Sunday, April 18, 2010

How The Madness Began, Part 1: Toni's Version

Embarrassing picture of Rachel and...
wait a second, is that a figure of me she's smooshing?


Apparently Rachel has a thing for tigers. Is this why we are friends? I am, after all, Toni the Tiger. Let me recall the beginning of our friendship.

In the summer of '07, Rachel was a teacher in my Relief Society. She was new in the ward and she worked at Barnes and Noble. Of course, I gravitated toward her in hopes of getting a discount on the seventh Harry Potter book, which was coming out that July. It was a brilliant plan. In fact, I distinctly remember the first time we hung out at her apartment: we had a couple of people over to talk about HP7, particularly what we thought was going to happen and which characters were the most attractive. Rachel is to Sirius Black as Toni is to George Weasley. That I remember. Anyway, there we were, sitting around her countertop island, radiating nerdness into the atmosphere. It was totally awesome, the beginning of a beautiful friendship a la Casablanca. We got together again a few weeks later, having finished the book within hours of its release. We mourned together, laughed together, discussed literary-isms together, and BAM! Inseparabilitio! We had been cursed to be nerd-friends.

Yep, that sounds about right.

Coming soon: Part 2, Rachel's Version.
Coming not-as-soon-but-pretty-soon: Part 3, The Fortress of No Return

Friday, April 16, 2010

Most exciting thoughts and a little bit of blood

Rachel and I will now be using this blog as a venue for our most exciting thoughts about literature. Yes, we do have exciting thoughts about that mighty and nebulous aether of literature. Why? Because Rachel is a new MFA student and I am a new MA student.
M.A. Me and M.F.A. Rachel

We're about to lead glorious lives filled with leaves, spines, drafts, hand cramps, and (last but not least) paper cuts (hence the blood in the title of this blog post). To relieve the immense pressure of this glory, we are going to discuss our favorite things on this blog: children's and young adult books.

This coming summer, our focus will be Victorian and turn-of-the-century children's books, as part of our preparation for a class on the Victorian era. We are looking forward to writing book reviews, reader reactions, interviews with the dead, and other fun things! What "other fun things" would you, gentle readers, like to see on this blog?