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openNo Title Literature
It was a book or perhaps a series of books (young adult novels) and I believe the main characters name was Will and I don't remember much about the plot but I believe he gained pyro abilities and I remember in the first book it talked about how for his birthday all he wanted was snow, and the it said something about how it always snowed after christmas but he wanted a white christmas. Anyone?
Edited by KyleTheHouseCatopenNo Title Literature
I'm trying to remember the titles of two children's books. I read both in the very early 2000s, probably no later than 2005.
The first was a hardcover book of poems about nature - I don't think it was an anthology of different authors, nor was the author particularly well known. The illustrations looked like they were done mostly in pastel or coloured pencil, and the cover was an orange-yellow with a picture of a girl looking down at some of the things that were talked about. As far as the poems themselves go, I remember one about the star inside an apple and another about how when oil from a car ("Someone's old Buick) mixes with water in a puddle, rainbows form.
The second was a chapter book. I feel like it's called "The Loser's Club", but anytime I google that name, I don't find what I'm looking for. It's about an average boy who goes into fifth grade with a notoriously strict and picky teacher, and he's trying to please his parents who seem to favour his little brother. There are these two boys he is forced to sit near and work with,along with a "teacher's pet" girl that he's trying to impress as well. The two boys are your typical "bad kids" - they're kind of lazy. There's one point where they go on a field trip and have to write a report and the boy talks about the comments they get on it, and on the part one of the bad kids wrote, the teacher comments "please use 'vomit' instead of 'barf'" Other than that, the memory is pretty fuzzy.
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a kid's book. It was heavily illustrated, and the illustrations were extremely pretty. The general focus of it was that when everyone on Earth falls asleep, they sleepwalk through some sort of dreamland, and this guy with a lantern leads them. He keeps them safe from obstacles with his magic. I can't recall what his name was, but he did have a name.
Sound familiar to anyone?
openNo Title Literature
I'm reposting this from the forums. Anyway, the story goes (the gist of it, anyway; I forgot the details):
Before going on a journey, the heroes consider making a sacrifice to the gods to guarantee their safety and success, but they weren't sure if it would be necessary. Someone suggests consulting a famous oracle or expert about it, but that oracle/expert lives in a distant land. Then the heroes make a long, arduous journey to speak to that person, and s/he said, "You've gone to a lot of trouble asking me questions you know the answer to. Why didn't you do it in the first place?"
I'm not sure where to find it in Greco-Roman mythology; I'm thinking the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Aenid. I'd really appreciate your help on this. Thanks!
openNo Title Literature
A red cover? Young adult. Something with lanterns in the name, maybe?
Re-tellings of severals fairy tales with characters like Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast coming together (for a party?) to recount their stories.
I remember the Beauty and the Beast story the most clearly. It was the daughter of a man who had lost his friend to a curse when he was young, saves her dad's best friend and they fall in love. Her father is glad to have his friend back and accepting of their love.
openNo Title Literature
There was a series of beautifully illustrated graphic novels that you could buy from the app store. The author was a huge fan of greens and blues and novels were a series of scary stories which were so weird but just so great. Here are the ones I remember: a little girl goes to the circus where she meets a flamboyant ringmaster in a building with fish and many children. The man has a machine which allows the children to breathe underwater, but the girl hangs back. As the children breathe they turn into fish. When the girl runs home she sees a whale and then she is served fish for dinner. She hears the fish cry for its life in a child's voice. It is revealed later that the ringmaster is actually a humanoid fish trying to get more kids to stop eating fish. There's another one where a boy grows an onion in his stomach, a man turns into a mosquito, and a girl is rejected by her crush so she feeds him her biology experiment causing him to turn into this horrifying, basically immobile plant monster.
openNo Title Literature
RESOLVED thanks to FalconPain and biosafety.
Two children's books I read in the 1970s, may have been from Scholastic and/or the school library. Both were probably written in the 1960s or even earlier, and both star Free-Range Children.
1. [FOUND per below discussion] A trio of boys spending time at one's grandma's house (for the summer?) find an old book hidden in a cubbyhole in the basement, detailing a boys' adventure club that had existed years prior. They boys decide to restart the club, and go through the "initiation" rites as depicted in the book. The only one I really remember is going out the night of a full moon and fighting a monster using some homemade spears. A how-to guide for making the spears is written in the book-within-the-book [as are how-to guides for other DIY activities]; they make the spears and go out to fight the monster. It turns out that the "monster" is just a bush in grandma's backyard, which when the moon is full looks like a scary monster. It also turns out at the very end of the book that the father of the boy whose grandma's house the book was found in was a part of the original club.
