Molly's reading
Mar. 29th, 2007 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerI keep a record of what Molly reads each week. (Some may have spotted these posts occasionally when I forgot to filter them.) In the last week, her reading suddenly took a turn for the meatier. Her favorite books for a while were the Boxcar Children; more recently, she got really fond of The Babysitter's Club. She also really liked Trixie Belden. Generally, however, she prefered series books.
This past week, she read a couple of Cam Jansen books, but also The Phantom Tollbooth, The Great Brain, and Coraline. These all involved some significant branching out for her. Phantom Tollbooth and the Great Brain are both books with boy protagonists, which for a long time she wouldn't have anything to do with. And Coraline is fantasy -- dark, creepy fantasy. I pointed out Coraline to her at the library, warning her that it was a scary book, and she said she liked scary books and checked it out. Neil Gaiman has said that adults find Coraline much scarier than children do, because they read it as a child-in-peril story; kids read it as an adventure, and since children's literature generally obliges with happy endings, they expect it all to work out. And my experience vs. Molly's seems to bear this out. Molly found it creepy but not too scary. I found it so scary that I actually had a nightmare based on the book, the first time I read it.
In the last couple of weeks, we've been going to the East Lake Library instead of the Nokomis Library. The East Lake Library is the one closest to our house, and was my prefered library for quite a while, but was closed for two years for renovation. It re-opened in early March, and I thought it might be nice to make that our home library base rather than Nokomis. (This requires more advance thought than you might think, because I have all my requests sent to whichever library I'm expecting to go to. Ed also has all his stuff sent there and has me pick it up for him. So just going by the whim of the week doesn't work so well.) East Lake has a really poor selection of juvenile paperbacks, which is frustrating to Molly because all the Babysitter's Club books are paperbacks. (I was also kind of dismayed by the fact that they spent vast amounts of money and enlarged the building but don't appear to have expanded the collection even slightly. They made the aisles wider and they added a bunch of computers, but there aren't any more books.) However, lacking Babysitter's Club options, Molly actually explored the rest of the juvenils stacks this week -- in the past, she has focused on the series books and the revolving racks at Nokomis that hold the paperbacks. She's welcome to read Babysitter's Club or even the Twelve Candles Club if that's what appeals to her, but it's nice to see her expanding her horizons.
So long as she doesn't read this or this or this or this. I just about hyperventilated when I saw them on the shelves. Kids who see the movie and want to read the book should read the actual book. And its six sequels. They're excellent books, and they're not particularly difficult despite the scaaaaaary British vocabulary. I can think of absolutely no reason for that "Peter's Destiny" and "Susan's Journey" tripe. (Given the limited space and budgets of this library system, I can't believe they're wasting space on it. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.)
This past week, she read a couple of Cam Jansen books, but also The Phantom Tollbooth, The Great Brain, and Coraline. These all involved some significant branching out for her. Phantom Tollbooth and the Great Brain are both books with boy protagonists, which for a long time she wouldn't have anything to do with. And Coraline is fantasy -- dark, creepy fantasy. I pointed out Coraline to her at the library, warning her that it was a scary book, and she said she liked scary books and checked it out. Neil Gaiman has said that adults find Coraline much scarier than children do, because they read it as a child-in-peril story; kids read it as an adventure, and since children's literature generally obliges with happy endings, they expect it all to work out. And my experience vs. Molly's seems to bear this out. Molly found it creepy but not too scary. I found it so scary that I actually had a nightmare based on the book, the first time I read it.
In the last couple of weeks, we've been going to the East Lake Library instead of the Nokomis Library. The East Lake Library is the one closest to our house, and was my prefered library for quite a while, but was closed for two years for renovation. It re-opened in early March, and I thought it might be nice to make that our home library base rather than Nokomis. (This requires more advance thought than you might think, because I have all my requests sent to whichever library I'm expecting to go to. Ed also has all his stuff sent there and has me pick it up for him. So just going by the whim of the week doesn't work so well.) East Lake has a really poor selection of juvenile paperbacks, which is frustrating to Molly because all the Babysitter's Club books are paperbacks. (I was also kind of dismayed by the fact that they spent vast amounts of money and enlarged the building but don't appear to have expanded the collection even slightly. They made the aisles wider and they added a bunch of computers, but there aren't any more books.) However, lacking Babysitter's Club options, Molly actually explored the rest of the juvenils stacks this week -- in the past, she has focused on the series books and the revolving racks at Nokomis that hold the paperbacks. She's welcome to read Babysitter's Club or even the Twelve Candles Club if that's what appeals to her, but it's nice to see her expanding her horizons.
