Welcome to part three of my little series about my favorite books and authors, part of this month’s #SixteensBlogAbout topic over at The Sweet Sixteens.
I’ve already written about two of the seminal books of my adolescence, Watership Down and The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes talking to me is probably expecting this post, because I have never been a quiet Harry Potter fan.
Selections from my HP shelf.
Back in 1998, I was on a mock-Newbery committee made up of local children’s librarians. I read hundreds of books that year, and one of those was an unassuming, unknown book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling. It showed up in the midst of a pile of other books, and I had never heard of it. I was hooked by chapter two, and stayed up all night to read it and recommended it left and right.
And then, well, you know what happened next. It’s easy to forget, now that it’s such a phenomenon, that the first Harry Potter book was rejected by just about every publisher in Britain, that it was released quietly and didn’t gain momentum until kids started passing it around on the playground. I was lucky to be able to read the first book (and the second and third, which I quickly ordered in British editions, as they weren’t yet out in the U.S.) with no expectations and no hype.
So here’s the second in my little series, inspired by The Sweet Sixteens’ December #SixteensBlogAbout theme, “Favorite books and authors”.
Last week I wrote about the book that made me a book evangelist, Watership Down by Richard Adams, and I mentioned how Mrs. Whatley, my eighth-grade teacher, changed my life when she introduced me to the wide world of fantasy and science-fiction. Well, while my reading group was discussing Watership Down, I kept hearing snippets of discussion about the book the other reading group was working on, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I was intrigued, so I read that one too, and enjoyed it.
The dog-eared copies I read every year as a teenager.
This month’s #SixteensBlogAbout theme over at The Sweet Sixteens is “favorite books and authors”, so I decided to make this a little series celebrating some of the books and authors that have had the most impact on me as a person and as a writer.
Stories By Hand with Kathy MacMillan 