2. [ALSO NOW FOUND] Longer book, maybe as much as 100 pages. Not a book with pictures (other than perhaps at the beginning of chapters). A trio of siblings, two boys and one girl, are on their own for several months because their parents are out of the country. It gets to be December and the adults still aren't back yet, so the older boy (12ish) and girl (10ish) decide to have a "real" Christmas so as not to destroy the Santa myth for the younger boy (6ish), who is on the cusp of not believing any more. [In the context of the story, the Santa myth appears to be that people buy presents for each other but Santa comes and gives candy & knickknacks to good boys & girls.] Two specific bits I remember:
- They all go shopping at a department store to buy gifts for each other, and the older boy buys some stuff to fill stockings "from Santa" while the girl distracts the other boy. Before this happens the two older ones discuss it between themselves; one thinks they should buy stuff only for the youngest one in order to save money - since he's the only one who believes - but the other convinces hir that they need to buy stocking stuffers for all three, otherwise the youngest might be confused and/or cotton on to their scheme.
- At one point the older two find a horror comic book that the youngest has hidden in his room (the youngest isn't there at the time), and are shocked because he knows thier parents have forbidden them from having horror comics. But on Christmas Day it is revealed that he didn't care about the comic book itself, he had gotten it to mail-order presents for his brother & sister from one of the ads inside. The other two are surprised - but pleased - that he has the the maturity to buy presents for others on his own initiative.
openNo Title Literature
Looking for a story I read years ago. Two things I remember about this novel. First, the hero and his love interest are staying in a cabin, when lightning strikes and sets the place on fire. They escape, but the car is disabled, and lightning seems to be following them. Eventually, the hero is struck, and it turns out that he had a small device planted on him that attracts lightning. The second thing, the hero along with a group of people and a bad guy, end up on a small island, captured by a group of tribesmen. The hero and the rest of the group escape, but the bad guy is drugged to the nines, and watches as an elderly woman slices his cheek off before eating it. It cuts to black, and implies that the rest of the tribe eat him alive.
openNo Title Literature
I've been raking my memory for the name of this book, but am coming up empty. Hopefully someone here can help. I read this book years ago. The plot revolves around 2 powerful sorcerers. One is a sorcererss who bases her magic on things of thread. She can weave amazing tapestries which she will occasionally sell when she requires money. The servents of her castle are thread in the shapes of people. She controls spiders in order to get them to weave webs which she uses to communicate. The other is a sorcerer whose magic lies with summoning demons from the elemental planes and binding them to rings and can give them shapes by moulding them out of clay. The sorcerer who controls demons is paranoid of the sorcererss and so sends one of his demons to put her out of commission. The demon falls in love with her and gets her pregnant. The sorcererss has a son and eventually leaves to try and track done his father. He eventually gets apprenticed to the sorcerer and begings to learn the craft of binding demons. The only named I can remember was the name of the demon: Grendal or some variation of that name. I hope someone can help.
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a book that I read sometime within the past five years. The setting may have been medieval France or Italy; I believe the genre was fantasy.
The one specific detail I can recall is two creatures in the book. They were dragon-like, blue or silver in color, might've carried an electrical charge, and were (I think) kept in glass jars. One was older/larger, the other was younger/smaller. Anyone know of a book with creatures like this?
openNo Title Literature
I read a book series a few years ago about a young woman who was about to be hanged and became a spy for the kingdom instead. I think she had been raised in the circus and she killed someone who was trying to rape her? When she was released, she was given a poison that would kill her unless she took more of it and the name had something to do with butterflies. One of the covers was red and I think another was green.
openNo Title Literature
Searching for a short story by Micheal A.Stackpole, that starts with (Im paraphrasing): "Except for the reven shit on his shoulders, Odin looked pretty damn good on his Armani suit"
openNo Title Literature
I feel like an idiot, because I read this story a few weeks ago (found out about it here) and the title/author escape me, as do the trope page where I first found out about it. I tried the Back to Front page, and it's not listed there.
It's a short sci-fi story, told in reverse order: the end first, then the middle, then the beginning. It has a "happy" ending, but as you read it becomes apparent that things are not what they seem. At the "end" of the story (told first) the man presses a button, teleports to a (red-haired, I believe) scientist's lab, and receives a million dollars. Later (earlier in the story's chronology) it's revealed that he got a device from a robot that would sync up his mind with someone from the future (something like that), and after that (the earliest in the story) it turns out he was sent back in time, the robot that gave him the device was his servant, and his memory was erased.
