According to Julie

The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants by Ann Brashares - actually a novel that grew into a trilogy after achieving commercial success. It's on this list for meaninglessness, not obscurity, because it's the story of four teenage girls and the cover is pink (at least for the British edition, not in the pictures on Amazon). Most of these types of books are written for preteens and don't have any connection to reality. This one should be read after age 14, and is surprisingly realistic and believable. Buy it for your younger sister or daughter - then read it yourself to understand her and her friends better. (I haven't seen the movie version yet. Until I do: read the book first. Never judge a novel by its movie version.)

The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindle - probably obscure, probably because of wierdness. My dad bought me this book because it looked weird. It's the story of a little girl who is shy to the point of being more or less invisible. In an effort to escape having to go to school, she builds a small hidden apartment inside her family's large house and moves in. After wondering for a few years where she is, her family nearly forgets her, while she watches them from inside the walls and steals food at night. In her early teens, she finds a note slipped into a knothole and starts to think about moving out...

Doppler by Erlend Loe - Norwegian. Meaningless and weird, but funny. I would never have read it if it weren't for the recomendations from friends, because I bear a grudge agianst the author, Erlend Loe. A guy named Doppler moves into the woods to escape the world. When an overpowering urge to eat sugar brings him creeping to a nearby house, his wherabouts are discovered, and other people start moving into his own personal wilderness. Please don't read any comment on society into this book, it's just laugh-out-loud funny. And it bears no resemblance in style to The Woman in the Wall.

Klara - Norwegian. Written by _________ when she was 15 (?) years old. I read it when I was about 12, and disliked it strongly. For some unknown reason, I read it again at 16, and realized why someone must have published it: it describes the feeling of being in tenth grade and feeling too old and too young at once while time seems to stand still and still slip by too quickly. Apparantly (and obviously) it's much easier to describe fifteen-year-olds accurately when you are 15 yourself. The same goes for _______________ by then 14 _____________. Other than that, neither of these books is very good.

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine - a more logical version of Cinderella: Ella is bewitched so that she is unable to disobey orders. "If someone told me to chop off my own head, I would have to do it." It's an interesting experiment; I can just imagine the author thinking: "What would the consequences be if someone had to obey every order?" The story takes place in a typical fairy tale setting (imagined time and place similar to Europe during the Middle Ages, but with giants and fairy godmothers), but just imagine what it would be like to be bewitched in this way today, with modern advertising: Every time a commercial told you to run out and buy something, you would actually have to do it. (They made a probably horrible movie out of this story too. They keep doing that to my favorite stories. Probably the worst example is Cheaper by the Dozen. Please read the book. Please don't see the new movie.)