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openNo Title Literature
Actually, it's a fan work, crossing G1 and G4 of My Little Pony. A freak accident creates a rainbow bridge between Earth and Equestria, and the now-adult Megan finds it needful to go back. I cannot remember the name, and it's not on the fanfic recommendations page that I can find.
openNo Title Literature
It's a book that I read a few times when I was 6 or 7. I remember it had an alligator or crocodile on the cover, and the premise of the book was that it was filled with jokes and gags, and if you laughed at any of them, you had to go back to the beginning and read through everything again. I'd like to know what the name of this book was, just for old time's sake, and because I would like to buy a copy for my niece.
openNo Title Literature
It's a teen book, possibly a series, about an extraterrestrial girl, human-looking except for her metallic gold hair, who comes to Earth as part of her socials homework. At one point, she takes a job babysitting a particularly rambunctious two year old, and his parents tell her that if he's too much trouble, just tie him to the tree in the back yard. When they get back, she tells them that when he became too much, she tied him to the tree. But it seems cruel to just leave him there being bored, so she taught him to read. Naturally, they're a bit skeptical, but when they go into the yard, they find the kid tied to the tree, with about two metres of rope between him and the trunk. He's surrounded by toddler book, and he's clearly reading them. Slowly, and sounding out every word, but he's reading. The parents aren't sure if they should yell at the girl, or pay her extra.
openNo Title Literature
Children's books on the paranormal. I think the might have been from the 70's or 80's. I seem to remember a series of them. One was about monsters, and had pictures of the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot, illustrations of Mothman. Another book was about aliens, and had illustrations of the Shag Harbour UFO incident, and of one person who was abducted and recalled a alien walking back and forth on a platform.
The books tended to be rather small in size. Probably no bigger then 6 inches tall.
Any help on figuring this one out would be great.
openNo Title Literature
Okay, here's what I remember about the book—the narrator was a college professor, he had problems with the school he was working for that lead to him threatening to strangle a goose for every day the problem went unsolved. He had a dog named Occam's Razor. His neighbors had an issue with him living on higher ground than them. I'm pretty sure he sneaks through air ducts at some point.
There was a female character who had end inflection in all her sentences that made them sound like questions, to the point where she leaves a note for the narrator where she actually uses question marks instead of periods.
openNo Title Literature
There was this book about a girl with weight problems. It involved something with a family and had a Bookends full-circle-ending kind of thing going on. I believe it came out in the 60s or 70s. I might be confusing some of this with a different book though. Some help please?
openNo Title Literature
I remember reading this short story about a boy who gets a possessed guitar that allows him to play beautifully. Can anybody tell me the name of the story?
Edited by monkeyheroineopenNo Title Literature
I remember reading this short story about this teacher who always has pupils who behave and are model students. She wins best teacher of the year award at one school. There's a scene where she says that they all have to behave... OR ELSE and she turns the lights off and makes a face at them.
Then later on in the year, a female student disappears. The teacher kept remarking about how messy and scatterbrained this girl was, and about all the ash in her chimney. Then she tells the principal that she wants to transfer because of how upsetting it was for this child to go missing.
At the end of the story she defecates on her rug and smears feces all over her naked body.
It is strongly implied that she kills children and transfers to a new school a little while afterwards.
Does anyone know what this was called or what anthology it was in? I think it might have been one about adult fairy tales (Rumplestilskin maybe?), but I could be wrong.
Edited by SessaliskopenNo Title Literature
A children's fantasy novel about a girl and a boy who are best friends and live near the sea/ocean, until they have to leave home and go on some sort of quest or something like that. The only details I remember are that the boy has white hair and a mysterious past which he doesn't remember, and at the end of the book it turns out he's from Atlantis. Also, I think the mariner from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was involved somehow.
openNo Title Literature
There was a series of short stories — apparently somewhat famous because I know at least one of them, the donut one mentioned below, was turned into a movie. I //think// they took place around the 1920's, but I'm not sure.
I can recall the plots of two of the stories: In one of them, the main character's uncle (who ran the general store) acquired a donut-making machine, and made thousands of donuts. A woman accidentally dropped her engagement ring into the batter, and the people of the town began eating through all of the donuts looking for it.
In another story, everyone in town got a song stuck in their head — it was basically the ultimate Ear Worm. The cure was a second Ear Worm that had the power to knock out the first. The problem was that the second one would get stuck in your head //until you sang it to someone else.// It got passed around to everyone in town until they finally managed to pass it off to someone who was just boarding a train.
Any help with this would be appreciated. Thanks.
openNo Title Literature
I recall reading a series of books in the 80s or 90s about a teenage boy who goes to live with a relative out in the country. If I remember correctly, the books didn't have an overall plot, but each chapter was like an individual short story.
