Twelve writers talk about the stories that sparked their lifelong love affair with books.
Ashley Ford: Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman
When I was in the second grade, my grandma bought me the book "Amazing Grace" just based on the cover. I initially loved it because I thought someone had written it with me in mind. Grace and I looked just alike! Now, I love it because the book is all about how little black girls can be whatever they want to be.
Ashley Ford
Alex Naidus: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden blew my 16-year-old mind into smithereens. You mean, a life outside of suburban mall-angst exists? And it's in the WOODS? And it's, like, poetic? Christ. Even the word transcendentalism felt impossibly cool and important. Just saying it out loud made me feel like I could helicopter out of New Jersey and onto some faux-spiritual plane where everyone was self-reliant and took constitutionals to think about life and livelihood.
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Sandra Allen: Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
I read constantly as a kid, but the first time I remember deciding that I had a favorite book was when I finished Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, probably in third or fourth grade. I'm fairly certain it was the first novel I'd ever read and that was what I loved about it — it was complicated. It was hard. Characters made mistakes; things didn't resolve necessarily the way you would like. This reflected the world I knew, the home in which I was being raised. I read that book again and again. I remember the spines of it and Creech's other books I came to own — Absolutely Normal Chaos, Chasing Redbird, Bloomability — seeming so much sturdier, so much more adult, than the other things on my shelf, and combination of fear and pride and comfort that contrast gave me. (Huzza, huzza!)
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Jessica Probus: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Reading The Phantom Tollbooth was the first time I realized that books could be really funny. Like LOL funny. And in particular, that there were some jokes that were especially/only funny when you read them as opposed to hearing someone tell them out loud.
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