In the spirit of our earlier “happy computer memories” thread, I’ll open one for happy book memories. What’s a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?
As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and…). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don’t think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.
What comes to mind is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a maritime adventure novel for children, which is, I believe, the first “real” book (as in, not those short kids books you can finish in an hour) I ever read by myself. I picked that for a book report in school, where the assignment was to write like a mini summary for our favorite books. Me, not having read much at that point except for those kids books, which I didn’t want to do, went to the bookstore and just idly browsed around, and for some reason that book caught my attention because of the title (it’s called “Salz im Haar” [Salt in my Hair] in the German translation) and the badass cover art of the edition I own has, so I picked that and ended up really liking it.
Ever since I’ve been a sucker for maritime fantasy.
That book also got me into reading more in general. I’m a huge fantasy nerd, so other books that will always warm me up inside are the first fantasy novels I read: Lord of the Rings, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.
By Ursula K. Le Guin, I really like The dispossed and The left hand of darkness, and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (espcially the underground mathematicians measuring the distance to the face of God [the sun], one).