I got rid of a lot of things before I left to travel. It was a nice feeling to purge everything unnecessary, everything unneeded, from my life. In the end I sold, threw out, or donated over two-thirds of my belongings. Still, I kept many...
It's back! It's been over a year since my last installment of Val Reads The Baby-Sitters Club. And I have one bad reason and two good as to why it's taken me so long to continue. 1. I've been lazy. (That's the bad reason.) 2. I left to...
Mallory gets a steady job baby-sitting for a couple of twins. And boy are they cute: they dress alike and look alike. There is no way to tell them apart! But soon Mallory learns that just because they are cute on the outside, doesn't mean...
I'll admit, I started reading the book once before. I'd found a copy on a take one leave one shelf in a Medellin hostel and grabbed it without replacing it. I got maybe 100 pages in before giving up and the paperback spent the next...
After a year-long hiatus, I'm back in business with my life goal of reading every Baby-Sitters Club book ever written. In order. From the start. I was stuck for a while because, while I had a few books in the series, I didn't have number...
Baby-Sitters Club was one of those things that was mine. I read all the books, watched the TV show, begged my parents to let me audition for a role in the movie. Dawn had me wishing I was a California girl. Stacey and Super Special...
1. "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 2. I...
"Ouch, you naughty lion. You mustn't bite." It's funny when three people all have the same memory and it turns out to be wrong. For probably twenty now I've been searching for a book. It was one of those things that was published well before I was...
What's the funniest thing ever? When one of the most brilliant minds of modern American humor goes for the cheap joke. "If pocketbook means vagina, what happens when your pocketbook gets snatched?" *** Anyways...
On my way to the Printer's Row Book Fair, I pondered why anyone would walk on the street when if they took about 10 steps to the east they could walk through the park. I also figured everyone thought I was a tourist because, as...