The article's pretty annoying, but I don't generally think that breaking YA books into separate lists for boys and girls is necessarily bad, though I certainly think there should be a third (larger) list for the crossovers. It's the rare boy who likes "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" (though we are a generally cool bunch).

I thought the big deal with Snape's patronus was that it's the same as Lily's...i.e that he loved Harry's mom SO MUCH that his patronus matched hers. Did i even read the same books as everyone else??

No, that's right.

What an odd assortment of books they do recommend for "boys" and "girls."

Fahrenheit 451? Hardly young adult. Also, not just for fucking boys. (Oh, that's right. Exposing young people to language likes that coarsens them. Oops.)

Old School? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? Also not young adult.

The world of Ship Breaker values human life less than the Hunger Games world and has an abusive, homicidal parent. The main protagonist is a boy rather than a girl, though, so maybe that makes it different.

Z for Zachariah just isn't a very good book and very dated.

Maybe those are the only books with teen characters and/or dystopias they've actually read.

I did try to read the marbury lens recently , and I couldn't. It was pretty harsh. But than Bleeding Violet was really graphic and I couldn't put it down. There is a lot more violence in YA than when I was growing up. How ever, The Chocolate war is much older and on all the classic lists -- I thought that was horrible.

I looked at the list and - some of them look good - but I'm not sure who I'm recommending them too. if they are readers, great, if not , some o those are hard sells

In a skim of the article, I'd imagine the author thought that YA meant late high school -- since she mentions that end of the term private school juniors only admit to reading YA in small numbers.

Which is a stupid small bar and sample!

Dumb article.

I thought the big deal with Snape's patronus was that it's the same as Lily's...i.e that he loved Harry's mom SO MUCH that his patronus matched hers.

Which is also why Tonks changed her patronus to a wolf, after she fell in love with Remus.

I love Tonks on this read: the first time through she barely registered. I foresee myself looking for lots of AU stories.

What is the Shoebox Project, anyway?

Oh, and 12 chapters into the last book, I still haven't seen either Snape's patronus, or Lily's.

I reorganized bookshelves today. I decided that I should move all the vampire books onto the bigger bookcase that's easier to get to, because let's face it, the books I re-read the most often are vampire books. I posted a photo of the vampire bookcase to Tumblr.

The Shoebox Project is a long, long, long fic that centers entirely around the Marauders and the paths that took them through Hogwarts and into the Order of the Phoenix. It also has lots of Remus/Sirius and it shows them falling in love and realizing they're gay and it's just wonderful. There are illustrations and asides and copies of notes passed between them all in Transfiguration or Double Potions and it's just marvelous.

It got hacked awhile back and I think there is a PDF of it available. But the two authors, ladyjaia and .... I can'r remeber the other one, graduated from college and got proper jobs and never finished the fic up to Harry's birth or James and Lily's deaths. Which is totally sad.

Did we go back to 1950 today and I missed it?

We are kind of going back to 1950, I think. I have this theory that because the "Great Recession" hit men harder than women, it's created a culture similar to post-WWII, where men are trying to re-establish their place in society or make up for not having jobs. There seems to be a similar effort to control and legislate women as well as narrowly delineate what's "proper" for girls and women.

And of course the WSJ has only gotten more conservative under Murdoch.