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Here's a slightly embarrassing factlet. (I need a word for a small fact, since I recently discovered that's not what factoid means. Suggestions?) The most played song on my iTunes is "Belle," the opening song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. It used to be "Never Again" by Kelly Clarkson, but I deleted that when I bought the album yesterday. Now "Never Again" only has 13 spins to its name, and it can't compete with the Disney songs. Those are the songs that have the highest playcount. The first non-Disney song on the top is "Candyman." So I was obsessed with it for a while. Whatever. Next is Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You," so that's at least not embarrassing.

Speaking of Beauty and the Beast, I just finished Robin McKinley's retelling of that tale, Beauty. It was magnificent. You know, I've never read any of the sources for all the Disney movies I love, just various retellings of them. That kind of makes me ashamed. Like, I haven't even read The Little Mermaid, and I know dissecting the differences between Hans's and Walt's (or Roy's, I guess) versions will be a geek orgasm. Why haven't I read this crap yet? I have no idea.

Anyway! That paragraph was supposed to be about Robin McKinley, who is brilliant, and whom I only just discovered two years ago, during my "read all the Newbery Award-winning books" summer. Her Newbery Award winner is The Hero and the Crown, which was exactly the kind of book I love: science-fiction/fantasy-ish with an unlikely female hero. Robin McKinley has a lot of female heroes. (I guess that should be heroines, but I really, really hate distinguishing between the sexes in nouns that can easily apply to both. So, whatevs.) Even in her retelling of the Robin Hood tales, she makes Marian an outlaw with Robin's legendary archery talent, instead of just some pretty lady who sympathizes with the Saxons. And then The Hero and the Crown had a prequel, which actually follows it in chronology, but McKinley wrote it first. I don't know. Whatever. I read The Hero and the Crown first, since that was the Newbery winner, but I wonder if The Blue Sword was supposed to be read first. Or if it matters since the stories take place hundreds of years apart. Whatever! They're both awesome, and I am sad that I did not read them when I was younger.