So long as she doesn't read this or this or this or this. I just about hyperventilated when I saw them on the shelves. Kids who see the movie and want to read the book should read the actual book. And its six sequels. They're excellent books, and they're not particularly difficult despite the scaaaaaary British vocabulary. I can think of absolutely no reason for that "Peter's Destiny" and "Susan's Journey" tripe. (Given the limited space and budgets of this library system, I can't believe they're wasting space on it. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.)
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-29 08:33 pm (UTC)So you’re an evil overlord, or a tentacled elder God. Hordes of minions
or worshippers are an absolute necessity. Where do you get them? Is evil
really appealing enough to attract worshippers? What talents do you
require? Are you better off outsourcing? Will you have enough capital
left over to make that doomsday device?
I have always wondered about this. Back when I was in a long-term D&D campaign, evil gods always had hordes of followers, and even my excellent and very world-building-oriented DM (hi,
The fabulous book Good Omens actually addresses some of these questions. And the Imperial Storm Troopers turned out to be clones, which answers the question of "how" with "grow them in a vat." But a lot of the time it's just this obvious given thing, the Evil Overlord has Minions, and what the minions get out of the deal is left to the imagination of the fanfic writers.
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-29 09:41 pm (UTC)Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-29 09:54 pm (UTC)Minions and How to Acquire Them
Being an evil overlord is a lot of work, and you can't scrimp the human (inhuman?) resources. The ways you use to recruit your minions will affect how loyal they'll be, and you can't have disloyalty in your ranks, can you? Remember, minions do not like being blown up, so the issue of certain death must be addressed by trickery or force. Are you better off outsourcing? How will you ever have enough capital left over to make that doomsday device?
Magenta Griffith, Naomi Kritzer, David D. Levine (m), CJ Mills, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, DavE Romm
Sat 11:30a-12:30p, Krushenko's
But it's still basically the same thing. Ultimately, it's up to the panelists what it's actually about, but us programming minions were thinking primarily of minions in fiction, rather than real-world minions.
I find it very interesting that a lot of people seem to have immediately thought that "how to acquire minions" really means "how to run a convention".
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-29 11:29 pm (UTC)Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-30 04:08 am (UTC)Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-30 03:45 am (UTC)Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-03-30 10:44 pm (UTC)I'll have to admit that when I was running the campaign in college, I didn't put a lot of thought into the private lives of the evil cultists. Which may have been for the best, because when college students are blowing off steam by slaughtering the evil cultists, they may not want to hear about how, in between evil-cult activities, the evil cultist likes to go for walks along the river with his/her spouse and two cute little kids.
You've got me thinking about Followers of the Evil God in general. Organized groups of people whose religious faith is based around doing evil deeds and thinking of themselves as evil seem pretty rare, outside D&D campaigns, fantasy literature, and Indiana Jones movies. Most religious groups see themselves as the good guys. But since D&D has absolute morality, this isn't really an option for the Followers of the Evil God. When a level-one "detect evil" spell confirms that yes indeed, you are evil, and so are those people you hang out with, there's not much room left for argument. So what kind of psychology would these people have?
Instead of making this comment any longer, I'll continue musing on my sadly neglected blog, where no one will read it.
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-04-02 04:43 am (UTC)So, you know, not no one, unless you have a non-lj blog I don't know about.
Re: Egad!
Date: 2007-04-02 04:58 am (UTC)I seem to remember you getting clearly irritated by the whole alignment system at various points, which may be why you chucked that aspect of gaming entirely out the window when you set up your own universe for the Fantasy Hero game. Along with the "Detect Deception" spell.