For my 60th birthday (that can’t be right!) I’m emulating Bono from U2. He published 60 songs, but I’m a writer so I have chosen 60 books. I’m going to write up a little article and see if I can sell it to a magazine.
Here are sixty books that changed my life, roughly in the order in which I discovered them:
- Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown
- One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey
- The Little Farm (Little/Small series) by Lois Lenski
- Green Eggs & Ham by Dr. Seuss
- Little Bear by Elsie Minarik
- Little House in the Big Woods/The Long Winter (tie) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- Miss Osborne-the-Mop by Wilson Gage (Mary Q. Steele)
- Half Magic by Edgar Eager
- The Three Investigators series by Robert Arthur, Jr.
- The Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander
- The Black Stallion series by Walter Farley
- The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- The Borrowers by Mary Notron
- The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes
- Below the Root by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
- Moccasin Trail by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
- The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key
- The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
- Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
- The Beastmaster by Andre Norton
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
- A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
- The People series by Zenna Henderson
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
- The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
- Johnathan Livingston Seagull/Illusions (tie) by Richard Bach
- The Grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Murder on the Orient Express/Murder at the Vicarage (tie) by Agatha Christie
- The Shining by Stephen King
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/Time Enough for Love (tie) by Robert Heinlein
- The Daybreakers by Louis L’Amour
- Thieves World edited by Robert Asprin
- Dragonsinger/Dragonsong by Anne MacCaffrey
- Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant
- Beauty by Robert McKinley
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
- Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
- The Beekeeper’s Apprentice/O Jerusalem (tie) by Laurie R. King
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson
- Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
- Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow