Back to Recent Books I've Read: by Year
Books I Read 2004
Little Kids
The Boy, The Bear, The Baron, The Bard (Gregory Rogers)
Doodler Doodling (Rita Golden Gelman) Wonderful plays on words and pictures.
Emily and Albert (Jan Ormerod) I love this sweet book about friendship between a bossy ostrich and a mellow elephant!
The Reluctant Dragon (retold by Robert D. San Souci) mini watercolors by John Segal
Squirrel and John Muir (Emily Arnold McCully) beautiful illus. of Yosemite and the nature-loving John Muir’s friendship with a little tomboy
SensePass King: a story from Cameroon (retold by Katrin Tchana; illus. Trina S. Hyman) gorgeous pix of course; tale with spunky heroine; girl power!
My Penguin Osbert (Elizabeth Cody Kimmel) A great story about a boy who asks for –and gets—a penguin for Xmas. (Probably a distant relation to Alexander of the terrible etc. day.)
J Books
Amelia Rules!: What Makes You Happy (Jimmy Gownley) j graphic novel – decent
Ancient Rome (Peter Connolly) Cool info by Oxford U. Press.
Because I Could Not Stop My Bike and Other Poems (Karen Jo Shapiro)
Canterbury Tales (trans. & adapted by Barbara Cohen; pix by Trina Schart Hyman)
The Capture (Guardians of Ga’Hoole #1) (Kathryn Lasky)
Castle (David Macaulay)
Chasing Vermeer (Blue Balliett)
Cirque du Freak (Darren Shan) Ewww. Unpleasant characters, nasty creatures, jerky writing. But very popular.
City (David Macaulay)
A Coyote’s In the House (Elmore Leonard) Antwan, a hip young coyote homey from the Hollywood hills, befriends an over-the-hill canine movie star, Buddy, and they try out a Prince-and-the-Pauper-style exchange.
Curse of the Pharoahs: My Adventures with Mummies (Zahi Hawass, Director of excavations at the Giza Pyramids and the Valley of the Golden Mummies) Good photos. Incredibly conceited sounding man, text full of endless unnecessary references to himself.
Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters that Changed History (Bryn Barnard) Totally fascinating little vignettes, chockfull of derivations and interesting connections. Just enough information. Way fun. Totally fascinating very short pieces about meteor impacts, typhoons, mudslides, volcanic eruptions, etc., that happened at just the right time to help defeat a particular enemy, destroy a crucial fleet of ships, and otherwise mess with human history.
Everything on a Waffle (Polly Horvath) Primrose Squarp is the only one in her little B.C. village to believe her parents, who disappeared in a storm, are alive. Brimming with eccentric characters. Everything quite often doesn’t go well, but there’s plenty of love and a certain Zen tranquility going around.
Fantastic Feats and Failures (by the editors of YES Mag)
FastForwardCastle (Nicholas Harris & Peter Dennis)
Granny Torrelli Makes Soup (Sharon Creech) Lovely! Blank verse. 12-year-old Rosie & her best friend and neighbor Bailey don’t always get along, but Granny Torrelli often has good observations and stories from her Italian childhood to share as she choreographs the making of pasta and soup to bring them all together. (Bailey’s blind, by the way.) “That Bailey boy,” they call him.
Gregor the Overlander (Suzanne Collins) Good! Excellent adventure story featuring a boy and his sister sucked down a vent into the world miles below NYC—a world of giant rats, bats, spiders and cockroaches sharing a society with pale ex-patriat humans.
Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane (Suzanne Collins) Great!
Howl’s MovingCastle (Diana Wynne Jones)
In Grandpa’s House (Sendak) Yiddish sounding odd tales strung together my Maurice Sendak’s father and illustrated by M.S.
Indigo’s Star (Hilary McKay) Companion to Saffy’s Angel. Excellent kid-true depiction of Rose, the fabulous 8-year-old sister of Indigo.
Inkheart (Cornelia Funke) Tedious. A 200-page idea told in 534 pages. Although I did want to know what happened.
Lenny and Mel: After-School Confidential (Kraft) Brothers Lenny and Mel (Bart Simpson-like) check out lots of after-school clubs and write short articles for their school newspaper about them. Fairly cute.
Leyla: The Black Tulip (Girls of Many Lands series) (Alev Lytle Croutier) Leyla, 12, accepts the soldiers’ offer of gold for her family to go with them to Turkey—she thinks, to be married to a Turk, but in actuality, she becomes a slave who is purchased by the Sultan’s harem. There she pursues her talents of gardening and painting and gains favor (although not freedom). Pretty good.
Linda Brown, You Are Not Alone: The Brown v. Board of Education Decision (Thomas) Stories & essays by well-known authors reflecting on the times around that decision and since.
Lyra’s Oxford (Phillip Pullman) “Lyra and Pantalaimon (now a pine-marten) are back at Oxford. But, their peace is shattered by Ragi, the daemon of the witch Yelena, who is searching for a healing elixir to cure his witch.” Includes faux ephemera, like pages from guide-books, maps, cruise-tickets, etc.
Millicent Min, Girl Genius (Lisa Yee)
Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day (Gary Paulsen) Okay. Molly is type A, her grandma is a free spirit who comes to school with her and makes her day utterly chaotic but in the end frees her from the tyranny of her organizer notebook. A bit forced.
Never Mind!: a Twin Novel (Avi) Twins Meg and Edward are like night and day, but when Meg claims her brother is an amazing musician and pledges his band to play at the popular girl’s party, Edward inadvertently comes to the rescue.
Olive’s Ocean (Kevin Henkes) Martha Boyle’s family spend part of the summer, as always, at Grandma’s Cape Cod cottage. Martha is thinking about a classmate, Olive, who died; and also testing out flirting with some family friends.
Ophie Out of Oz (Kathleen O’Dell) Fourth-grader Ophelia Peeler, singer and dancer, tries to make the best of her family’s move to Oregon. She’s left her best friend behind in California and wants badly to get in with the popular (and unfortunately snotty) drama girls, but discovers that the quirkily stolid and maddeningly literal Brittany makes a pretty good friend. Good characters.
Otto and the Flying Twins Charlotte Haptie “Young Otto comes to the rescue when he discovers that his family and city are the last remnants of an ancient magical world now under threat from the Normal Police.”
Perfectly Chelsea (Claudia Mills) “Nine-year-old Chelsea's experiences, which include a fight with her best friend, making mistakes in the handbell concert, and saying goodbye to the only church minister she has ever known, help her to accept that things change and that people, including herself, are not perfect.” Totally nice story of a girl and regular life at her church.
Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis)
Riddle of the Rosetta Stone: Key to Ancient Egypt (James Cross Giblin) Brief, informative and intriguing.
Roman Places (Sarah Howarth)
A Roman Villa (Jacqueline Morley) Very interesting “Inside Story” NF book.
Silk Umbrellas (Carolyn Marsden) Thai-granddaughter learning to paint umbrellas from grandmother—older sister working in factory…(Only read half.)
Spinning Through the Universe: a novel in poems from Room 214(Helen Frost) 400 issues crammed into about 12 thin pages. Doesn’t hold up.
Stuart’s Cape (Sara Pennypacker) Hilarious and odd. Stuart moved to a new house and is going to start 3rd grade in a new school in a few days. He’s worried and bored. It occurs to him that only people with capes have adventures, so he staples together 100 old ties, adds a purple sock for a secret pocket, and proceeds to have several odd adventures, including flying (takes pound cake to bring him down), growing toast, and making a new friend (the trash man).
Stuart Goes to School (Sara Pennypacker) Not quite as good as Stuart’s Cape, but decently quirky.
The Famous Adventures of Jack (Doherty) Read half. Stories derived from famous fairy tales.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis) Great still!
The Magician’s Nephew (Lewis) Also great- a beautiful creation story embedded in an adventure.
The People of Sparks (Jeanne DuPrau) Sequel to The City of Ember. Good. The 400+ Emberites, having escaped their dying underground city, are taken in by a struggling hamlet (Sparks) in the post-Disaster world, and tensions build as the Sparks folks have to share limited resources and teach the Emberites how to survive. Resentment and rivalries build- is war among peoples inevitable? Or not?
The SOS File (Byars, Duffey, Myers) “The students in Mr. Magro's class submit stories for the SOS file about their biggest emergencies, and then they read them aloud for extra credit.”
