sometimes the pikes are there though and everything is better

So I'm entering my collection for the Seymour Adelman Book Collecting prize and with it I have to submit an annotated bibliography of every book I own. First of all, this is really difficult because I haven't actually been able to read all of the books I have yet, or at least reread them in the years since I've had them, and it's not like my memory of books I read at age ten is all that vivid. Second of all, the summaries are crazy boring. The plots are often: "BSC thinks of some wild scheme/go on a financially implausible trip, they fight/someone gets jealous/someone gets ill, they make up/get better, everything is a wild success." Sometimes Jackie Rodowsky breaks his arm. Here is my summary of Boy-Crazy Stacey (which is my favorite of the entire series), for example:

The Pikes are such a large family--ten including Mr. and Mrs. Pike and their eight children--that when they need someone to baby-sit all eight of the kids at one time, they have to call two of the girls from the Baby-sitters Club. It is no different when the Pikes need mother's helpers on their annual trip to the fictional Sea City, and Stacey and Mary Anne Spier are the only members available for the week that the Pikes will need them. The trip is chaotic and it is hard work taking care of eight kids in a place neither Stacey or Mary Anne have ever been, but when Stacey falls in love with the seventeen-year-old lifeguard at the beach, she leaves all the work to Mary Anne. This leads the two girls to fight, but they make up when Stacey's heart is broken when she realizes that the lifeguard is not interested in her, and their last night in Sea City is spent with a pair of different boys that both of the girls like even better. Stacey is Claudia's best friend and Mary Anne is Kristy's, so until this book readers never really had a chance to see Stacey and Mary Anne do a lot of interaction, and that interaction, combined with the presence of the Pike family (by far my favorite of all of the baby-sitters' charges) and the travel aspect are all the reasons this is the book I have read most often of all of the series.

Third of all, it is hard to refrain from being relentlessly mocking of the characters. I have edited out So, basically, Kristy is a jealous jerk most of the time and Mallory sucks like ten times already.

In other news, I'm cranky because I have a lot of work and I have a cold which is forcing me to miss a lot of class and my room, already gross from lack of time to spend cleaning it, is now full of the remnants of a box of kleenex. Yeah I'm classy.