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09/30/2002: "Read This Book!"

Nancy Farmer's The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm (1994) is one of the most innovative Young Adult science fiction novels I've ever read. It's set in a future Zimbabwe and integrates household robots with traditional Praise Singing, flying buses and plastic mining, gangs and masks. It's simply an amazing book. Read a profile of Nancy Farmer at the Educational Paperback Association. "The only writer in the hotel was a man who wrote a western every month and was paid $300, a decent salary in those days. He lived on egg sandwiches and whiskey. One of my jobs was to make sure he got enough sandwiches to dilute the whiskey. Seeing him slumped over the typewriter day after day made me decide that writing was a lousy job." I'm glad she didn't keep that opinion!