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openJapanese samurai book Literature
I'm looking for this old Japanese samurai book that I saw here a while ago. It talked about stuff like the ethos and methods of what true samurai should be. I believe this book was written at least 400-500 years ago but not exactly sure.
opendinosaur book series??? Literature
probably a scholastic series—very edgy but for kids. one of the main characters was a therapod named scarface, who rose to the top of his dinosaur pack over the course of the series. (as you might suspect, he had a scarred face.) one of the books involved a protoceratops battling a velociraptor to the death. all the characters were dinosaurs, no humans.
openNo Title Literature
Hello,
I am trying to find a story I read on Wattpad a few years ago. I cannot remember the name or the title, but I recall some of how the plot goes. So basically it is about a girl named Emily/Grace I cannot quite remember but she was dating this guy who had two best friends. So his friends would make fun of her and he won't do anything about it, time passed and she finds out he cheated on her, so she broke up with him, gets drunk and has a one night stand with one of the best friends and ends up pregnant, turns out the best friend had feelings for her for a while and was trying to get her attention by teasing her and during her pregnancy, they bond and fall in love. I can't remember if they had twins or a girl. But would love it if someone could help me find this book.
Thank you.
openSheep (or goat) who escapes from slaughterhouse Literature
Short story I read in high school Freshman English class in 1981 in the textbook we had. It's about a sheep, or a goat, who along with his(?) fellow sheep/goats are being fattened up for slaughter. The animals, who can talk to each other by Translation Convention, know about being taken away but they don't know where it goes. There might be some myth involved among them, that they go to a place where they never have to worry about anything again or something. Anyway, this one sheep/goat manages to escape from the slaughterhouse and rushes back to his flock telling them about the horrors that await them in The Other Place. They don't believe him. He may be a Messianic Archetype.
If it helps, it would have been in either the book Man the Mythmaker or The Perilous Journey, both edited by W.T. Jewkes. They were the two books we used over the course of the year.
Edited by randomsurferopenA chapter book about a sapient rabbit toy that goes from home to home. Literature
This was a book they read to me and the other 4th graders at my school during storytime, and the rabbit's personality changes as he moves from person to person are an important part of the story. I forget the rabbit's name, but think it was a classical English/American name like "Edward" or "Edgar" or "Albert". He begins the story snobby and living with a girl in an upper-class family, but then is lost and winds up with a middle-class older couple. He then ends up with a homeless man and his dog on the streets, before being adopted by young orphans who are brother and sister, the girl very sick. Over the course of this journey, the rabbit goes from stuck-up to down-to-earth, and it ends with him in a toy shop. The dolls there are snotty towards him for being an old rabbit toy in a store of dolls that walk and dolls that have glass eyes, but other than that, I don't remember the ending.
openSci-fi book with alien caterpillar protagonist [SOLVED] Literature
I read the back blurb of a sci-fi book whose protagonist was a gigantic (possibly psychic?) alien caterpillar. It was a sort of trickster (amoral?) character and I think that the setting was another planet/space. It did not seem to be very recent and it is possible that it was an anthology.
Edited by bowlfishopenThe Unnoticeable Boy Literature
I remember there being a (probably non-canon) Marvel book about a boy who went to Xavier's School and his mutant power was that he could turn invisible. But not in a see through way, more like a perception filter where he's still there and you still see him but you don't notice him at all, sort of like a social outcast with no friends except as a super power. And, unfortunately, he can't turn this power off so he has to go super out of his way to be noticed.
It was all told in the format of a series of blog posts.
openSci-Fi Short Story By "Axle Hackle" (SOLVED) Literature
I was reading the "Vengeful Vending Machine" page when I came upon this poorly-written example "In a short story by Axel Hacke. He is talking to his sentient fridge named Bosch about this trope. Some American soldiers who were crushed by vending machines are mentioned. Bosch thinks it's the soldiers' fault, since they shook up the machines. The narrator gets angry and mentions the many times he got nothing for his money."
Does anyone know what short story this is?
