I checked it out for the first time in the 3rd grade and begged my mom to buy me the rest of the series. I still remember where The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was located in my elementary school library. How did it shape me? I have a real proclivity for family stories and series, and I once smoked a whole pack of cigarettes with my friend Jeremy in a caboose.

But I loved the details of their little makeshift home and how they kept their milk cold and foraged for berries and stuff. Sure, it would probably be terrible for four children to lose their parents and essentially be homeless for years. It’s saccharine and improbable, but as a kid I just remember the tiny details, the sense of family and the sense of adventure. This is the first book I remember voluntarily reading on my own just for fun. So, here are the book that made me the slightly geeky, hopefully intellectual, rather cynical, voracious reader, mother, wife and friend I am now. Ignore how cute late 90s Meg Ryan was, and just dwell on that statement for a minute. “It wasn’t just that she was selling books she was helping people become whoever it was they were gonna turn out to be.”

Let’s take some timeless advice from Kathleen Kelly on how books you read as children become an indelible part of your identity. I was a teenager when they were first written, but what if Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had been the first book I willingly read in the 3rd grade? How would it have changed the kind of reader I became … or even the person I became? In light of all this reinventing canon nonsense that JK Rowling is spewing, I got to thinking about that generation that literally grew up with the Harry Potter books. I mean, who doesn’t judge all men by Laurie and Gilbert Blythe? Who didn’t look for besties like Kristy and Claudia from The Babysitter’s Club? The ones we can’t forget and that become somehow how we view the world as adults, the standard by which we judge our future best friends, future boyfriends and more. Seriously, though, Belle is super happy about books.īut there are those books for all of us that make a huge impact. Very few of us have Belle in the Beast’s castle moments, but instead we are introduced to reading through Goodnight, Moon, Dr. Maybe you remember the first time you went to the library, or maybe you don’t.

Gaelic Ghosts by Sorche Nic Leodhas