Friday, October 21, 2011

Books That Changed my Life

This post is inspired by the Time Flies Friday blog hop, hosted by Passion for Novels

The Rules :)
  • Follow Passion for Novels as host of the meme
  • Please add the blog hop button so everyone else can enjoy their childhood books again!!
  • Post about your book and why you love it so much!
  • Add a link to my blog at the top of your post (http://passionfornovels.blogspot.com/)
  • Add a link to your blog on the linky at the bottom of the page
  • Make sure you visit all the other blogs!!!



Books That Changed My Life


Today I want to talk about some books that changed the way I viewed the world. When I was young, my mom read to us seemingly every night. We would pile into her bed and she would read us chapter after chapter until we fell asleep, then dad would carry us to bed. We LOVED it when she read to us. There were old classics, Little Black Sambo, Where the Wild Things Are, The Box Car Children, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Summer of the Monkeys, The BFG, The Twits, just to name a few. As we got older, she picked other books; one I remember vividly was Mary Higgins Clark's book, While my Pretty One Sleeps.

It wasn't until I was taking a college writing class that my mom told me that she read to us because she struggled with reading and a college instructor told her to read out-loud to someone. I will be eternally grateful she choose to read to us. Having had her instill such a love of reading in us, I went on to devour books myself. I loved old and new. When we got reading assignments in AP English I read the books over and over again. I think I was the only kid in my class to finish and re-read The Scarlet Letter. I have read that book about 6 times now, always finding new depth and meaning. My husband thought I had lost my mind when I brought home the unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

I know that this exercise is to narrow down these books to my very favorite so I will try my best to keep the list under one hundred. :)

1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Dendak - Where do I start! I LOVE this book because it is imagination at its best. You can feel his frustration toward his mother and how she doesn't get that he just wants to be a wild thing. I have those day still as a mother that I really want to be a wild thing and just dance my wild dances and howl to the moon while I swing from the trees. This book taught me that imagination was endless, and there was always someone at the end of the day that loved me even though I was just a little wild.



Details for 4 more books are HERE!

3 comments:

  1. Having grown up with Where the Wild Things are and having been read to as a kid, also having been given access to my dad's library (which had over 2,000 books in it) I learned to love to read early and to this day, it is nearly impossible to every find a time in my life that I am not in the middle of reading something. ;D

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  2. Thanks for joining my blog hop!!! I can't believe I didn't read this as a kid!!

    New follower too :)

    Gemma
    http://passionfornovels.blogspot.com/

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  3. The Big Wave by Pearl Buck taught me empathy and widened my geographical boundaries. I was 8 and thought the ocean belonged to ME.

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