My friend has a teenaged boy, and her family goes through a 3-pound roast and a gallon of milk in two days. In our house, we’re like that with books.
It doesn’t seem possible to keep up with all the books out there. I’m in a book club and keep track of the end-of-the-year lists and follow the NYT Book Review to keep up with the new titles and I still feel like I’m behind.
I love finding books for my daughters so I browse the Book Review Middle Grade and Young Adult sections weekly, and also try to remember what my favorite books were at their ages. I just got Flowers for Algernon for them. Remember that one? It was hugely popular when I was in school.
Some of my other childhood favorites were Ajax: Golden Dog of the Australian Bush, Billy Whiskers: The Autobiography of a Goat, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Call of the Wild, anything and everything by James Thurber (I used to read The Night the Bed Fell practically every week), Ginny and the New Girl, The Secret Language, Big Red and Irish Red, A Wrinkle in Time, Little Women, the Black Stallion series, Helen’s Babies (a book written in the late 1800’s that I found at my grandmother’s house and was my favorite book for years), Old Yeller, all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books (even though I rolled my eyes at how stupid and formulaic they were), anything by Marguerite Henry, Jeeves, Twenty and Ten, Black Beauty, the Little House series, the Ramona books, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, Lassie Come-Home, Lad A Dog, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.