You can read anything (thus honing your own tastes & finding what is in your best interests) because reading begets more reading which, in turn, begets writing, which eventually begets clarity and/or good storytelling.

AND (I tracked back to one of PTs 2003 posts on reading/introversion) readers who appear to be hiding out behind the covers of books may simply have a more vivid interior life than others. They can see, in their mind's eye, the stories, the characters, the plot lines. They feed their own imagination, which is so interior.

Reading/feeding one's interior life and one's imagination, is job #1. Job #2 is, of course, that you go out into the big bad world and (net)work . . . But job #1 feels more enriching.

I, too, like the Tudor stories and have enjoyed Phillipa Gregory's embellishments upon that time in history. Allison Weir, who was factual about Henry VIII, finally wrote a fiction work in the last couple of years. Cannot recall the title.

I also re-read things . . . and am amazed at how much my "absorption" and viewpoint changes over time . . .

CAK

As someone who grew up without a mom, Blume's "Are You There God, It's Me Margaret" was pivotal in helping me understand the transition from girl to woman.

It was interesting reading your kid book list. How about telling us some of your favorite grown-up books?

Susan

Agreed. Only, maybe this is a public/private-school discrepancy – but here in St. Louis, at least in the independent schools, kids read it in ninth grade. (Except that some schools do the Iliad instead.

In the wealthy Cleveland suburb where I grew up, students read the abridged Odyssesy. Unless you were one of like 3 students deemed worthy enough to read the unabrdiged version. Which I was not – they didn't think I had the skills to master the full text. And it was frustrating, because seriously, I got more out of the Wishbone episode about the Odyssey than I did from reading the heavily abridged version in my English 9 textbook. Flash forward a few years to find that I did honors coursework in English during college, and that I now have an M.A. in literature. LOL.

I actually have never read the fully Odyssey. Never came close to it in college. I went to school at Kenyon, where you pretty much only read it if you were a classics major, or if you took an interdisciplinary course that combined English, philosophy, classics, and political science. I didn't major in classics and I never took the interdisciplinary class, so the Odyssey never crossed my path.

Agreed. Only, maybe this is a public/private-school discrepancy – but here in St. Louis, at least in the independent schools, kids read it in ninth grade. (Except that some schools do the Iliad instead.)