Today’s Featured Comment
1. To Kill a Mockingbird is the only book I started re-reading as soon as I had finished it, but it’s not a book I have around. I know it’s at the library if I want it.
2. I’ve probably re-read Alice in Wonderland more times than any other book, starting when I was eleven or so. And I still have that copy, with my name in my childish hand.
3. I have to have a book of Mary Oliver poems around.
4. And the condensed Oxford English Dictionary (the one you need a magnifying glass for, but it’s the whole enormous thing in two volumes).
5. Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads by Bertrand Bronson (but really by that great author, Anonymous).
6. A book that helped explain me to myself is Goddesses in Everywoman, by Jean Shinoda Bolen.
7. A book that helped explain my world to me is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, by Ruth Rosen.
8, 9 and 10. So I’ll round it out with Winnie-the Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. Reciting those bouncy A. A. Milne verses in childhood may have something to do with being a songwriter today.
11. Oh, wait! One more–Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg, poetry for kids who don’t read poetry. It looks like prose, it reads like stories, but it’s poetry all the same. The best read-aloud in the English language–for kids beyond Goodnight Moon age.
[This list was originally posted as a comment in this conversation. ~ Eds.]
What are your all-time favorite books?
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Eleven is a good number…
1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
3. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
4. Finders Keepers, Selected Prose of Seamus Heaney
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Husseini
6. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
7. The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
8. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
9. Worlds’ Greatest Poems (a fantastic anthology of poetry that I have owned for decades and curl up with again and again and again)
10. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
11. Mother-Daughter Wisdom by Christianne Northrup MD