'm going to say about that

• Lost in a Good Book
• Something Rotten: A Thursday Next Mystery
• The Eyre Affair
• The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel

• Alias Madame Doubtfire -- this is the book that the movie "Mrs. Doubtfire" was based on. I think I was the only person I know who even knew the movie was based on a book, let alone had read it. The two results were, of course, very different from each other. Which I suppose you can get away with when nobody but random bookworms like me has ever read the book, but you absolutely can't get away with if the book has a lot of obsessive fans (case in point, the recent failed attempt to make a movie only loosely based on The Dark Is Rising in which the creators apparently had no idea how much they were offending their potential fanbase by straying too far from the book). The movie in some ways was more realistic than the book, but one thing I thought the book did better: the kids in the book were NOT FOR A MINUTE fooled by their dad's disguise, and personally I don't see how they could have been.

• Understood Betsy -- for those of you who, um, read this regularly for updates: Mystery solved-- the series about someone named Betsy that I was musing about around here can now be found here.

• The great brain

• Harriet, the spy

• The whipping boy

• Inkheart --a must for any book lover. You all know that books can come alive... so they do.
• Inkspell -- and I thought Inkheart was good. This sequel may even possibly be better. I'm not sure how. What's cool is that these books deal with a concept I thought of using in Emily's Book but abandoned because it got too complicated. But she did it!
• Inkdeath
• The Thief Lord -- and this takes place in Venice, which automatically makes it cool.

• Coraline
• The Graveyard Book
• (with Terry Pratchett)Good Omens --the best book about the End of the World ever. It makes you really wish it would happen that way.

• Joey Pigza swallowed the key
• Joey Pigza loses control --this book contains the most screwed up geography of Pittsburgh ever. One moment Joey's at the Soldiers and Sailors Hall in Oakland, five minutes later he's downtown at Kaufmanns, ten minutes after that he's back in Oakland at the top of the Cathedral of Learning. Like, what the heck? Obviously Gantos knows enough about Pittsburgh to put these places into it, but has he actually tried to DO that? (Okay, I guess he's granted some artistic license-- I mean I took a few liberties with Monroeville for Ian Schafer, myself-- but it just made me a little dizzy, that's all).
• What would Joey do? --The first two Joey books were SO incredibly hyper that they were almost a little depressing I thought. That's why I was really pleased with this book. It seemed, for once, that things were actually balancing out for Joey... and was a pretty sweet ending on the whole, I thought.

• Blue willow

• Julie of the wolves,

• The map that breathed

• Do bananas chew gum?
• Thirteen ways to sink a sub

• The princess bride: S. Morgenstern's classic tale of true love and high adventure; The "good parts" version -- I've had people swear to me that they've read the original book (granted, this was ONE person who DOES have a habit of stretching the truth) and others (including, uh, William Goldman) who swear they know for a fact there's no such thing. Fun either way.

• The Wind in the Willows --I didn't care for this book when I read it, but then a girl in my class at library school read a chapter aloud to us in Storytelling class, and it was the funniest best thing ever. I mentioned to her that I'd never liked the book before, and she said, "You know, I never liked it much either until I read it out loud. I think that makes all the difference." So, I suppose I should try reading this out loud some day!

• The puppet Wrangler --I'm glad for the existance of this book. What genre is it? Who cares! It's something like a realistic fantasy comedy teen problem drama adventure magic realism dude thing? I love stuff like that. Especially if it's something as completely random as a teenaged girl making friends with a puppet from a preschooler TV show. I mean really. You can't beat that. Read this or some junk.

• An Abundance of Katherines --ah, sweet nerdboy romance

• Philip Hall likes me. I reckon maybe
• Summer of my German soldier -- so I never read this book as a child because it looked like a romance novel. Then I had to read it for a YA lit class (for some reason I think I've mentioned a lot of those on this list), and thought, GEEZ, how did I miss this? It's totally a book I would have LOVED in upper-elementary/middle school. Stupid false advertizing backfiring.

• Dear Max -- seriously, I got this book out almost entirely because I was debating naming my son Max. It was either that or Sam. And I went with Sam, although that really doesn't have to do with the huge gulf in comparison between the two BOOKS.

• the Client,
• The pelican brief,

• Snow falling on cedars -- I had a Teaching of Reading in the Elementary School class in which the professor decided to show us a method for teaching a book to a class by actually doing it with us with a grown-up-reading-level book. Which was this one. Personally, I would have prefered to read an actual elementary-school-level-book, but that's just the kind of dork I am. But anyway, some strawberry fields had major importance to the story, so for an assignment for this class I wrote a sequel to the book called "Strawberry Fields Forever." I am so clever.

• Among the hidden,
• Don't you dare read this, Mrs. Dunphrey,
• Escape from memory
• Running out of time
• Found

• The curious incident of the dog in the night-time --another cool book with a main character with autism, but I don't have anything interesting to say about it.

