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First off, if you want to waste some time by seeing what happens when LOLcats take on Presidential Politics, check out Ron Paul Can Has Cheezburger? After all, the American Dream is for every person to have a bukkit of their own...

Anyway, it's the last day of 2007, so let's talk about all the books that I read in 2006 and haven't talked about yet. La la la la la la la la.

First off, a book I really, really loved.

CHERUB: The Recruit Robert Muchamore

James can't catch a break. His mother is awful (and a major dealer in stolen goods) his sister's father isn't any better. Then he gets suspended for fighting in school and his mom dies.

Enter CHERUB. Founded over 50 years ago, CHERUB is a division of MI5--British Intelligence. No one ever suspects a kid, so that's who they send--kids.

James will be a spy and receive a top-notch education, but only if he can survive the training period.

And then, if he does, the real work begins.

A fun and gripping adventure story, I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of the books in this series...

College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-Eds, Then and Now Lynn Peril

This is a well-done, not overly academic look at the history of women's high education. It's a pretty balanced account with a lot of pull-out boxes about various aspects of female college life and lots of "Femorbilia" looking at different items marketed to the college girl. I especially enjoyed the "College Girls Book Shelf"-- a running thread of literary treatments of college girls throughout history.

I Am the Messenger Markus Zusak

I liked this book.

Ed is a slacker cab driver with no future. After foiling a bank robbery, he starts to recieve playing cards with messages on them.

With nothing to lose, he starts following them, discovering problems to be solved, some are easy and heartwarming, such as a church with no congregation and some are dangerous and chilling, like a woman being raped every night by her drunk husband.

Through solving these problems, he starts to find direction in life.

Zusak is an awesome writer. It's about as different from The Book Thief as can be, but that just shows his range.

White Is for Magic Laurie Faria Stolarz

A fun guilty-pleasure type read.

Stacey has nightmares about people being murdered--nightmares that have an awful habit of coming true. It's been a year since she saved her best friend last year (in the first of the series, Blue Is For Nightmares. Now the target of her nightmares is... herself. Luckily, she's a witch with an arsenal of spells to help her find the strength and courage she needs.

I couldn't put it down, but I also have no desire to read the rest of the series. The spells felt really, really hokey.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Alison Bechdel

This is a graphic novel memoir of small town America, literature, coming out, and family secrets.

It was really, really good, but the amount of literary allusion and quotations got old after awhile--that aspect was a bit overdone.

Mermaid Park Beth Mayall

Amy hates her family--her jerkwad of a step father, her perfect sister... so she is very much not looking forward to a long weekend on the Jersey shore at her mother's godmother's motel.

But, she finds a boy, and a waterpark of mermaids. (A forbidden waterpark of mermaids.) She talks her mother into letting her stay for the summer, and talks her way into a job at Mermaid Park, unraveling a few family secrets along the way.

A perfectly lovely book, although it didn't stay with me for long.

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Today the guys over at Mugglenet.Com were in town giving a readng of their book (which I review below), but I couldn't go. I had to work. But, that's ok, see, I promised you big excitement and here it is:

Check out how I spent my afternoon:

That's my coworker and friend Becci on the left, me on the right. But, I have to say, that's a day of Harry Potter cruelty when you have to decide between the Knight Bus and a Mugglenet reading. It's a hard life I lead, I know.

Here's what the thing looks like on the outside:




This is the "front" side, which has the door and stuff.







This is the "back" side.






Here's the Harry Potter bookshelf, which is to the right when you walk in. Across the way from the bookshelf, is a big blowup of the Deathly Hallows cover art under glass.




Then, looking from the bookshelf down the bus, this is it.





Of course, in the gear up to the end of the series, there is lots of speculation about how it will end and how the big questions will be answered. Is Dumbledore really dead? Will Harry get his head out of the #$@ and take Ginny back? Will Ron and Hermione ever get their act together and snog already? Where are the the other horcruxes? Who is RAB? And, of course, the big one, just whose side is Severus Snape on?!

These books attempt to answer the questions...

Mugglenet.Com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Falls in Love and How Will the Adventure Finally End by Ben Schoen, Emerson Spartz, Andy Gordon, Gretchen Stull, and Jamie Lawrence

This is an excellent book written by some hard-core Potter fans. So, out of the two questions they give their predictions on that have already passed (when will the book come out and what will it be called) they were totally wrong, BUT! their evidence is solid and their arguements well thought out.

Such questions they debate are is Dumbledore really dead? Is Harry a Horcrux? What is Neville's Destiny? and the role of prophesies. The great thing about this book is that even though the authors clearly state a side in the debate, they do offer both sides of the arguement. The authors think that Dumbledore is really dead (which I agree with) but they also make the most convincing arguement I've ever seen that Dumbledore lives.

I don't agree with all of their predictions and I think they ignore some crucial evidence. I really respect the book for sticking to a very strict set of sources-- the books, and interviews with J. K. Rowling. Also, they never present their conclusions as given fact, they are always very explicit about what their opinions are and what we know for sure.

Sadly, that is not the case with The Great Snape Debate by Amy Berner, Orson Scott Card, and Joyce Millman. (This is only available at Border's stores until after Deathly Hallows comes out.)

The concept of the book is great. One side of the book is the case for Snape's innocence--flip it over and it's the case for Snape's guilt.

Be warned, despite what the cover says, Orson Scott Card is NOT an author this book-- he has a 30 page essage on Snape, but the rest of the book is by Berner and Millman.

They make a lot of assumptions without any textual evidence--I can understand why people would assume that Lucius Malfoy took a young Severus Snape under his wing at school, but there is nothing in the "cannon" about this, yet the author's take it as fact and base their arguements on it. They say that Dumbledore isn't entirely trustworthy because he's made bad decisions in the past, such as letting Tom Riddle attend Hogwarts-- completely misisng the fact that Dumbledore wasn't headmaster at the time, so it really wasn't his decision.

In addition to faulty assumptions for which we have no evidence, they also use such things as the movies as evidence for what might happen in Book 7. Despite the fact that J. K. Rowling approved the movie scripts doesn't mean they can be taken as evidence because it's not like she wrote the scripts. Plus, they use the film career of Alan Rickman as evidence. I'm not entirely sure what that has to do with anything.

There are lots of sidebars that are supposed to be humorous-- like what's on Snape's iPod, or the fact that Snape's secret vice is really Dancing With the Stars. Where I appreciated the inclusion of The Best of the Smiths, Vol. 1 on Snape's iPod, the rest of it was just lame.

I bought the book because Orson Scott Card's name was on it. His essay is really good, but the rest of the book is just a crappy thing quickly churned out to make a fast buck.

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