Well I have about a billion books that I'm looking for, but for some reason I've been procrastinating on posting anything..


So anyway, the first book I'll ask about is a published journal that I found in a used book store when I was in London this summer. If I was at all intelligent, I would've bought it, or at least written down the title, but of course I'm an idiot. Anyway I'm pretty sure the journal was a real one, and not a fictional one. Like 99% sure. I think the book was yellow (or rather it was almost certainly a hardcover book with a mostly yellow dust jacket). It was definitely quite large, I'd say 400 pages at least, which is why I didn't buy it, cuz I wasn't sure it'd fit in my bag to go home. Also the edition I picked up said that it was a more accurate publication of her words, that they'd been published before but in a revised edition that wasn't true to her actual journal.

It was the journal of some young woman from the Victorian era or thereabouts, I believe she kept it from some point in her teens until her untimely death in her 20s. I do know that her parents celebrated her birthday when it should have been if she hadn't been "born premature" i.e. seven months or something after their wedding, although she believed that she'd been conceived out of wedlock, and so marked her birthday on the actual day she was born.

I really hope that someone can tell me what this was. I've been kicking myself for not buying it for months now, and I really want to find it.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you might be able to offer!

I read several some years ago, space opera, lots of "sex" but the descriptions were made almost comical by the weird euphemisms. His bits were his slice or slicer or variants, hers, were her "cake". Yes, that did make it hard not to lol.

There were hermaphrodite aliens (avian I think).

I have a vague feeling they were the result of some kind of mental aberration at either Penthouse or Playboy.

Anyone?

EDIT: found - The Playboy Press series Spaceways

Posted on behalf of my husband:

A regional airline flight in South America ends in disaster when an
Andes Airlift flight crashes in the mountains and the crew and passengers
are forced to live off the land.

It sounds like Alive, but it's not. The pilot is a drunken American who
is on his way down from flying jets in America and is flying an old piston
engine plane with an unpressurized cabin and bare hoses for passenger
oxygen at the high altitude. I think I remember the plane was a Connie
but I won't say that for sure.

I don't remember the name of the pilot or how the book ends, just odd
little bits like the pilot saying the AA on the tail shuld stand for
Alcoholics Anonymous. And I definitely remember the name Andes Airlift.

Can anyone help? I read the book in 1981 and it was probably pretty old
back then. Definitely fictional, not based on any true story. There is
a nonzero chance the author might have been "Peters" but I won't put any
money on that. This was in my high school library...
--scott

 there are two books I can vaguely remember but do not have a clue what they were called.

The first: a young boy finds an object that sends him to a parallel universe. In this universe he is a girl. All things that had happened in his life..that had two outcomes..took the opposite choice for the girl in the parallel universe. Her mother has died from some accident/illeness whereas his lived. I can't remember the other differences. I believe the book ends by her managing to get into his parallel universe and stop him from somehow being able to get back..leaving him in the not so nice universe.

Second: I barely remember this...Some girl I believe..something to do with some line in the land. Like if you crossed it or something....i think it was like...to distinguish two areas...and she like....stepped on it. half her body one side. half the other side and it somehow transported her to some other land? all i remember is her flying on a dragons back...and some town....thats really it.

I was a tween/young teenager, so some time in the late 80s/early 90s, YA fiction. There was a ghost of a young girl. The climax was the protagonist finding the body of a baby/young child hidden in the attic behind a bookcase (maybe in a shoebox?) and then maybe being trapped there by the murderer. Can't remember how she was saved exactly, but I think it had something to do with the ghost. It definitely had ghosts in it because I was going through a supernatural/witch/ghost/vampire/magic stage in my reading. Anyone else remember this book and know a title/author?

Edit: Book found, Ghost Cat by Beverly Butler. And it was the body of a cat in the box, not a baby. Bad memory after 20 years :)

I'm looking for a children's book I heard as a book-on-tape probably about ten years ago.

It's about a woman who I think gets polio and becomes somewhat crippled from it and makes friends with a fairy. She tells the fairy how she wants very much to have a baby, but she and her husband are having trouble. The fairy tells her that she can use her magic to give her a baby, so the woman and her husband describe to the fairy their idea of a perfect child. The child is born exactly as they described her, but with a tuft of blue hair. Later in the book the child is about eight or so, and the blue strands of hair she has turn out to be magic. I think the fairy gets kidnapped by wasps or something and the family has to save her.

Any thoughts?

Edit: It's The Fairy Rebel. Thanks for your help guys!

this is probably going to be pretty vague so I apologize in advance. I have no idea when I might have read this, but I don't think I finished it.

I believe it took place in France, the main character was man somewhere in or near his 30's, he worked at either a grocery store or a bank or somewhere equally boring. either his mother died, and he was going to her funeral, or he was just going to visit, but he took a bus up to her retirement/nursing home. he spoke with the manager about his mother.

