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openNo Title Literature
Two short stories. I think they were from the same short story anthology but were by different authors:
1) An obese Big Eater goes to a mall's food court, and ends up being put on trial by a literal food court (with giant talking fast food items serving as the judge, jury, etc).
2) In a small town in the 1950's, somehow all the televisions start picking up programming from the modern day. There's a major panic in the town because, based on the content, people are convinced the airwaves have been taken over by communists.
openNo Title Literature
I had talked about this on the old "You Know That Show" but I'm not sure what happened to the original entry.
I often wonder about a book I read years ago after I had randomly pulled it off a shelf in a library. It was a romance novel. I think the female main character was Native American and I'm pretty sure the male main character was Irish. They are forced to get married when they are both on a ship and they are found in bed together and everyone thinks they had sex, although they actually didn't.
Later in the book the now married couple travel the Oregon Trail together. After they have sex for the first time, the woman braids her hair which had been left loose before. She describes it as a tradition of her Native American tribe for women to braid their hair when a man becomes "her true husband" after they have had sex. She tells her brother that the man is now "her true husband" but he disagrees when he finds out they were having sex without planning on it leading to having a baby.
openNo Title Literature
i read this book when i was a kid, it was a small novel about a boy who goes to the markets (i think)and he finds this stall run by a guy selling magic candies. the boy buys a bag of them and they all have different magic powers. i remember in one chapter he puts one in his baby sisters bottle. he goes back to find the stall at the end of the novel and the guy isnt there anymore and doesnt seem to have ever existed. im sorry if this is a little vague, it would have been a good 15 years since i read it! i also remember that the chapters where named after the different candies and the author was VERY descriptive about the colors of the wrapping paper around them.
openNo Title Literature
This was a book my teacher read to the class in 2001. It was about a girl who was on a boat and something happened, sending her underwater. While underwater she met a Coelacanth who talked to her. There were also some seal(ions) (can't remember which they were) who talked to her... That's all I've got.
Is any of this useful to anyone? ^^;
I tried looking up the name I thought it was called ("World Beneath the Waves"), but that's not turning up anything useful- not even when adding the addendum "Coelacanth"
openNo Title Literature
There's a book I read when I was younger. It's about these poor kids who live on the street, and there's this older kid who's a thief who steals from homes to bring them food/other supplies. He's their leader, of sorts, and the kids look up to him. Later, it's revealed that he's actually just an upper-class kid taking things from his own house and pretending to be a thief. I'm pretty confident the title of the book is "The [Something] Thief" Anyone have any idea?
openNo Title Literature
I read this book in...third/fourth grade, it was assigned reading. It's set during the whole black racism time in America and while I can't remember very much from the book (I hate to admit it, but I skimmed pretty badly), there are two things I can remember:
-At the very beginning, the main character (the main character is a girl, and the book is in first person)'s brother throws a fit because the textbook he was given has a record of the names of all of the students who used it. It has a part next to it where the students wrote in what race they were, and so at the beginning it's a long list of names with "White" next to it and finally one name at the bottom with "nigra" next to it. (It uses a demeaning word and implies that black people are only fit for secondhand things, which is why he throws a fit)
-The main character has a bad relationship with a white girl (and her parents order her to not get involved with her), and soon they develop a friendship that from the outside looks like a friendship but (and this is where my memory gets foggy) the white girl is just ordering her around and blackmailing her, and finally the main character gets fed up and offers to show her a "surprise" and shocks her by throwing the girl's books on the floor and telling her she's not taking any more of it. (The white girl had forced her to carry her books for her.)
Anyone know? I know I haven't provided much to work off of, but knowing what the book was would be helpful.
Edited by asterseleneopenNo Title Literature
A children's book - short novel style - that I read in the mid nineties but seemed a lot older about a girl who could lick her elbow? This was a really big deal (obviously) but also meant that she could fly. She had a porcelain daschaund/sausage dog figurine that was her only friend but broke?