Edited by sRAMrelevratopenNo Title Literature
I was half-listening to an audio book in the car during a trip to grandma's house when I was VERY young. There was a boy who jumped through a doorway, from his house or his ship or something, and landed in some rural farm town area. He was picked up by a lovely farmer couple going down the road on their tractor. Plot happens - I think there was some problem in town that the boy helped solve? - and the boy has to go back home now. One of the last lines is him telling the couple that "[they] didn't find [him] - [he] chose [them]." Then he left.
My parents insist that there was never any such book and that I must have dreamed it, but I don't believe them. This would have happened early to mid 2000s, so the book is at least that old, if I'm right and it wasn't a dream.
openShort story with an invisible machine Literature
This was a short story set in a small town (possibly in America?). One day some of the population start working together to do something around the edges of the town. They're very focused and won't answer questions about it. Eventually the other people decide that they're building an invisible machine. They work for days and when they're finished they throw themselves into the machine- which turns out to be a meat grinder.
I read this as part of a course on weird fiction. It was the same week we covered Thomas Ligotti but as far as I can tell this story isn't one of his. It was probably written later than the 70s but before the 2000s. Anyone have any idea what this story is called, or just who the author might be?
openTwo Books I Read In Elementary School (SOLVED: The Word Eater and Wellspring Of Magic) Literature
So I read these in Elementary School and I'm wondering what their titles are.
1. This one was about a worm (maybe named "Flip"?) who had eyes (the story acknowledged that that was unusual) and could eat words, like off a page. I think eating words caused a certain effect, but I don't remember what. At the end, "Flip" loses the power to eat words, I think.
2. This one was about a few girls who got transported into a magical world, maybe by messing around with something in a weird pavilion. It turns out that each of them is a "princess" of something in that world (basically meaning they had superpowers), and they had to get to a magic fountain to fix some corruption or something, but the magic fountain was blocked off by dense thorny vines. The spend the whole story trying to figure out how to get past those vines, I think. One girl was like, the "princess of plants", but her powers didn't work on those vines. I think another was "the princess of water/rivers", and her power was that she'd turn into a mermaid if she got fully submerged. The magical world had its own inhabitants, and I think they called people from our world "plainsiders" or something like that. (Because we're from the "plain", i.e. unmagical, part of reality.)
Edited by sRAMrelevratopenChildren's Book Where Dog Aliens Keep Humans as Pets Literature
This is a book that I got from a scholastic book sale when I was in elementary school (so the early 2000's). It was about a boy who got abducted by aliens that looked like big dogs and kept humans as pets. I think he said something to the alien kid who ended up having him as a pet and the alien was surprised because humans (they had another name for them) weren't supposed to be intelligent? One detail that seems to have stuck in my head is that I'm pretty sure the protagonist's name was Clark and the alien dog kid ended up calling him Quark or something similar.
openModern Sun-Wukong story Literature
It was basically this book where the main protagonist was Wukong's staff as a teenage girl, and it was a YA book.
open[SOLVED] Short sci-fi story: children learn blue-and-orange logic through toys from the future Literature
I can't tell you anything about the writer, the year of publication, or even what the original language of this story was. I don't even remember where I read it, but I'm assuming it was one of the old anthologies I liked reading as kid.
The protagonist finds children's toys made in the distant future (a future scientist working on time-travel sent them). I remember that one of the toys was a complex bead maze. The protagonist showed the toys to his family, but the adults couldn't solve them, because those toys were made for people with a completely different way of thinking, and the adults were already set in their ways. They couldn't learn something so completely different.