I feel like it's a fairly well known book, might even be considered a "classic".
that's all I remember, any help would be awesome :)

Christian fiction/spiritual warfare novel in the style of Frank Peretti:

Published in 1990’s
I bought it at Books-a-Million in the discount section
Dimensions ~9” x 6” (one of those larger paperback books)
Cover is mostly black/dark with small outline of man in pink(?) next to his ship(?)
Female author debut novel (?)

The main male character is an alien whose skin glows pink when he gets really angry
His race can see/sense demons (if not angels too)
The main female character is a student nurse. Angel/Angela?
Her introduction has her doing rounds/internship in hosp, I believe and she has a favorite elderly male patient
The main male character’s introduction is on the bridge of his ship looking at earth drawing closer
One demon – Deception or Deceiver – is described as a female and looking slug-like.

Possibly having to do with balance of power between good/evil angles/demons going into the new millennium
Possibly takes place in Ann Arbor – Angela being a nursing student at Uof M (?)
There is a third character – a priest/deacon/preacher – who helps them in their search or may be the one the alien had been searching for; possibly disillusioned in his faith
The demon (Deception/Deceiver) has a piece of information that would have contributed to a temptation that would have been this man's undoing but she withholds it from her master... (I'm pretty sure it's Satan, but it might have been another demon lord in the hierarchy - similar to the demons Rafar and Strongman in This Present Darkness)..."because he gave her pain".

At one point they visit a monastery/place of spiritual retreat (rest/renewal)
The Spiritual place description has something about guardian angels being “entrenched” there because of all the prayers over the centuries, so majority of demons can’t get to them there

One scene has the student nurse swimming laps in the university pool (indoor I think)
I’m pretty sure she goes to church in the novel – don’t remember if it’s a Catholic Church or not
The alien keeps in communication with his ship via a computer (personified by man’s floating head)
He has all of this locked away from the main fem character but she finds it at one point – thus finding out that he’s an alien

Her guardian angel wakes her in time to go take her final test.
She gets sick before her nursing studies final (an oral one) and has strep throat; gets a prescription but drops it in an icy mud puddle and takes the final without relief.
Her supervisor/faculty person who administers the final is a difficult woman who has been especially hard on the student because she wanted didn’t want the student to graduate/wanted her to prove herself, that she was really dedicated to being a nurse.
Possibly the student was a woman of means or related to someone on university faculty? and didn’t have to be a nurse if she didn’t want to.

At the end the main characters get married either on his ship or back with the alien race. Her gown is described as “shimmering like liquid gold”

It is not:
Anything written by Frank Peretti
As Shadows Darken by Eva Mayer
Millennium’s Eve/Dawn by Ed Stewart
Firebird Trilogy by Kathy Tyers
Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
In the Hands of Angels/In an Angel’s Hands by Patrick S. Hirzel
Promised One by Patrick S. Hirzel
Millennium Series by Paul Meier and Robert Wise

I'm hoping someone can help me with this mystery book that has plagued my memory for probably 10 years! It was read to me in 3rd grade, about a boy and his sister who have go find their father who has been trapped back in time. They finally meet up with him in the age of dinosaurs. Eventually they get back to the present, only tagging along is a mammoth-like creature with suction cups on its feet. The only other memory I have of it is the mother who has a very long scarf she's knitting because she doesn't know how to end it, so she keeps knitting!
Again, any help would be very welcome!

I thought for years that this was a Camus story, but I've just been browsing stuff about Camus and I don't see it there, so either I'm misremembering the content or I'm misremembering the author.

This is a story I read in its original French in a French Language and Literature class in 1997. It's about a man who brings a notably curvaceous woman home with him, thinking to get lucky, but it turns out she's pregnant and he's disgusted by it. Mostly what I remember from the story is that the narrator comes off as an extremely unpleasant specimen of self-centered jerk.

I'm sure this is some sort of classic or well-known piece of literature, since I was reading it in a French class in Boston, but since I read it 12 years ago and in my second language, my memory of the details is so fuzzy that it's hard for me to Google it.

Following the Sun by Madeleine Urban from her single author anthology Far From Home.


I read a story that has stuck with me, but I can't remember who wrote it or what anthology it was in. (I think it was in an anthology, but I could be wrong.)

I don't wish to offend anyone, so I'll put the details ( behind this cut )

I saw this book once and can't remember the name of it: I'm pretty sure it was a sci-fi book that involved the Space Station Mir and Pangea.

Ring any bells with anyone?

Previously on this trainwreck...

I know, I know...I'm officially a terrible human being for letting over TWO MONTHS lapse since the last segment! How on earth did that happen? At any rate, I now solemnly vow to kick it on into the driveway ASAP.

( And away we go! )

I could have sworn it was W.H. Auden who wrote something to the effect that 'poetry didn't save a single person from the Holocaust' but Google and I are completely drawing a blank, even when I remove his name from the search. Can anyone help???

Hello! I posted about this book a few months back on find_a_book but no luck there. Maybe someone here can help?

