Name Six: Books You Love

From Seth to Rick: Name Six books that you love.

*Rick is one of those “book people”. He reads, but he also just plain likes books.

1.) Pickle-Chiffon Pie by Roger Bradfield.
This was my favorite book as a child, and I would read it over and over, turning back to the beginning when I got to the end. It’s a simple children’s story, very much based on the rule of threes (in fact, each of the three sections is a rule-of-three story) with cute drawings and a main character that looks a little like me.
Oh! In looking this book up on Amazon, apparently there is a sequel that came out this past April! I read this book in the early Eighties, and it was ten to fifteen years old at that point, so the idea that he would write a sequel 45 years later is great. I may need to buy that.

2.) The Girl, Gold Watch, and Everything by John D MacDonald.
A cute girl who worked at Borders with me bought this book, so I bought a copy to have something to talk with her about. By the time I finished it, she had quit, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. MacDonald’s Travis McGee detective novels are more popular, but I could never get into them.
Speaking of sequels, I recently found out that this book (which has no sequel) has a made-for-tv movie starring Pam Dawber, and the tv movie has a sequel- written by MacDonald, but never turned into a book. Just like Fletch, which could easily be on this list. Love that book, too.

3.) Algebra 1 by Paul Foerster.
I know how nerdy it is to love a math book, but you have to understand how good this book is. Algebra is a disaster of a class, and every book on the market tries to make it better by adding in pictures of roller coasters or using story problems that make no sense (If you’re smart enough to have an equation for your flower bed’s perimeter, why can’t you use a tape measure to find out how long it is?) This book does none of that, and is the only Algebra book I’ve ever seen that makes a distinction between variables and pronumerals- something I’d never heard of before. I’ve learned more reading that book than any college class I ever took. If you want to consider Trigonometry, Pre-Calculus and Calculus ‘sequels’ to Algebra, then Foerster wrote some pretty good sequels, too.

4.) Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.
I’m a big fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, but Dirk Gently is something I read often. While Hitchhiker’s asks you to constantly imagine different worlds and creatures, Dirk Gently asks you to accept one or two fantastical elements and otherwise grounds the story in reality. Mysteries typically either are easy to figure out, or cheat by keeping information from you, but at the end of this one, I immediately read it through a second time and took in all of the foreshadowing that existed, but would be impossible to piece together. That doesn’t even describe it, because foreshadowing makes you think of a couple sentences, while Dirk Gently has entire chapters that only loosely make sense until you see them in hindsight. Again, a sequel- The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

5.) Improv! By Greg Atkins.
It’s a really simple book- it’s essentially a list of games and exercises- but it has a good section on a class curriculum, and best of all, has a great section that lists common problems improvisers have matched with exercises that will help them work past those issues. Donna gave me a copy for a birthday one year, and the kind note inside the front cover always makes me smile. It’s one of my favorite possessions.

6.) When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.
This certainly isn’t one of my top books of all time, but you just asked for books I love, and I’ve been looking for a reason to recommend it. It’s a kids’ book- won the Newberry award last year- and it’s fantastic. I try to take an afternoon each summer and read the recent Newberry award winner, and this was my favorite since I started doing that. Just a very good book.

Readers: What are some books that you love? Why?