rereading fever

[coraa]

So it's (almost) December, which means there's more than usual stress, which, for me, means rereads. Last December it was a complete Discworld rereaed.

This December, apparently it's middle-grade books from my childhood. Who knew?

It started with Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. (Harriet is more famous but actually, upon a reread, I think The Long Secret is the better book.) Then I bought all the Anastasia Krupnik books that were available on the Kindle, and chafed that that's less than half. (I may break down and buy physical copies.)

Now it's the discovery that the Ramona books are available on the Kindle. I'm also thinking of rustling up my extremely battered copies of Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher and The Farthest-Away Mountain.

I'm a little embarrassed by this but, to be honest, not much. I think I have become, blissfully, old enough to do kid stuff.

(Someone is going to read this, scratch their head, and ask, "But don't you review YA fantasy all the time?" And oh, yes, I do; most of my favorite books of the past three years have been YA fantasy. But modern YA fantasy is an utterly different beast than the middle-grade books of my own childhood; it's not the same thing at all.)

Comments

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

I totally loved Anastasia Krupnik when I was a kid. My favorite was how her little brother taught himself to talk, then his first words were when he stood up and said, "Look at me, I'm up!"

My favorite fantasy books from when I was a preteen though have to be The Dark is Rising Sequence, anything by Patricia Wrede, and those books by Robin McKinley.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

Which books are those books? Do you mean the series that has The Blue Sword in it, or her fairy tale retellings, or other ones?

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

Yes. :P I liked both the series that has The Blue Sword and the fairy tale retellings, I don't think I read any others.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too!

There's another bit in one of the books where Sam says that he hates a kid in his class, and his mom says, "We don't use that word, Sam. You can say that you don't care for them." And Sam thinks about it, and says, "I don't care for Nicky so much I wish he would get run over by a big truck."

I sometimes think of that when I, ah, don't care for somebody. ;)