I remember it having a ridiculously long title something like 'The Little Girl Who Could Lick Her Elbow and Fly' but not quite that literal? It would mean so much if I could find the name of this book!
openNo Title Literature
Does anyone remember the name of an Arthur C. Clarke (I think...) story about nuclear missile troops stationed in high earth orbit on Orion-type ships witnessing a nuclear war taking place on Earth? Any help would be appreciated.
openNo Title Literature
Okay, I have only VERY vague recollections of this, but I'm going to give it a go anyway. In fourth grade, our teacher red us a book about a creature, he was some kind of gremlin or shadow-type fantasy animal. There were a couple of kids, possibly a girl and a boy, and I think they were the only ones who could see him, though I'm not sure. They may have had a treehouse? The creature lived underground, or in the tunnels under the city and it was a nice animal, though very mischevious. I recall parts of it being quite dark, possibly even scary, and sad sometimes. I seem to remember lots of rocks being invovled for some reason, and a red cloak or ribbon? When I think back on it, I know I was reminded a bit of Dahl and Where the Wild Things Are, though I don't think it was written by Dahl or Mercer.
It's driving me crazy. I wish I had more.
openNo Title Literature
This was a story in Cricket magazine, and I only got to read part 1/2 (at least, I think it was 2. I could be wrong, though).
In the story was a girl, and she wove or knit. There was a magic blanket involved, and werewolves. I am so sorry that this is not a more detailed description, though. DX
openNo Title Literature
Ok, this is a fantasy novel which started off with a healer about to go heal the evil overlord, who was some sort of hunchback. I believe they were all elves or Sidhe of some kind perhaps. And they were from underground. At some point, he got custody of a young girl (or boy?) who was a descendant of the old ruling family. Maybe several of them. He tried to save them, but somehow they got in trouble with a pirate of some kind, and one of them got killed in a way that caused her to come back as a very evil being.
The last bit I believe was some wizard thinking that it would be good to know a resurrectionist because things were about to get very very bad.
openNo Title Literature
Edit: TITLE FOUND!
There are two little details I remember about this book I read years ago. Two children (I think a boy and a girl) stay in a mall overnight and take coins out of a fountain to get money. They do laundry and their clothes turn gray since they wash everything in one machine. I wish I remembered something more important to the plot, but that's pretty much all I have.
Edited by allaboutsoulopenNo Title Literature
Two YA novels that I read in the early nineties. Both of them were about ghosts, I think.
1. A girl moves to a new house with a graveyard, and she finds the grave of a girl who died either by drowning or in a fire, I can't remember. The girl haunts her, and I think she feels a special kinship to the girl. The two girls may have had the same first name.
2. I only remember one scene from this one, where either a girl or boy is lying awake in bed staring at a stain on their ceiling. The stain looks like a cross, I think.
Edited by amazinglyenoughopenNo Title Literature
I remember reading a short story a while back about time travel. It was pretty long for a short story but the problem is that I cant remember the name of the author or the story...
In the short story the main character works for an agency that is waging war on another group using time travel. By the end of the story, we learn that the main character himself is the leader of the other faction (in his future) and we see history rewritten many times. The faction he originally belonged in wanted absolute control of time travel and wanted humans to stay on Earth. The other faction wanted humans to expand to space. However, when they would expand into space, the other faction would find the point of divergence and change it, erasing their work. And it went like that back and forth. At the end of the story, the main character's faction (the pro-space one) manages to win and humans have spread through the galaxy and apparently into nearby galaxies.
Memorable things from the story include the fact that according to the anti-space faction, human civilizations always collapse eventually. Our period in history is the first rise in civilization. One of the post-apocalyptic histories in the far future use diamond-tipped spears made from ancient car windshields. The main character initially works for the anti-space faction because they have some sort of information on a specific time address when a loved one of his died (who also worked for the time travel faction so it wasnt her native time) and he wants that address so he can change her fate. There is some sort of super-library at the end of time but searching it for that point in time would take too long.
If any of this jogs someone's memory and knows what Im talking about, please let me know. I want to reread it and its going to bug me forever if I cant find it.