The only story I can remember with enough detail to describe accurately is this: The main character is walking through the wilderness (forest? desert? other?) when he suddenly gets a horrific nosebleed (it's explained in expository that he's prone to these). Since his clothes are soaked in blood, he takes them off and washes them in a stream so they don't get stained. But now he's covered in blood himself and his nose is still bleeding. He decides he needs to stop the nosebleed first and then bathe. He lays down with his head tipped back, and accidentally falls asleep. When he wakes up, he washes up and gets dressed. However, apparently a woman riding on horseback saw him asleep covered in blood and thought he was dead — the victim of a violent murder. She rides into town and gets the police, but by the time they get to where he was he's gone. I can't remember if she ends up thinking she's crazy or if she recognizes him and thinks he did it as a prank.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
openNo Title Literature
Two books I vaguely remember reading as a kid, but the titles escape me:
The first was a picture book in which a little boy's dinosaur-shaped birthday cake turns into a real dinosaur. The dinosaur ends up in a zoo and is miserable, so the boy helps it escape and takes it somewhere it will be safe from the people who want it in the zoo.
The second was about a girl who tries to befriend two new students at her school. She initially succeeds with the one who turns out to be a jerk, but makes friends with the other girl toward the end. I think there was also a subplot about how one of the girls (can't remember which) is bi-racial and is ashamed of having a white mother because her grandmother hates white people.
openNo Title Literature
zerky remembers reading this book as a child. It couldn't have been written any later than the mid-late 90s. In the book there was a girl who was born to two ghost parents.
As in, her parents were both ghosts, and somehow a living child was born to them.
She goes to an ordinary school and at one point, her teacher comes over to her house to see how she lives. Her parents use a sort or garlic poultice to treat a wound.
Edited by zerkyopenNo Title Literature
I'm looking for a sci-fi anthology I read a while ago - I think it was for young-adults. The only story I remember involved a class of students trying to study Shakespeare after most of his plays have been banned by various groups going for political correctness. In the end, I think they end up convincing their teacher to let them read King Lear, and there's only three lines that haven't been banned. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
openNo Title Literature
I read a fantasy novel once about a princess named Sylvia - who actually lived inside the book, performing her role as the star of the story every time someone read the book, as if she was an actor. She and the other characters actually treated it like a performance that they repeated over and over each time the book was opened. Sentences and pages were described as physical things they could interact with, and if someone messed up in their performance, it changed the book the person was reading. The book Sylvia lived in was implied to be suffering from a Keep Circulating the Tapes situation, and eventually the last physical copy was destroyed, leaving them alive only in the memory of a woman who had loved the book as a child. Literally - they lived inside her mind and participated in her dreams. At the end, Sylvia influences the woman into rewriting the book, which becomes a major bestseller. There's also a sequel I never read, in which the book becomes avaliable online and the characters have to learn to adjust between the weightlessness of an ebook and the solid reality of a traditional book. I can remember all of this, but I have no idea what it's called!
openNo Title Literature
A collection of stories. It had a green cover. The introduction said "hold on to your hat". One part had a theme of friends. "Ira Says Goodbye" and "Since Hanna Moved Away" were in that part. "Since Hanna Moved Away" was on a page with a poem about girls who matched. It used the phrase "two pierced ears and two bare ones". There was also a section of humor. It had jokes such as "Why do cows wear bells? Because their horns don't work". It also had the poems "Eletelephony" and "Banananananananana...". The latter's name is not exact, but it's about someone who kept spelling "na" in "banana". "Amelia Bedelia" was also in the book. The last section was about science. It had an experiment to prove that air takes up space.
openNo Title Literature
Back in the mid 80's at some point, I remember the teacher reading our class a story. It basically involved some kids living normal every days lives, and their fear of a mean old woman who spied on them (and everyone else) with her binoculars. As the story unfolds, the mean old woman is killed by her even meaner nephew (I think), and she is hung (or hanged, as the case may be) from a cherry tree by the binoculars straps. The story then inolves the nephew wanting to eliminate any witnesses (the children), and the children somehow proving what the nephew did to the police.
It has been a very long time since I've heard this story, but I was curious about what the title of it may be. Does anyone out there remember this story? If so, what was it called?
Many thanks in advance.
openNo Title Literature
Children's book, I think a series but not sure. The protagonists were mice, and the main character was named Thursday. I remember a plot about the characters being on a riverboat, and something about a cheese theft. One character had a German accent, and he was the cook on the riverboat.
openNo Title Literature
Youth sci-fi about an alien that transferred its mind to a skunk's body. Some help please? (Loved that book as a kid.)

This is a book I read within the last year or so. It was fairly short, maybe the size of your average james patterson novel, if not shorter. It was about a gallery owner in New York who stumbles upon a collection of work of such magnificence that he promptly has them displayed. Thing is, the artist was found dead in his home. All the pieces are connected, and numbered on the back. They form a huge, mind-mappish picture/mural, about the artist's life. The story swiches between the main charactr's story and flashbacks to the life of the dead artist, who turns out to be a relative of the main character.
This SHOULD be enough to go on. I think.