I'm Feeling Lonely...

...so I'm doing a meme even though no one tagged me. This one's stolen from MotherReader, who stole it from Big A little a, who stole it from The Miss Rumphius Effect. (Okay, "stealing" is perhaps perjorative.)

1. What are your five most important books?
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. THE Great American Novel.
Anastasia Krupnik by Lois Lowry. Anastasia is the reason I live in Massachusetts.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Made me want to be a writer. (A very, very bad writer, as it turned out.)
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Riverside edition. What I did in college.
My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber. First time I realized that grownup books could be funny, too.

2. What is an important book you admit you haven’t read?
For someone who claims to be a big reader, the number of important books I haven't read is rather staggering. Let's just say for now that I've never read any Gary Paulsen and I've never read any of the big Russian novelists (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.).

3. What classic (or childhood favorite) was a little disappointing on rereading?
The Westing Game was one of my two Big Childhood Books (Superfudge was the other). Rereading it as an adult was not in itself disappointing -- it's still a kickass book, and I still want that t-shirt -- but the context in which I read it was. I reread this for my first and only book club meeting, an informal group of Boston-based children's book people, and the rest of them all hated it. They thought it was too gimmicky, too coincidental, too transparent in its plotting. Granted, we read it along with the other Newbery books from that year -- The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox and M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton -- so I could understand somewhat how a semi-comic contemporary mystery would seem less impressive in context. But still. I sort of felt like somebody stabbed my puppy.

4. What book do you (or did you) care most about sharing with your kids?
I'm so glad my daughter loves Click Clack Moo, the oeuvre of Mo, and the Lilly books. I am excited to read her Charlotte's Web and the aforementioned Westing Game. (I assume my son will love books, too -- he just hasn't articulated his tastes yet.)

5. Name an acclaimed book, either classic or contemporary, that you just don’t like.
King Dork by Frank Portman. Hated it. I am also lukewarm about Goodnight Moon, though I confess it is/has been the first regular bedtime book for both of my children. Freaky, ugly-ass rabbits aside, there's something lulling about that text that's unmatched by any other book I've tried.