As I mentioned in the previous post, the NYT book blog, Paper Cuts, has a piece up about the books that serve as a gateway to lifelong reading. I want to play.
First: The BFG by Roald Dahl, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
And then, those books that bridged the gap between kids' books and grown-up books: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
And then the "good" books: A Farewell to Arms, the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, Hamlet, The Grapes of Wrath, 1984
And the ones that made me realize that genre fiction was cool, too: It by Stephen King, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
But perhaps none so important as the books from the next category.
Started reading for the dirty parts, stuck around for the story: Loving Women by Pete Hamill, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
I was not permitted to watch PG-13 movies (and a lot of PG ones), but I did have a library card and an imagination.
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I remember riding down Olympic Blvd from my house on Kelton to a branch library (Rancho Park, maybe? It was a LONG time ago) and coming back with a basket of books (like Eudora Welty in the NYT post). Every Saturday, without fail, I'd do that. I imagine I started out with the Chip Hilton, Hardy Boys, John R. Tunis genre books for boys, but I moved on. I'm just not sure what I moved to.
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