From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 16:10:14 -0500

Like those who connect books and the librarians who put them into their hands, I also find that some (but not all) of the truly significant books of my childhood are connected to people.

When I was very young, It was Virginia Kahl's "The Duchess Bakes a Cake," which my mother read to me over and over. So very absurd and we loved it (although I certainly couldn't have used the word absurd back then).

My sister was 12 years older than me, and by the time I was 8, in the early 1970s, she had established the habit of giving me books for birthdays and Christmas. THe books she gave me were so different from most that were lying around the house. (I loved my Nancy Drews and Trixie Beldens, and my dad had worked for marketing in Western/Whitman Publishing, so we had lots of tv tie-ins--yes, they were around even back then!--that I read, but while Nancy and Trixie and the Bob-Whites were fun and comforting, they weren't life-changing for me).

My sister gave me James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, with illustrations by Ellen Raskin--extraordinary, unlike any story I'd read before it. She gave me Harriet the Spy, where, like so many others, I felt I was meeting a part of myself. She gave me books that echoed my own emerging understanding of who I was, such as Siv Widerberg's poetry collection "I"m Like Me," and the anthology "Daughters in High School"
(when I was older--who knew teens could write AND be published). And when I was fifteen, she gave me "Our Bodies, Ourselves" by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective--liberating.

Megan







Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, UW-Madison 600 N. Park St., Room 4290 Madison, WI 53706

ph: 608-262-9503 fax: 608-262-4933

schliesman at education.wisc.edu www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/
Received on Tue 30 May 2006 04:10:14 PM CDT