Favorite childhood novel: Tequila Mocking Bird
Tequila had a hard life growing up in provincial France to liberated ex-patriot American truffle hunters, with her only true friend in their trusty and adventuresome truffle pig, Sparkle.
(Scout is my favorite walking pork chop ever penned to paper.)
Favorite current novel: Love Creeps by Amanda Filipacchi
Recommended Rainy Day Books:
"The Diary of Eve"
"Me Write Book"
"The Gashlycrumb Tinies"
"The Blue Day Book"
"The Missing Piece Meets The Big O"
Recommended Classics:
"Pride & Prejudice"
"Common Sense"
"The Good Earth"
"Candide"
"Great Expectations"
"Hamlet"
"Anthem"
"Brave New World"
"A Modest Proposal"
"The Flame Trees of Thika"
"The Screwtape Letters"
"All Creatures Great & Small"
"Leaves of Grass"
"Walden"
"Pickwick Papers"
"Lolita"
Recommended Modern Novels:
"Love Creeps"
"High Fidelity"
"Dead Until Dark"
"The Joy Luck Club"
"White Oleander"
"Hearts in Atlantis"
"Bag of Bones"
"Oryx and Crake"
"American Gods"
"Fragile Things"
"Beggars and Choosers"
"The Lost Days of Agatha Christie"
"Little, Big"
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"
"Snow Crash"
"Life, The Universe and Everything"
"Cryptonomicon"
"Smoke & Mirrors"
"Haroun and the Sea of Stories"
"The Diamond Age"
Great Young Children's Picture Books:
"Miss Suzy"
"The Little Engine That Could"
"The Velveteen Rabbit"
"Imaginary Gardens"
"Weslandia"
"The Giving Tree"
"Little Daylight"
"Oh, The Places You'll Go"
"Stone Soup"
"Lafcadio"
"The Favershams"
"The Snowy Day"
"Little Bear and the Beautiful Kite"
"The Tale of Peter Rabbit"
"Tuesday"
"Tea With Milk"
"The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane"
Great Young Children's Early Reading Books:
"Voyage of the Dawn Treader"
"Wind in the Willows"
"Half Magic"
"The BFG"
"Charlotte's Web"
"A Cricket In Times Square"
"Matilda"
"The Horse & His Boy"
"The Magician's Nephiew"
"Bed-Knob & Broomstick"
"Just So Stories"
Great Middle School Children's Novels:
"Tom's Midnight Garden"
"From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler"
"The Dark Is Rising"
"The House With A Clock In Its Walls"
"A Door In The Wall"
"National Velvet"
"The Princess Bride"
"Ann of Green Gables"
"Behind The Attic Wall"
"The Giver"
...And so I've heard:
"The Tale of Despereaux"
"Olive's Ocean"
"Al Capone Does My Shirts"
"Wringer"
"What Jamie Saw"
"Because of Winn-Dixie"
"The Lightning Thief"
Great Young Adult Novels:
"The Secret Life of Bees"
"To Kill A Mockingbird"
"Hatchet"
"My Side of the Mountain"
"Wild Roses"
"Number the Stars"
"The Subtle Knife"
"The Amulet of Samarkand"
"Twilight"
"A Great & Terrible Beauty"
"A Light in the Forest"
"Jacob Have I Loved"
...And so I've heard:
"Of Mice and Men"
"The Catcher in the Rye"
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"
"The Life of Pi"
Respected Authors:
C.S. Lewis for helping children to read things worth reading, and later for giving them backup while never coming off as friendly fire.
Agatha Christie for her remarkable, bittersweet life, and her piercing psychology.
Arthur Conan Doyle for giving us that pompous, oddly respectable monster of an archetype.
Shakespeare, for secretly being the sum of all human instruction booklets stuffed in a plastic bag under an escaped shopping cart rattling in a circle somewhere out behind a boarded up Super K...
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