A Reader’s Library

I’ve created three separate pages–Recommended Books for Children & YA ; Print Resources for Writers ; Adult Fiction and Non-Fiction–and have chosen to limit my recommended books to those that relate to, or perhaps explain, topics I’ve written about on my website or in my individual blog posts.

Between the ages of nine and twelve, while living in Tokushima City on Shikoku Island, Japan, I would immerse myself in reading as soon as I’d completed my correspondence course assignments for the day. Typically, I would finish my homework by 11:30 a.m.–long before my Japanese playmates were released from school. What is there to do if your family doesn’t own a television? The answer for me was obvious–read!

I would often turn to a stack of books borrowed from the American Consulate Library, or to our own shelves, where such multi-volume titles as the Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia, My Book House (The Bookhouse for Children collection edited by Olive Beaupré), and Childcraft were lined up, waiting to inform and entertain me.  There were others that we’d brought with us from Canada or that were passed on to us by my parents’ friends.  Among them were such books as The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Jungle Book, Aesop’s Fables, the Thorton Burgess books, the Chronicles of Narnia, several collections of fairy tales, not to mention stories about the hiijinks of girls living in English boarding schools.  I also remember devouring the Nancy Drew series, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Hardy Boys as if they were as light and addictive as potato chips.  When I ran out of those, I would “borrow” adult mysteries from my parents’ bookshelves, and novels such as those written by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

Books have been, and still are, an indispensable part of my life. Thankfully, the social media site for writers, authors and readers at Goodreads helps me keep track of the ones I’ve read over the years. Rather than post reviews, I prefer to spend my time reading and researching topics related to a current work in progress. I hope you will follow up on some of my non-fiction book suggestions for writers, and also on recommended reading for children, teens and adults. Enjoy browsing my Reader’s Library!