Top Ten Tuesday

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a fun weekly meme hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

This week's theme:  NON-BOOKISH FREEBIE. Which means you can do pretty much anything you want. Which, for some reason, always feels like a lot of pressure on me to choose just the right topic. Which is dumb, but there you go. So, after much thought and deliberation, I decided to go with 10 Favorite Bookish Memories.

1. My mom making up bedtime stories just for me when I was little about a mischievous fairy named Golda and all her fun misadventures.
2. My dad teaching me to read using his old copy of Dick and Jane and Hop on Pop among other books.
3. Trips to the library from the time I was little (we went several times a week in the summer because the library was air-conditioned and our house was not).
4. Library book sales that lasted for days. Me and my sisters would go everyday with our wishlists and come home with bags of books. 
5. Book orders in elementary school from Troll, Arrow, and Scholastic. I loved coming home with a new armful of books every month.
6. Teachers who read favorite books to my class like Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Where the Red Fern Grows, and A Wrinkle in Time. They are books I still love today.
7. Fun Buddy Reads with my mom, my niece, Bettina and Melody.
8. Getting to meet Jane Yolen, Gary Blackwood, Laurie Foos, and Stephanie Black at writer's conferences.
9. My dad buying me each new Harry Potter book on the day it came out so I could read it right away even though I was more than old enough to go out and buy them myself. (Thanks, Dad!)
10. Reading A Long Walk to Water with a group of 4th graders and seeing their eyes light up when they finally see the connection between Salva and Nya at the end. 

Happy Reading!

Bookish memories...

This week's theme for TOP TEN TUESDAY, which is a fun weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is about favorite bookish memories. As a lifelong reader, I have many. So it was kind of hard to choose which ones to highlight here. But I settled on these five: 

Author Jane Yolen

1.  Having lunch with Jane Yolen! I was attending a writer's conference in Chautauqua, and she was one of the speakers, and I got to eat lunch with her the next day. She's very personable and down-to-earth, and she tells some great stories. 

2.  Getting to visit the bookstore Shakespeare & Company when I was in Paris years ago. It was awesome! Both because it's a great bookstore, and because it's in Paris.

3. Meeting Nobel Prize Winner Kip Thorne 3½ years ago, and getting him to sign my copy of his book, Black Holes & Time Warps. It's an incredibly interesting book, and a bookish moment I will never forget.

4.  Reading Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile while I was actually in Egypt sailing down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor. It was an amazing trip, and made me love the book even more!

The Nile ... as seen from our boat. 

5. Learning to read with this old copy of Fun With Dick and Jane with my Dad the summer before I started to school. (He was a schoolteacher, so he always had the summers off.) Thanks for teaching me to read, Dad...and for so much more!!!

Happy Reading!