The Spiderwick Chronicles: Lucinda’s Secret (DiTerlizzi & Black) Good.
The Spiderwick Chronicles: The Field Guide (DiTerlizzi & Black) “When the Grace children go to stay at their Great Aunt Lucinda's worn Victorian house, they discover a field guide to fairies and other creatures and begin to have some unusual [and not necessarily cute] experiences.” Good.
The Spiderwick Chronicles: The Seeing Stone (DiTerlizzi & Black) Good.
The Spiderwick Chronicles: The Ironwood Tree (DiTerlizzi & Black) Fine.
The Thief Lord (Cornelia Funke) Prosper (12) and Bo’s (5) parents died, and now their aunt wants to adopt Bo and send Prosper to a boarding school. The boys run away to Venice, a city their mother loved, and fall in with a gang of street kids who live in an abandoned movie theater. Their leader is the self-styled Thief Lord, a teenager who supports them with the proceeds from his heists of rich mansions. Meanwhile, the aunt hires local detective Victor to find the boys. Surprising twists and turns. A fun, adventurous read.
The Various (Steve Augarde) “While staying on her uncle's rundown farm in the Somerset countryside, twelve-year-old Midge discovers that she has a special connection to the Various, a tribe of "strange, wild--and sometimes deadly" fairies struggling to maintain their existence in the nearby woods.”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C. S. Lewis) Read out loud with Val. Still great.
YA Books
Al Capone Does My Shirts (Gennifer Choldenko)
Alice, I Think (Susan Juby) Hilarious first-person narrative about a home-schooled teen preparing to re-enter “regular” teen life. Great bits to read out loud for booktalks.
The Amulet of Samarkand: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book One (Jonathan Stroud) Wonderful fun. Ambitious, weaselly apprentice magician (Nathanial) conjures up long-suffering, sarcastic demon (Bartimaeus, who prefers to be called a djinni) to get revenge on grown-up magician who picked on him. Things get out of hand almost immediately, and the reluctant partners find themselves involved in complex political plots. Told in turn from Bartimaeus’ and Nathanial’s points of view, with plenty of chatty asides from the djinni. (Owes a debt to Robert Asprin’s Myth books.)
Be More Chill (Ned Vizzini) High school dork Jeremy Heere learns to be Cool – and kind of a jerk, as his best friend Michael points out— with the aid of a black-market computer implant called a squip.
The Burn Journals (Brent Runyon) Riveting true memoir of Brent’s attempted suicide by fire as a young teen, followed by his recovery and attempts to understand himself.
Definition (Ariel Schrag) Graphic novel written by 16-year-old Schrag, about the gruesome and heavenly realities of teen life. Not for the faint of heart (or the alarmed by drugs or sexual experimentation).
Doing It (Melvin Burgess) “Three teenage friends, Dino, Jonathon, and Ben, confront the confusions, fears, and joys of adolescent male sexuality.”
Frozen Rodeo (Catherine Clark) Teenage summer for Peggy “Fleming” Farrell in a small Texas town. She works at the Gas ‘n’ Git, baby-sits her many younger siblings, is her mom’s Lamaze partner, flirts and makes friends in the vacant Lot, and considers ice skating in the Rodeo with her pro skater dad. Decent, but unexceptional.
Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna (Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton) A fascinating account written by a man who lives part-time with his family on the African savannah, hunting and living in mud huts and drinking cow’s blood, and the other half of the year he teaches history at the Langley School in Virginia!
Family Manners for Teens (Alex J. Packer)
Go Girl!(Trina Robbins & Anne Timmons)- graphic novel about a teen who inherits the talent to fly from her mom (ex-superheroine GoGo Girl) and learns to be a superheroine herself. Pretty cool – she has a good relationship with her mom and friends, learns self-defense, struggles against a teacher-turned-demon who tries to suck away her self-esteem, etc. But authors have unfortunate hangups about fatness and looks.
Godless (Pete Hautman) “When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.”
The Golem’s Eye: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book Two (Jonathan Stroud) Longer than book number one, and still terrific fun.
How Angel Peterson Got His Name (Gary Paulsen) More “Harris & Me” type stories of Gary and his early teen friends engaging in idiotic (yet hilarious) death-defying stunts involving army-surplus parachutes, bikes and a boxing bear.
