I am utterly thrilled because I recommended Discworld to someone and she actually read it! I have this tendency obsession with buying any used copies of anything by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, or Diana Wynne Jones that I find, so I get doubles and sometimes send them to people. There are at least two people that I sent books to who never mentioned them again. In retrospect I realize that one of them probably wouldn't have liked it much and that the other was caught up with a bunch of stuff in her life (she seemed to like Gaiman a lot, though), but you know how it can be when you're excited about something and you want everyone else to be excited, too. I still sometimes have the urge to ask "Why did you say that you were interested and said you'd read it if you had no intention of doing so? Gimme my books back!" but I also realize it's silly.

I have a cousin who's 12 and my aunt says he's very immature and just starting to get into Sci-Fi/Fantasy and asked for recommendations. She said "Well he likes Science Fiction and Fantasy, and YOU like Science Fiction and Fantasy, so . . ." and I'm not sure if she realized that that's a really diverse range of stories fall under those labels. (I've never met the kid as they live all in New Jersey.) So then I was mentally running through my favorite books to see if there was anything she might get upset about. I wouldn't recommend American Gods (okay, pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman), for example, to just anybody because of *hem hem* certain scenes.

Matters aren't helped by the fact that I've only met her three times and I have no idea how or if she limits what her kids read. (I'm guessing not, but it would be a good idea not to piss her off at this juncture.) She said that Discworld was too mature and I didn't really understand that since I heard worse than anything in the series by the time I was in fifth grade. I only recall one time in the whole series where it is unarguably stated that someone had sex and it isn't descriptive at all.

And then she said I should think about what I liked when I was 10 or 11. I only started to really focus on fantasy when I was about 12 and before that I would read virtually anything (lots of historical fiction, some of it very Mary Sueish). I also don't really know any males to ask about "What would a 12-year-old boy like that won't get me in trouble with his mother?"

I typed up a big list and e-mailed it to her, praising the Artemis Fowl books and Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy (the logic here being that they're both well-written, by men and about 12-year-old boys), Coraline by Neil Gaiman, the Chrestomanci Chronicles by Diana Wynne Jones (because I like DWJ and there's not really lots romance in them, unlike in Howl's Moving Castle or Deep Secret), and a few other things. I skipped books that were a lot older, like Half Magic, because while I liked it when I was 11, there was a different expectation for kids' literature when the books were written and I figured they'd probably come off as babyish. I gave her one of my extra copies of The Princess Bride (warning her that it starts off kind of slow), but that may have been a mistake.

Meh, I tried my best, and that's what matters.