Blog post challenge: List 10 books you read growing up that have stuck with you

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Photo credit: Wikipedia) was one of my favorite books when I was a pre-teen.

Lately I’ve been seeing this new social media challenge going around on Facebook and various other outlets and decided to get in on the fun: List 10 books you read growing up that have stuck with you. Here’s my list for today (although, if you ask me the same question tomorrow, I will probably have thought of ten other books that I should have used insteadJ)

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain is my celebrity crush.)
2. The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Elizabeth George Speare)
3. The entire Little House on the Prairie series (Laura Ingalls Wilder,) but especially the final book where the tone of the series changes so dramatically.
4. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
5. Julie of the Wolves (Jean Craighead George)
6. Ghost in the Garden (Carol H. Behrman)

Life is Truth

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a recent Wednesday Writing Prompt, I asked you to consider what themes and motifs seem to appear regularly in your everyday life. One theme that regularly appears in my life is the concept of “truth.” This has occasionally crossed my mind over the past three years, but finally hit home last week when I discovered that yet another research paper had turned into a discussion of the identification and exploration of universal truths.

I’d been writing a narratological analysis of Elizabeth George Speare’s historical YA novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and found that many of the academic resources I was reviewing on historical fiction seem to touch on those aspects of human nature that are largely unchanged from one generation to the next. While this was, by no means, the thesis of any of the research papers I read, it was the one common thread that seemed to weave through all of the pieces.