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Gary D. Schmidt)
Margaux with an X (Koertge) Excellent, taut, complicated, 10-cent-word-loving book about a too-pretty girl who doesn’t trust anyone (among other things, her dad abused her) until she meets an oddball Humane Society devotee and his MS-enduring aunt. Really really good.
Messenger(Lois Lowry) Follows The Giver and Gathering Blue. Weird story about people somehow selling out their souls and ending up uncharitable. Main character dies at the end after chapters of suffering in a vindictive forest. Unsatisfying.
Miss Smithers (Susan Juby) sequel to Alice, I Think. More hilarious observations from the irrepressible former-homeschooler Alice, this time entered (as a learning experience) in the town (Smithers)’s Miss Smithers contest. Also learns self-defense.
Montmorency : thief, liar, gentleman? (Eleanor Updale) “In Victorian London, after his life is saved by a young physician, a thief utilizes the knowledge he gains in prison and from the scientific lectures he attends as the physician's case study exhibit to create a new, highly successful, double life for himself.”
Mortal Engines (Philip Reeve) In a future when traction cities roam the Hunting Grounds (most of Western Europe) and “eat” smaller towns, a 15-year-old apprentice is pushed out of London by Valentine, the man he most admires, and must seek answers in the perilous Out-Country, aided by a scarred girl who wants to kill Valentine. Annoyingly half-baked world; unrealized characters; dismal events. An interesting idea not well enough handled.
My Thirteenth Winter: a memoir (Samantha Abeel) Sam is a gifted student, bright and creative; but she struggles with an unusual (and, until she’s 13, undiagnosed) learning disorder: dyscalculia (I think). She can’t understand the comparative value of money (so doesn’t know if $5 is enough to buy a CD or not); can’t tell time and also doesn’t have a sense of time, like if she has an appointment at 3:00, does she have time to go out to breakfast or not? She doesn’t know. But she’s a good writer and smart enough that her smarts are put into masking her disability, causing horrible anxiety, until she is diagnosed at 13. Memoir takes her through college (also it turns out she’s depressed).
No Laughter Here (Rita Williams-Garcia) When Akilah’s friend Victoria returns from visiting her grandmother’s family in Nigeria, she is strangely silent and distant. It turns out that during Victoria’s much-anticipated coming-of-age ceremony her family drugged her and had her circumcised.
One of those hideous books where the mother dies (Sonya Sones) Light and fun verse book in which 15-year-old Ruby leaves her home in Boston after her mother dies to go live with her movie-star father, whom she’s never met. Turns out he’s completely great and nice but Ruby directs her fury toward him until she finds out it was her mom who kept them apart because she was so hurt when her dad came out as gay and they divorced. Happy ending. She even loves dad’s partner whom she calls Aunt Max. But the reader figures out that dad’s gay and Max is his partner (and that Ruby’s friend is cheating with her boyfriend at home) about 100 pages before Ruby does, which is a bit eye-rolling.
Revenge and Forgiveness: an anthology of poems (ed. Patrice Vecchione) In response to September 11, a collection of thought-provoking poems old and new.
School Manners for Teens (Alex J. Packer)
Stravaganza: City of Masks (Mary Hoffman) “While sick in bed with cancer, Lucien begins making journeys to a place in a parallel world that resembles Venice, Italy, and he becomes caught up in the political intrigues surrounding the Duchessa who rules the city.”
ttyl (Lauren Myracle) Three sophomore girls’ friendship, as seen through instant messaging. Quite good, actually. Characters emerge quite well in their own typed chat. They hit on a variety of teen “issues” without becoming an Issue Book. Prevailing theme is friendship through thick and thin, and how hard that is. Recommend to young teen girls (12-15 perhaps). We get to follow the complicated friendships of 10th-greade best friends Zoe, Maddie and Angela through their instant messages to one another
The Amulet of Samarkand: The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book One (Jonathan Stroud) Great. Owes a debt to Robert Aspirin and Aahz. Ambitious, weaselly apprentice magician conjures demon (Bartimaeus) to get revenge on grown-up magician who picked on him. Narrated by Bartimaeus interspersed with 3rd-person omniscient of Nathaniel (the kid).
