I spent most of yesterday at home, flat on my back in a Dayquil doze, where you’re not sleepy enough to sleep but not awake enough to do anything useful. I was idly playing BrickShooter while listening to the audiobook of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, a book I had read and enjoyed while visiting Australia many moons ago. It was pleasant if a little boring, but I told myself to keep on as my favorite Bridget Jones Moment was coming up, right after her Brokedown Palace escapade in Thailand. Bridget went into prison, did Madonna karaoke with the inmates, got out of prison and came home to a phalanx of reporters at the airport. Then she eagerly gets up the next day to read about herself in the papers and discovers . . . . huh. Wait. What? Am I listening to an abridged version? Nope. Is the Dayquil giving me False Memory Syndrome? Where is this book’s masterstroke, when Bridget discovers that the death of Princess Diana has snuffed her own chance at tabloid notoriety? When she goes to the vigil at the Palace, leaving Diana some cigarettes and chocolates in tribute? I was hoping the Dayquil would have me bawling like a baby but IT NEVER HAPPENED.

After checking around the web, adrenaline having chased off the cold medicine, I discovered that what I had thought the emotional climax of the novel was taken out of the U.S. edition, its publisher thinking it dated the book. MORONS. I knew that this subplot wasn’t in the (terrible) movie, but I thought it had been eliminated because both Bridget Jones films had been moved forward in time. Is such drastic transatlantic editing frequent? Forget the sickbed, I may find myself in hospital.

The post Maybe Dumbledore really WAS gay appeared first on The Horn Book.

On Thursday, the Morning News will choose between Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award winner The Round House and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, whose omission from this year’s Printz lineup intrigues me. (Does anyone know the scoop?) I’d go with the Green–The Round House has a Jodi Picoult plot but, to my ears, a flat affect that keeps the story and characters at too much of a distance. BoB’s first bracket, judged by Kenneth Oppel on March 12, is Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb versus R.J. Palacio’s Wonder. Not a fan of the latter. How about you?

The post Battle or Lovefest? appeared first on The Horn Book.

See the Book Smugglers for a side by side look at the U.K. and U.S. editions of the book. I hear the U.S. paperback edition will not repeat what the NYT review called the “lesbian Fifty Shades of Grey” motif of the hardcover.

And DON’T LAUGH but if you liked Code Name Verity try Judith Krantz’s Till We Meet Again. That book does have its Fifty Shades of Grey moments but also a great plot about a plucky American lass who finds employment in the ATA while her siren sister–a Parisian movie star–finds herself in uneasy collaboration with the Nazis. It’s a lot of fun.

The post Fly blind, suggests Susan appeared first on The Horn Book.

The post Finding the work-home balance appeared first on The Horn Book.

In other series news, I’m just about done with A Discovery of Witches, encouraged by Elissa’s post. It was great beach and back porch reading, at its best reminding me of Katherine Neville’s deliriously over-the-top The Eight but with a better sense of humor. Or a more efficient Possession. (I loved how quickly Deborah Harkness dispatched the menstruation question that Stephenie Meyer never quite answered in Twilight.) But I may have to wait a while to try the sequel as the Labor Day weekend stack is already piling up with the new Denise Mina and a non-Brunetti by Donna Leon.

The post and Joan Allen still gets the best lines appeared first on The Horn Book.

But Pam couldn’t help with my question and maybe somebody here can. I’m reading the novel on my Kindle, which makes skimming pretty much impossible, so I don’t know how to go back and check this: it seemed to me that Anna was all restraint and longing gazes with Vronsky, and all of a sudden she’s pregnant. At least, sometimes she’s pregnant, and sometimes she seems to forget. Who’s the father? Am I not reading carefully enough? Was Tolstoi wanting us to read between the lines? Should I stay away from free Kindle books?

The post Wait, what book did you read? appeared first on The Horn Book.

Could we make such a list of children’s books? We’d have to wrestle with the problem that difficulty in a children’s book is grounds for many to not consider it a children’s book, et voilá. But I might include the William Mayne novel pictured here, Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, Hamilton’s Arilla Sundown, Garner’s Red Shift . . . . Martha mentions Paton Walsh’s Unleaving, and Elissa offers Kingley’s Water-Babies as a book all the Simmons students resented having to read. (Let me add to that my experience Grahame’s The Golden Age, which I read for a CLNE seminar with great, great grudging.) What else?

One question I have here and about PW’s list is the assumption that difficulty equals accomplishment, that the harder a book is to read, the more an author has to say and the more the reader has achieved. Nah–the most difficult reading I see in this office are the review copies of self-published novels, for children and adults, written by crazy people.

The post Not so easy to be hard appeared first on The Horn Book.

I’m currently shuttling between (among?) Anna Karenina, William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (on audio). They’re all great and each a relief from the others. Gone Girl is driving me slightly crazy because it involves a fictional children’s book series that was allegedly wildly popular, but descriptions of and quotes from the “Amazing Amy” series make it sound like it would have been out of touch forty years ago, much less today. Maybe this will be explained in the end, because Flynn is an awfully cunning writer and otherwise sharply observant. What are YOU reading?

The post What’s on YOUR summer reading list? appeared first on The Horn Book.

on Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, August 2012):
“perfect for fans of George R.R. Martin and Suzanne Collins”

on Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes (Penguin/Razorbill, December 2012):
“ideal for fans of George R.R. Martin and Kristin Cashore”

As a serious fantasy and sci-fi nerd, I can say that I’m a fan of George R.R. Martin, Suzanne Collins, and Kristin Cashore—but I have to wonder whether there’s much overlap in YA readership among the three. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, featuring lots of gory battle scenes, incest, torture, and dark magic, is not for the faint of heart even among adult readers. The popular HBO show Game of Thrones based on the series—which wrapped up its second season last night—is, if anything, even more graphic. (Did you see Saturday Night Live‘s recent Game of Thrones behind-the-scenes skit?)

Are fans of Collins and Cashore really reading Martin, or is it the other way around?

The post Strange bedfellows: Suzanne Collins, Kristin Cashore, and who? appeared first on The Horn Book.

I have finished Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, one of the best novels I’ve read in several years. I’m trying to get into his new book Trapeze, about a young English woman recruited to sneak into France during WWII. So far it’s okay but not a patch on the similarly premised Code Name Verity, which is on the list linked above. Which shows you should always listen to the Horn Book.

P.S. And if you liked Code Name Verity, try The Defector, first in a fabulous quintet (I think) of books by Evelyn Anthony from the 1980s about a Helen Mirren-like Cold War agent for the Brits. I’m giving them another go come Memorial Day weekend. What’s on your shelf?

The post The fun kind of summer reading appeared first on The Horn Book.