Books From My Childhood

I saw a post on an author's blog recently that posed the question: What are some of your favorite books from childhood. It made me think. Geeze, what are the books that I loved. So I made a list, and I'm wondering if kids are still reading these or not.

1) Nancy Drew Books
I loved the fact that there were 60+ books in the series and I wanted to read each and every one of them. My girlfriends remember the row of yellow books above my desk. Eventually, I grew out of this phase but I was obsessed with making it through the series for 2-3 years.

2) Where The Wild Things Are
This is a classic. I believe it started off as a bedtime story. Later, I would read t in bed, under the covers with a flashlight... The pictures alone are worth the price of the book.

3) Whistle for Willie
I'm a child of the seventies. This is one of the first books I remember that featured people of color. I couldn't whistle, but I wanted a sausage dog like Peter's! I wanted to live in a city like Peter's! I practiced spinning like Peter!

Are these books still popular? Do kids still fall in love with them? What are you favorites?

My New Blog!!

Although I'm a huge lover of books and reading, my background is in technology - specificaly, web technologies. Blogging has been a hot for the last year or two but I've been resistant. Why? I didn't think that end users would remain interested in someone's random rants and ramblings? I figured the blog would go the way of the message board. And, while I read EVERYTHING, I've never considered myself to be a strong writer. Give me a piece to edit, and I'm your woman. Show me a blank piece of paper and I suffer from performance anxiety.

Recently, I've come across a few author and book blogs that impressed me. Tayari Jones, Danyel Smith and Angela Henry have great blogs. I pick up tidbits about the publishing industy from Felicia Pride(The Back List) and Lawrence Ross. Not just miscellaneous ranting, but insightfull commentary from interesting people. So now, I have a list of blogs that I check out on a daily basis.

So I'm sticking my toe into the ever growing "Blog pool". I'll share my favorite reads, hot topics and yes -- some of my own rants and raves. Instead of sending out email to my crew with my thoughts, questions, political commentary, I'm going to post them here on my blog. Let's see what type of feedback I get. Who knows, maybe with time, I'll lose the performance anxiety and become a better writer.