Thank you.
openNo Title Literature
There was a science fiction book I remember reading as a child. I want to say the title was something like "Monsters INC" but of course, my attempts at searching are more or less doomed to failure due to the wildly successful Pixar film. It was released at least a good 20 years back if not older (I read it in the library by 1990 at the latest). The main character was a boy who lived on an island where they created bio-engineered creatures for a company, including miniature monsters. Two of this pets were a miniature Godzilla which could breath fire, but at the level of a butane lighter, and I think a miniature wolly mammoth. He lived with only one family member, his father, I think, with the other deceased at the beginning of the book.
Near the beginning, we establish the monsters were more or less one-offs, designed by the deceased parent and found unprofitable. Strange men show up and take over the island with the protagonist escaping by swimming away. I want to say that he improvised a weapon with the tranquilizer guns in the building but the swimming ruined them in-transit.
And... that's about as much as I remember. Does this spark anything for anyone?
openNo Title Literature
i first saw this as a short comic book in a collection of books that were adapted (at least partly) into a short comic book.
This is a Sci-Fi story about how bug-like (maby like an ant) aliens that outnumber us a million to 1 have taken over earth and strong humans were forced to fight the larval forms of these aliens. Humans cant communicate with them without putting a kind of comminucator to his or her lips.
The main character is one of these strong humans (Hes a man but I cant rember his name) And the alien making him fight (I think its name is something like Ikk-so-Briar, but maby not) He has fought well so if he wins 1 more battle then he will be free or at least not have to fight anymore. But in the last battle he has to be paired up with a partner in a "Double-Double" (a 2 on 2 fight where you are chained to your teammate) and a woman is his partner.
She still has hope for the human race's freedom when he has none and the comic ends when they are charging through the flooded arena at their opponets. Sorry for the long post.
Edited by ForecharmeropenNo Title Literature
I remember reading a (probably picture) book back when I was a lil kid. The things that I'm sure of is that the main character was a cat. The german cover had lots of leaves on it, but that's the only detail I remember of the cover, so yeah. There is a picture of the cat and some other animal by night in a garden full of of bushes cut like animal figures somehwere inside, but I have no idea what exactly the rest of the story was about. Now here comes the part where I'm not sure wether or not I'm mixing up different memories: I think that I can remember a picture of a cave/ hole, completly black, with bones in front of it. Don't ask me why that was in a childrens' book. Aaaand something about an old, abandoned ship; I think that was from an other book but I'm not sure. I've been searching for this picture book for quite a while, so it would be great if somebody knew the title!
openNo Title Literature
There was this book, not thick, but it was about this ghost family. They got struck by lightning and came back as ghosts, anyway they could change their appearance, form their old-fashioned outfits to anything else, like one brother changed into a skeleton one time. The scene I remember most clearly was this photography group came to take pictures of the "abandoned" house and the ghosts kept posing invisibly then appearing right when they took the picture,confusing the photographers. I'm not sure if this is the same book or not, but this ghost went to school (invisibly) and went into the absent boy's chair and worked on the math work, then the class found out about him being a ghost and let him stay. like I said, I'm not sure whether this was one book or two different ones. It's been bothering me lately...

I read this book back in middle school, and I've always wanted to read it again, even after graduating high school...but I just cant remember the name. The cover I remember had a teenaged guy lying on a road, face up and arms strecthed to either side. He was lying on top of, or right below a street arrow. All I remember from the book was the teenaged boy accidentally killed his semi abusive father by pushing him and his father hit his head severely on the fireplace (I believe). The kid freaks out and tries to cover things up by keeping his father in bed and playing recordings of his snoring to fool his aunt(?) that comes over or something. Turns out that his father or something, somehow gets a hold of a lot of money (I think) and the son wants to try and get it. He also becomes friends with a girl around his age, and she wants to be an actress. She knows about the boy killing his father and helps him hid the bod in a huge ditch/hole (I believe it was). At the end though, she runs off with the money. She was acting (remember her wanting to be an actress?) like she was his friend and stuff.
A lot of that is guessed, but what I know for certain is that the boy accidentaly kills his father, tries to cover it up with the help of the girl, and the boy somehow gets money and the girl steals it at the end. For the love of all that is loveable I can't well remember the name or even the name of the characters! I would love to find this book again if possible :(