Happy Birthday!

Harry Potter fans, today is the day. The thirty-fourth birthday of the Chosen One...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HARRY JAMES POTTER!

Dear Harry,
You've had so many adventures. The quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which was almost like a live version of a video game. The search for Slytherin's monster, and the fight in the Chamber of Secrets. The search for Sirius Black, who turned out to be your godfather. The Triwizard Tournament, as the youngest participant ever and the only non-Death Eater to see Voldemort's return. You ran Dumbledore's Army under Umbridge's nose and fought Voldemort and the Death Eaters in the Department of Mysteries. You lost Sirius and heard the prophecy in one day. You searched for the Half-blood Prince, who you found was your hated teacher, Severus Snape. You learnt about Horcruxes, and you saw your headmaster killed. You searched for Voldemort's Horcruxes as the Second Wizarding War hung overhead, a storm about to break. You saw many you loved die and found that you were Voldemort's last Horcrux. You sacrificed yourself to defeat Voldemort once and for all. You survived and killed Voldemort. You became the master of all three Deathly Hallows.

You had millions of people, fictional and real, rooting for you, cheering you on. You took us out of our own lives for a while. We laughed and cried with you. You took the world by storm.

Thanks for being with us. You're on my bookshelf, and in the houses and hearts and minds of millions around the world. We're still cheering for you.
Happy birthday!
-Purple Dragonfly

Holes

Oh my goodness, look at that, I haven't posted for almost two months!
How horrifyingly embarassing.

Holes happens to be a book that I personally think is awesome. It won the Newbery medal, which is, as far as I know, an award given in the USA to what the judges think is the best children's book of the year.

Don't quit reading this in disgust after the term "children's book", because a lot of those books are targeted towards teenagers as well, and even adults enjoy them.
Okay, so if you're not convinced...well, here's the review I posted on Goodreads last year.


When I read this book, I decided that it totally deserved that Newbery Medal.
Holes is the story of Stanley Yelnats IV, a singularly unlucky guy from a singularly unlucky family. His family was supposedly cursed when Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather broke a promise to a fortune teller.
His dad is an inventor trying to invent a way for shoes not to smell. When a pair of shoes falls out of the sky and hits him on the head, he thinks it's fate. Maybe his luck is changing...
Apparently not. Those shoes once belonged to legendary baseball player, Clyde Livingstone, called Sweetfeet.
Stanley is given a choice- jail or Camp Green Lake. He chooses Camp Green Lake.
There's no lake at Camp Green Lake, a 'correctional facility' in the middle of the dry Texas desert.

Once, the desert used to be a lake, and there was a town. The schoolteacher there, Katherine Barlow, fell in love with an African American onion-seller named Sam. When the townspeople found out, they shot dead Sam.
The sheriff refused to help, and asked Katherine for a kiss instead.
Three days after Sam was killed, Miss Barlow shot the sheriff and left a lipstick mark on his forehead.
She became the feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and the lake dried up. Twenty years later, when confronted by two people she once knew, she refused to tell anyone where the money she's stolen was.
They could dig holes in the desert for a hundred years, and they wouldn't find the treasure anywhere. Soon after saying this, Kate died from the bite of a poisonous yellow-spotted lizard, laughing.

If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, he becomes a good boy. And that's what happens at Camp Green Lake. The strange Mr. Sir and the mysterious, intimidating Warden make the boys dig a hole every single day. There aren't any fences or walls- because the camp is the only place that has water for miles around. It's a prison.
The boys at Camp Green Lake all have nicknames, and soon Stanley's new name is Caveman. The boy he becomes the closest to is Zero, a quiet boy who everyone dismisses as stupid. When Zero runs away, Stanley wants to find out what happened, and follows him.
Although he doesn't know it, running after Zero will lead to the breaking of two curses- the Yelnats family curse and the curse on Green Lake.

This was a really well-written, captivating book. I stay with my statement- it totally deserved the Newbery Medal it got.


Yes, I'm serious, Stanley and his family refer to his great-great-grandfather as his *deep breath* 'no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather'.
It's engrossing and funny and a really good book, so I recommend you read it at the first chance you get!