The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (Carolyn Mackler) I wasn’t as excited about this as some people. Seemed like a typical plump-girl-thinks-she’s-fat-but-seizes-control-of-her-life-and-therefore-her-self-esteem book. Only really unusual part is that her revered older brother is kicked out of college because he date raped someone; but it just seemed like an Issue to Discuss to me.
The Glass Café, or, the stripper and the state; how my mother started a war with the system that made us kind of rich and a little bit famous (Gary Paulsen)
The Singer of All Songs (Kate Constable) “Calwyn, a young priestess of ice magic, or "chantment," joins with other chanters who have different magical skills to fight a sorcerer who wants to claim all powers for his own.” Starts of well but gets trite. Characters are rather stereotypical (the brooding sailor, the wise but scrappy street urchin, etc.), and I’m so tired of 15-year-old girls falling (for no illustrated reason!) for their 30-year-old mentors.
The Year of Secret Assignments(Jaclyn Moriarty) Lydia, Cassie and Emily from Ashbury High write to three male students from rival Brookfield High as part of a pen pal program, leading to romance, humiliation, revenge plots, and war between the schools. Quite drily funny and more intricate than I expected. Good characters, even as seen only through letters.
Vampire High (Douglas Rees) When his family moves from California to New Sodom, Massachusetts, Cody, who has flunked out of several schools, is sent as a last resort to Vlad Dracul Magnet School. There, many things seem strange, from the dark-haired, pale-skinned, supernaturally strong students to Charon, the wolf who guides him around campus on the first day. Turns out they weren’t interested in Cody for his mind at all: all schools need a swim team, and vampires can’t get in the water, so they invite a few human “ringers” every year, giving them all A’s as long as they’ll swim for the school. Incensed, Cody decides to prove he’s worth more than a body in water—but he has to tread carefully in a school full of disdainful vampires. Funnier than I thought it would be. Good.
Who Am I Without Him? Short stories about girls and the boys in their lives (Sharon G. Flake) Good.
Adult Books
Changing Planes (Ursula LeGuin) The conceit is that the uncomfortable conditions of waiting in an airport can create a slippage that allows a person to visit alternate planes (worlds) for visits. Each chapter describes, in a personal travelogue fashion, a different sort of reality visited by the narrator. Thought-experiments on the human condition. Often silly, and often thought-provoking.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Lynne Truss)
The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) British alternative history mystery featuring an LiteraTec operative named Thursday Next with a time-jumping father and an ability to enter the novel Jane Eyre and speak with the characters.
Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (Cheryl Peck) Short, reminiscent stories about the author’s childhood and also her daily life now as a “large gay woman in the American heartland” (south Michigan). I only read a few- kind of funny but kind of forced- I could feel her working on the stories.
Firethorn (Sarah Micklem)
A Girl Named Zippy (Haven Kimmel) Reread. Still great.
Harem: The World Behind the Veil (Alev Lytle Croutier) NF narrative and encyclopedic account of harems (mostly Turkish, especially that of Topkapi), with lots of paintings as illustrations.
The Inner Circle (T.C. Boyle) Salacious, yucky-feeling account of the development of Dr. A. Kinsey’s Sex Institute, told from the point of view of his (fictional) acolyte, John Milk. Plus not enough Bloomington detail.
Lenny Bruce is Dead (Jonathan Goldstein) Annoyingly penis-focussed. Not nearly as funny as his commentaries on This American Life.
Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities (Alexandra Robbins) Even if you didn’t grow up in a Big Ten, very “Greek” university town the way I did, you’ll be fascinated by this investigative-reporting account of a typical year in the lives of some typical sorority girls. (The author is a young woman who was able to “pass” as a sorority friend of the four protagonists who agreed to be observed for the book.)
Salt : a world history (Mark Kurlansky)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon) Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
The Game (Laurie R. King) Another delightful Mary Russell mystery novel, this one set in India. Good!
The Nightengale (Kara Dalkey)
The Shipping News (Annie Proulx)
The Telling (Ursula LeGuin) Terran Sutty leaves religious oppression behind on Earth when she goes to become an Observer for the Ekumen on Aka, a world in the grip of a brand-new materialistic government. Finally she receives permission to leave the stiflingly corporate city and journeys to a mountain town where she begins to learn about the banned old ways, the ways of the Telling. Good.
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