Help would be appreciated. I thought the title had something to do with "happy ending," but searches are turning up completely different results.
FOUND: I was right, it's "Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner. Took a little digging, apparently several stories have very similar names.
Edited by JobanGrayskullopenNo Title Literature
I once read a book when i was young called "ten short mysteries" or something along those lines. It was just that. I can remember the content from three of the stories. The first i rememebr was about a boy on a colony on a snow planet, and there were theses aliens only he could see that were kidnapping his friends, and erasing them from existence so that only he could remeber them. There was anothe SF one about a boy who, after his dad renovated his room or something, was attacked by cloaked aliens every night. His parents thought he was having a recurring nightmare and he was told to see a therapist. The therapist explained that the aliens were real, and that in his wall used to be part of a portal network relay thing. She replaces it and the aliens stop bothering him. The third story i remember is about a young man or woman who is about to get married, and a strange visitor delivers this necklace to him/her. The spouse is out hunting the next day, and they come along. They think they see the visistor out of the corner of their eye, before turning to see its a deer that the spouse shoots with an arrow, causing them to start choking until the necklace is removed. There was something about the same thing happening to their child at the end. Any ideas?
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a nonfiction book about ghosts that I read during the late '90s. Unfortunately I don't remember much about it, except that it was very well-written. In addition to allegedly true phenomena, it discusses ghosts' role in fiction.
It had one striking picture of a buck-toothed ghost standing on its hands. It was an illustration from an old story or novel about a ghost who seemed more frightening than he really was, because the witness' imagination filled in the details.
Here are some other things I remember from (probably) the same book. It discussed the question of why ghosts are usually clothed (complete with a whimsical illustration of ghost clothing hanging on a line). It had a photo of a levitating brick. It covered the Drummer of Tedworth (but that doesn't really narrow it down).
Edited by FloydPinkertonopenNo Title Literature
This was a book that I think was read aloud in our class. Probably fourth or fifth grade, around 1990. I remember the beginning better than anything, so maybe we never finished it. I recall it being told from the POV of a school girl. She has a male friend who I remember could make himself physically ill to get out of school. They find a doll maker or a doll shop or something, and somehow have life-like duplicates of themselves made to go to school for them while they have a life of ease, eating cakes or something. I think they eventually realize that isn't the life they want, or something isn't as they expected, but I don't remember anything after that. Hopefully somebody knows!
openNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a couple of books I half-remember...
1. A kid's book I read in my grade-school days, in the mid 90's. A young boy and girl end up befriending a woman that the town thinks is somde kind of witch. I think the title may have the word 'light' in the title, in a phrase like "The light on the hill" or something like that.
2. A young Adult novel, about a young girl who goes into a haunted house on a dare, and meets the ghost of the boy who used to live there. She has no real friends, and has an abusive father, if I recall. She ends up spending a lot of time with the ghost boy, and she falls in love with him. She decides to kill herself in order to be with him, but he convinces her not to. I remember that the girl couldn't feel physical pain for some reason, and there was a scene in the book where she stabbed herself with a thorn but didn't feel it. I think the title had the word "bones" in it, but I'm not at all sure.
Thanks. :-)
openNo Title Literature
There's a book, I think it was/is a series, about how a modern(-ish?) town is transported to medieval Germany, circa 1600. I know that there is an article about it on This Very Wiki, but I'm too lazy and/or don't remember the title. I do know that the title is a year, I think it's the year in Germany that the town appeared.

Comic books, precisely, but they count as literature :V
I'm thinking of a comic from back in the early 2000s, released by Image if memory serves. It was about a distant future where humans fought off a bunch of aliens by stealing their tech and integrating it into these special bug-like fighters that became our primary weapons of war.
This Hispanic kid who is some kind of expert with technology is recruited into the elite commando unit who pilot the alien-tech fighters. Then, their base gets destroyed, and the end part is them trying to retaliate against the aliens when it seems that all is lost. I forget how it ends.
It only lasted above five issues I think, but I remember reading once they released a Trade Paperback for it...unfortunately I can't recall the name so searching for it is basically impossible because "genius kid joins mystery organization to fight aliens" is the basis o 99% of all comics ever made. Ever.
Anyone know this one?