• M. C. Higgins, the great --unfortunately I don't really care for her writing. I thought this Newbery winner was actually incredibly boring. Oh well.
• Zeely --this one was better. Her folktale collections are good, too. I swear I've read another book by her too, but it apparently wasn't listed in NoveList.

• Ida B: and her plans to maximize fun, avoid disaster, and (possibly) save the world -- this sounds like it should be very funny and upbeat, but it's actually quite sad. That's okay, it's fairly good.

• Fly by night

• The against Taffy sinclair club
• The great mom swap

• Snowbound with Betsy --it was the one with the totally awesome plot that ABSOLUTELY WOULD NEVER HAPPEN TODAY in our world of don't-talk-to-strangers-and-always-carry-a-cell-phone! See there was this huge blizzard and on the way home their dad finds this family stranded on the side of the road with a dead car so he INVITES THEM HOME so this random other family gets snowed in with Betsy's family and they have all these great adventures including deciding to make popcorn except the popcorn got all wet so somebody got the bright idea to put it in the OVEN to DRY and the popcorn popped and overflowed the whole oven and I don't know maybe I'm getting the books all mixed together in my brain, keep in mind I'm writing this from memory from third grade... so, um, yeah, at any rate this planted the seeds of my life-long fantasy of having people get snowed in with me during a blizzard. They were always male and attractive when I was in high school for some reason.

• Catch-22 --Wow. I never knew it was possible for a book to have ADHD. That's really the most accurate way to describe it. And the amazing thing is that it shouldn't work and if anyone tried to copy the style it probably WOULDN'T WORK and yet somehow IT DOES here. But it's totally ADHD.

• Misty of Chincoteague --TECHNICALLY, I don't think I read this, but I clearly remember my dad reading it to me when I was five and we were on vacation at the Outer Banks with all my mom's side of the family and he'd read it to my cousins and I in the room with the bunk beds and occasionally out on the long screened-in deck. Vivid memory. Better than reading it to myself.

• the day they came to arrest the book

• Dune

• My big sister is so bossy she says you can't read this book

• Letters from Rifka,
• The music of dolphins,
• Out of the dust,

• The top-flight fully-automated junior high school girl detective

• The Outsiders -- this book now makes me think of one of my old middle schoolers. She was definitely an Outsider in real life (actually come to think of it she was a LOT like a female version of the main character of this book); she was creative and unique and awesome but had a lot of serious adolescent angst. She discovered this book and just WORSHIPPED it. Then she found out we had the movie in our AV collection. The AV collection normally could only be checked out by teachers; but she said "PLEASE? I PROMISE I'll bring it back tomorrow!" Well, it's not a good thing for teachers to make exceptions, but my heart took over from my head on this one. She NEEDED this book, this movie, I could tell-- it was REALLY making a difference for her. "Don't spread it around I let you, though, okay?" I said. And yes, she did return the movie the very next day, and no, I never had any trouble telling other kids no, so it all worked out in the end. --I wonder how she's doing now. I hope the strength she gained from this book has continued to see her through.

• Beardance

• Mystery of the Secret Message

• Stormbreaker --so I read that this was "James Bond for pre-teens" and I thought that was just a figure of speech that meant it was a spy book, like people say any book with magic in it is "Harry Potter for toddlers/Americans/people who eat fast food." But no, this really IS James Bond for pre-teens. There is no possible way to make it MORE James Bond for pre-teens without actually, you know, having it be about James Bond. Which does exist, except I haven't read any of those.

• Everything on a waffle,
• The Pepins and their problems,

• Bunnicula : a rabbit-tale of mystery --Yeah, after my cousin and I created "Cujo Rabbit" at the age of, what, 8 or something, the discovery of this book was a highly amusing and exciting event. The entire series rocked, though.
• Celery stalks at midnight, The
• Howliday Inn
• It came from beneath the bed! : tales from the House of Bunnicula --so for some reason this book is in the Attic collection at the Museum. It's the most popular book for staff to read if they're stuck in the gravity room and the museum is DEAD. It's very humorous.
• The Misfits --this book is everything that is GOOD about middle-schoolers (and everything that sucks about middle school). It's funny and sad and SO SO true. Read it. Read it, and understand the age.
• Nighty-nightmare
• Return to Howliday Inn

• Les miserables --so I LOVED LOVED LOVED the Broadway musical, so of course I had to read the original book. But I think I read an abridged version, because there were random MAJOR PLOT POINTS cut out all through it. A bit confusing. But still, good.

• A stranger came ashore

• Pay it forward : a novel --this book has a sucky ending. I never saw the movie. I doubt I want to.

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created 2006, updated 2007, by Amy, who thinks you need to know this.