Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorites

I love this week's Top Ten Tuesday theme, hosted each week by The Broke & the Bookish.  This week they are revisiting their first ever TTT by asking us to list our childhood favorites.  I spent my earliest childhood in a small mill town in Wisconsin and then later in a small town in MS.  We didn't have a lot of money for books but Wisconsin had an excellent library, which my mother encouraged, and I was lucky to have adults in my life who gifted me with books once I moved to MS (where the library was a joke, sadly).

In no particular order, here are the books that defined my childhood.  I'll use the sixth grade as a rough cut-off point between childhood and adolescence.  Looking back on these now, it's amazing to me that my mom found as many books with strong girl characters as she did back in the 1970s and early 1980s--all the more impressive since she has never, ever self-identified as a feminist.

1. Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink.  This was a Newbery award winner that happened to be set in Wisconsin.  Naturally I devoured it. 

2. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  The first book was also set in Wisconsin, which I loved, and I went on to read all of them, even the icky First Four Years with all of the romance and wedding and baby stuff. A grandmother figure gave me the entire boxed set on my birthday, which I treasured.

3. The Pippi Longstalking books by Astrid Lindgren.  Talk about strong female characters--Pippi was literally the strongest person I knew.  I might have loved the South Seas book best of all. 

4. The Trixie Belden mystery series by Julia Campbell and Katherine Kinney.  Lawd, I loathed Nancy Drew, but Trixie was a tomboy whose mystery solving I could really relate to. 

5. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery.  I loved the next two books in the series, too.

6-8. A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle.  I still remember the magic of first reading about misfit Meg, smart but with no way of fitting in. My adult sister gave me these for Christmas the year I turned seven and they helped me understand my world. 

9. The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.  I still remember the one-sentence description on the back of my edition: "How Aslan, the noble lion, saved Narnia from the White Witch."  I was instantly smitten.  The same grandmother figure gave me the entire boxed set for Christmas one year, which I read until they fell apart, but the first book was always my favorite.

10.  Not sure what book should go here since nothing else is a clear favorite.  I'll go with Edith Hamilton's Mythology, but it could have easily been Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe some of Walter Farley's The Black Stallion books. 

How about you?  What books are on your list?  Harry Potter would surely have made my list if they'd been written a couple of decades earlier!

NB: I've got a Lauren Oliver giveaway for her forthcoming book, Pandemonium, if you want to click here to enter.

Book Blogger Hop: What Book Influenced You?

My computer died at the end of the old year and I've been visiting family in the frozen hinterlands of middle America since January 1, so I'm happy just to be getting my first blog post of the new year in by the end of the first week.  This week's hop question, sponsored at Crazy-for-Books, is what book influenced or changed your life and how did it do so?

Well, lots of books do that.  I think people who are sensitive readers come away a little bit changed from most reading experiences.  But the first book to have a marked influence on me is Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful Newbery award winning book, A Wrinkle in Time.  It was published in 1962 and very revolutionary for the time.  My sister Cathi gave it to me for my 6th Christmas in 1978 and it was pretty revolutionary then, too.

 I've been almost a life-long reader.  My mother taught me to read when I was two and I was reading chapter books on the middle grade level by the time I was four, devouring most of C. S. Lewis's Narnia books before I started first grade. The problem, as with so many precocious readers, was finding material that challenged me without being ridiculously age inappropriate.

The day I sat down with my sister's gift, I was mesmerized.  Oh, I'd read much of the day's usual suspects: Beverly Cleary, E. B. White, C. S. Lewis.  My mom took pains to introduce me to two real Wisconsin (my home state at the time) heroines: Caddie Woodlawn and Laura Ingalls.  (Not Judy Blume, though.  My family's natural midwestern conservatism deemed her too racy for me. And though Nancy Drew was encouraged, I loathed her.  Simply loathed her.)  But when I first made friends with Meg Murray and her little brother Charles Wallace, I learned for the first time that smart, awkward, and quirky girls  (i.e. girls a little bit like me) could be heroes, too, and that you don't always have to know all of the answers to life's questions.  Two pretty good lessons to learn at the tender age of six, if you ask me.

Alas! If only the precociousness of my youth carried over into my adulthood.

What about you?  What book has influenced or changed your life?