I had this book probably about ten years ago. It was fantasy, standard paperback size, about an inch thick. I cannot remember the title or the author, but it was part of a series called something like "Circle of Time" or "Circle in Time." I have searched for this, to no avail. Everything that turns up in search results is either Robert Jordan or new age, and not what I want. I think the author's name might have been Jane something?

The story started with a young woman in the household of her very unpleasant father. They live in a country with a really patriarchal, anti-sex religion which bashes women, so the young woman is basically under her father's heel. She catches the eye of a mercenary-type who is accompanying a merchant and staying at the father's house that night. The mercenary, slightly drunk, offers for the young woman's hand in marriage, and the father consents, since he wants his daughter off his hands. The mercenary is actually quite nice to the young woman, because he comes from another country (an archipelago, as I recall) where their version of the religion celebrates sensuality and holds men and women equal. As soon as the new couple are on the road, the young woman takes advantage of the mercenary getting drunk and runs off, because she's convinced he's as bad as all the other men she knows. But it turns out she has some kind of magic, and the one time they had sex, the magic of both parties combined somehow, so they're connected. The rest of the book is the young woman making her way through the countryside, with the mercenary trying to find her, because he's aware of the connection and thinks it's significant. In the end, the young woman defeats one of the big, bad bishop-types from the patriarchal religion.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'd like to read it again. I can provide more details if anyone wants them, but I think I included the important bits

Looking for a Young Adult book about a boy escaping from East Berlin, probably written in the early sixties.

I thought it was titled simply The Wall, but that has turned up nothing.

Early in the story, the boy's mother dies. (He returns to his home one day to find her lying cold on the sofa, I think.) I don't remember the father being in the picture at all, though the way the story goes, he is/was probably someone important. The boy finds a spot where he digs a hole under the wall at night with the help of a small dog; pretty sure it was a dachshund.

I remember some guards coming near and one of them lighting a cigarette, and "the match flared as bright as a headlight". At least, I'm pretty sure that phrase was in this book. :)

Once he's made it to the other side, he finds a home with a couple who care for him (possibly relatives)--but it turns out he is not safe, as he is being trailed by the KGB who want to capture him and return him to the East.

I really want to read this again, as it is the obvious source of a recurring dream I have of escape and pursuit.

I found it in my junior high library in 1983-85, though I have no idea how old it was then. It was a small paperback with a cover illustration of one or two white unicorns in a dark green tree-filled area. The story culminated with the unicorns missing the deadline to get on Noah's ark, and that's why there aren't any unicorns anymore.

It's not _The Last Unicorn_ by Peter Beagle and yes, it's a lot like the song _The Unicorn_ by the Rovers. The first time I heard the song I remember thinking that the writer must have read this book.

Thanks for you help!

FOUND: It's _Unicorns In The Rain_ by Barbara Cohen!

Hi all,

I'm trying to remember the name of a YA Fantasy novel that scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. It was likely written on or before 1995.

Sadly, I can only really remember the scene that scared me: an evil wolf/dog thing jumps on a kid who is lying in bed, and nearly kills him. I believe the dog/wolf is supernatural and from another world or plane of existence. I believe the kids in the story travel to this other plane occasionally, but there is something evil there, and the kids have to hide from it.

This book was a paperback, I got it at Cole's in Canada. I have looked EVERYWHERE for this book, but I have no idea what the title was. I believe the paperback cover was a typical fantasy cover and painted in light/pastel colours, and it wasn't marketed as a "scary" book or anything like that...I was just a wimp. :)

Thanks so much for your help!

ETA: FOUND! It's The Same Place But Different By Perry Nodelman. Thanks everyone!

I'm looking for a children's book about the North Pole. It had very beautiful, detailed illustrations. There were some more reindeer in addition to the ones mentioned in the "Twas the Night Before Christmas" song. One of the illustrations showed the reindeer's stables, and the name "Lichen" was on one of the stalls. I had this book when I was kid in the '90s, but I don't know if it was new then.

Found: It's "The Wild Christmas Reindeer" by Jan Brett.

Hi everyone. This is a great community and having to opportunity to try and find some books from my past is awesome. I really hope someone can help me.

The first book was a YA book, or maybe even a children's book that my sister brought him from the library one time. It would have been written in or before the late 90s/early 2000s. I seem to remember the cover having pastel colors and pictures of real girls in hearts. The book was about these three girls who go off to a boarding school and have to room with each other or something like that. And they all disliked each other but ended up becoming friends. I also think the POV moved between each of the girls. Anyone have any ideas?

The second book is really vague. It's a book I thought about buying a couple times but never did. It was about this girl who could see a hot ghost, if not more than just that one ghost. And I think she may have had dark hair and been sitting on a beach in the cover art. All I really know for certain is that it's not The Mediator series by Meg Cabot/Jenny Carroll. Sorry it's so vague.

Any help would be amazing! Thanks!