But children could. The protagonist's kids (a boy and a girl if I remember it right) started to play with these toys more and more, and their way of thinking started to shift. But it wasn't just toys that were sent back, there were also instructions for a time machine, which the kids had built. The story ends with children disappearing into the future, leaving the protagonist behind with a time machine that no one can use anymore because just like the toys it operates on a completely different type of logic
Edited by AndarielopenTwo More Books I Read (SOLVED: Mirror, Mirror and The Villains Series) Literature
So here's two more books that I read once and now can't find:
1. A collection of short stories. The title had something about a "mirror". The first thing in the book was a poem (of the non-rhyming sort) that began with "a child in the mirror sees a". I couldn't remember who the child saw, but then the next line was whoever the child saw in the mirror looking in a mirror and seeing someone else. I don't remember exactly who saw who, but there was a gambler and a bride, and I think there was a part with "a rebel in the mirror sees a soldier/a soldier in the mirror sees a prisoner..." and it ends with "and a hero in the mirror sees a child." One of the short stories in it was "Dying For Franjibelle", about the titular flower. It also had a poem "One sniff and you're in heaven/two sniffs and you're in hell/take three sniffs and you leave the world forever/dying for Franjibelle". No, this isn't a collection of stories with poems or anything. The only other story I can recall was one about some guy with fingers growing on his head instead of hair. (Eeeugh). Apparently he wasn't always like that, he did some experiments or something and that caused it. At the end, he undoes the other damage his experiments caused, and that gives him his normal hair back. (Or maybe it was that guy's daughter, and she was born with those fingers? Maybe both?) I have no idea what anything in the collection actually had to do with mirrors...
2. I remember a LOT about this one, I just can't recall its name. So the... main character (can't say he's a hero) is this guy (I think he's named Victor) who discovers that near-death experiences (of all sorts) can occasionally give people superpowers. Only people with a certain genetic marker, though, which it turns out he and his lab assistant have. Being college students at the time, they stupidly decided to *nearly* kill themselves to get powers. The lab assistant (don't remember their name or gender, I'll call them Labby) freezes themself to near death. Victor electrocutes himself. They both get powers: Labby gets a healing factor, and Victor can control pain (both removing it and inducing it). They have a falling out, Labby tries to kill Victor. The flashback ends before we find out how Victor survives being (I think) shot. In the present, Victor is going around killing other people with powers. He's trying to find a way to kill Labby (he knows how to get around their regen powers, they're just hard to kill for other reasons.) There are two more "main" powered people: two sisters (their names both begin with "S", I think). One has a "compelling voice", the other can, DRUMMROLL PLEASE... Raise The Dead. Both sisters nearly drowned and froze in an icy lake. Actually, the "mind control" one DID drown, but was brought back by the other. A detail about the powers is that they're decided, not by the manner of the near-death, but by what people were *wanting* as they went through it: Victor just wanted the pain (of electrocution) to stop, the ressurrector wanted "to give [herself] and her sister another chance". There's a minor character, whom Victor killed, who nearly asphyxiated in a collapsed mine. He "didn't want to die alone", and, though we don't find out what his power is. he mentioned that afterward "THEY [implied to be something that other people can't see] would never leave [him] be". There was also a minor (nonpowered) character who looks like your stereotypical "dumb muscle" but is actually very brainy. He apparently did some hacking... to set up a bank robbery or do surveillance for it or something, but since he looked like your dumb goon when the cops arrested his gang he ended up charged with the armed robbery, while his compatriots were let off with just the hacking.
Edited by sRAMrelevratopenGross children's book -- expired lunch Literature
It's a children's picture book. I don't remember much about the art style, but I think it looked somewhat cartoony.
The main character is this boy who seems to be in elementary school (though exactly how old he is is unclear), and when getting ready for school on a Monday, he retrieves his lunch box, only to find that he left some food in there on Friday and it's gone bad.
One of his parents (the mother I think) yells something like "Get rid of that before everyone loses their lunch!".
And the last line of the book was something along the lines of "And then everyone lost their lunch".
Sorry for describing this.
openNovel about pageant Literature
A novel titled something like "Golden Girl", about a group of girls competing in a pageant that was something along the lines of Miss America/Universe/etc. There were various talents showcased among the contestants, like playing the piano and dancing (I think the main character was a dancer). There was a mystery, as the contestants would get injured or maybe even murdered (I don't remember which). At the climax of the novel, the main character is confronted by the culprit, who I believe was the mother of another contestant, and records the conversation on a cassette tape.
openAlternative neuro typical civilisation Literature
Hi, I’d like it if someone could direct me to fiction dealing with civilisations comprising a population of people for whom the neurotypical norm is different and how they deal with more neurotypical people? I’m aware of the Harry Turtledove short story where almost everyone is Autistic and what we call normal need to seek therapy.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but while trying to alphabetize Bucket Helmet, I found this entry that has no source. Does anyone know what book/literature it came from?