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Narnia's lovely, and the writing is wonderful. If you'd like something similar to Harry Potter, you could check out: Diana Wynne Jones; Jane Yolen (I like her short stories better than her book-length fiction); Ursula K. LeGuin, and Neil Gaiman (culty writer I've never liked, but adored by his...

I did try (because I'm as pathetically needy of affirmation as anyone else) but that was way too boring a paragraph to read.

I hated Jane Eyre, but not for any flaw in the book, I just hated the main character. I wanted to slap her.

I thought the gratuitious sex was the best part...

And sometimes Doris wants to scream at the top of her lungs and behead the barbarian war lord with her fiery sword of power and vengence. I like that.

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. I hated it for its accessible style posing as quality, its hokey/hook'em theme posing as controversial daring, and most of all for its atrocious ending, which was the most commercial piece of 'talk about me!' calculation I've ever seen in a novel. I hated...

But at least romance novels are short. Bad fantasy novels go on and on and on and on... You just want to scream "quit telling me what the fifth scribe to Queen Althphanthasiayyi said at the christening about the exact line of succession to the Vrethnthian throne!" and throttle the author...

I tend to drift into Borders and Barnes & Noble frequently to browse the sale section and the new books, but they have nothing unusual - granted, sometimes I'm looking for something really unusual and they are charming about ordering, but still, their in-store stock is all classics, best-sellers...

I don't think it's the length of the series that hurts US television. (Knowing when to pull the plug on an elderly show is another matter, most shows straggle on dispiritedly long after they should have been cancelled.) Consider how unusual it is for the networks to produce anything...

Back in the really old days for US television (from the late 1940s through the early 1960's) the season lasted from about late August to early July of the following year for the few series that were on. It was amazing, and the reason why old westerns, for example, have so many episodes.

Anything is worth reading, so I'm not fussed by some Mean Girls in print. But the idea of a 'married writing team' producing pretty graphic teen sex scenes is a little unsettling. I mean, it's not exactly pedophilia, but it's cutting it a little close. The fact that some of it's pretty rough...

I'm tickled to find that some of my favorite writers have their own websites, but while some are great, some are stiff, overly commercial productions, as if the publisher's prodding them in the back and muttering "you can fit another link to Amazon in that space there." Worst Kris...

Just in case there's a mistake here, I think abortion is a positive good. But I can't help thinking that it's going to be a stumbling block in the typical romance, which often ends these days with the heroine embracing her guy, who's having to be a bit careful about the hug since she's 8-1/2...

So many reasons to discard. Lack of quotation marks in dialogue is, perhaps, immature, but the only time I've been able to overcome my dislike of that style is with Roddy Doyle's books. There are other reasons - bad writing (oh, you stylized sons of Hemingway, may God forgive you your prose)...

I suppose it depends on the publisher but romance seems to have loosened up a lot in the last 20 years, what with the popularity of "I'm a single mom and he's a hunky cowboy' storylines. You probably are going to have problems if your heroine had an abortion or beats her cat, but otherwise, I...

Raining, but we were promised ice so rain is fantastic. I'm starting to hate the national weather news, since the East is the only area not enjoying record high temperatures. I don't really want to live in Oklahoma City, but I'm getting tired of winter.

Firewall. Oh, the agony. One of those films where the heroic corporate guy's enormous house and 20-years-younger wife and way-too-young-for-him kids (including one moppet who, I'm sorry, is just the most revolting alien spawn ever on screen) makes you start rooting for the bad guys to start...

I remember when I was about 20 I mentioned to my older sister that I hadn't read anything fictional in a while, and she off-handedly told me that adults always read mostly nonfiction. I think she's partly right - I never read nonfiction as a kid, but now I'm as likely to browse there as with...

The Matador. Overrated, derivative junk with a serious case of the indy pretensions. Brosnan was fantastic, though.

What, you mean you get fed up with heroines who ride, shoot, swim, fight, steal, curse, master magic/dragons/men/infants/stallions/villains and still clean up real good and play chess? I know what you mean, it's like they're all Buffy to the infinite power.