One of my favorite memories from elementary school is the
reading bath tub. The old, claw foot tub in the back of the classroom was
filled with pillows and cozy blankets, surrounded by bookshelves. Next to the
tub, students recorded how many pages we read at home on a chart. At the end of
the week, the student with the most pages read received a gold star and got to
spend our twenty minute silent reading time in the tub with a book of our
choice. I absolutely loved that reading tub, and reading is still one of my
great “rewards” in life.
This is a list of the books, in no particular order, I remember as influential in my youth and the formation of a lifelong love of reading. What are some of your beloved favorites?
- The Giver, Lois Lowry
- Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein
- A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
- The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
- Goosebumps, R.L. Stine
- The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
- The Power of One, Bruce Courtenay
- The Diary of Anne Frank
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
