Uhope said:

Oooh, yes -- "Flowers for Algernon"!!! So deep and sad. I recall barely being able to breathe by the time I finished it. I never wanted to read it more than once but I remember LOTS of it to this day. Amazing story.

hum, is this thread about "Books FOR KIDS that you still read even if you're now an adult"??

RodeoSchro said:

[img:$uid]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8d/Where_The_Wild_Things_Are_(book)_cover.jpg[/img:$uid]

[img:$uid]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/Sendak-nightkitchen.jpg[/img:$uid]

I love Maurice Sendak

[img:$uid]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/The_Velveteen_Rabbit_pg_1.jpg/200px-The_Velveteen_Rabbit_pg_1.jpg[/img:$uid]

Still brings a tear to my eye

The Chronic WHAT? cles of Narnia!!

Ben Hur

All of the Laura Ingalls-Wilder books

Go Tell It On The Mountain

Great Expectations (Everything Dickerson wrote)

Treasure Island

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Secret Garden

Ann of Green Gables

The Railroad Children

Adventures of Huck Fin

The Count of Monte Cristo

Three Musketeers

The Jungle

Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Gulliver's Travels.

Velveteen Rabbit, The Rats of Nimh, The Trumpet of the Swan and Charlotte's Web when I was pre-middle school. The Velveteen Rabbit was a gift to my mother (for me) at my (her) baby shower. The Trumpet of the Swan and Charlotte's Web books were gifted to me after I saw the original animated version of the latter and wouldn't stop talking about it. I still have all of them on a bookshelf just a few feet away from where I sit as I type this.

Throughout all of my youth, and for that matter all of my life until she passed away, my aunt (whom I was very close to) had everything L. Frank Baum had ever written laying around the house in one place or another. I never understood why people thought the Wizard of Oz movie was so great when I was a kid (although I love it now - and yes, I'm going this weekend) because I thought there were so many better stories in the other books. The Sea Fairies was a favorite non-Oz Baum book.

My Grandfather read Tolkien a lot. I'd like to say once a year, but I'm not exactly sure. I just know it was a lot. He also loved Isaac Asimov's Foundation books and had a complete (up to that time) set in the house. I started reading all of those around the sixth grade, and I liked them, but I didn't fully understand what I was reading. More on that in a minute....

In middle school, the eighth grade to be exact, there was only one class that kept me there (literally, like, I would have dropped out or been expelled, the latter of which happened right as I was moving out of state anyway). That being Ms. Prentice's high school prep literature class. I've spoken of it before, but that class changed my life. Animal Farm, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, and I think Watership Down, all entered my life in that class (amongst others). Without a doubt that year is what created my deep, DEEP love of reading.

....so, after that class, which opened up the meaning of (as well as behind) the words to me in ways I'd never understood before, I re-read Tolkien and Asimov and had my world fully rocked. Just a couple years after that I read the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy and had the same mind-warping experience again.

Those are definitely the experiences that shaped the kind of reader I am to this day. In the fiction realm, I love classics of all kinds (even the wordy hard to read ones ), poetry, plays, fantasy, sci-fi, a bit of horror here and there, and copious amounts of comic books, but I have to be pressed pretty hard to get into any other genre stuff (I'll do it, because I like to read, but it sometimes takes some convincing). I'll read anything non-fiction that catches my interest.

For the record, I had a similar experience to those books I read in my younger days only once as an adult. Paul Bowles 'The Sheltering Sky', for whatever reason, left me slackjawed, speechless and in awe the first time I read it (the first of many, now). It's the only time in my adult life that I've felt truly transported and changed from reading a book.

[Edited 9/19/13 0:11am]

I want to add that it's amazing how many of the books other people have listed that I read AFTER that eighth grade lit class. My childhood would have been so much better if I'd read them earlier.

Uhope said:

Oooh, yes -- "Flowers for Algernon"!!! So deep and sad. I recall barely being able to breathe by the time I finished it. I never wanted to read it more than once but I remember LOTS of it to this day. Amazing story.

Yes! I read that one as a kid, and it was very touching.