Modern Good Reads discussion

Sitting in front of our bricks-and-brown-board bookcase in my childhood bedroom with its tight green carpet as my sister talked about the Lord of the Rings and later the Jean Auel series, Earth's Children. Then there was Jo'burg Airport. We were heading home, and I was desperate for a book to read on that long flight. I picked up Robert Jordan's Eye of the World and have been grateful ever since. Then there was the trip to Kohl's Department Store when my sister, again, picked up a Georgette Heyer Regency romance. The year I discovered Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dick Francis, and a few others I can't remember when I lived in friend-starved Montana. A beautiful leather-bound and gilt-edged 1886 copy of Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill I found in a used bookstore in Tunbridge Wells. The night I tilted out a vintage copy of Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management from a family friend's book shelf in London, and she gifted it to me. My three English cookbooks I bought when I lived in my little cottage in Burwash in East Sussex. My absolute delight in the book of fairy tales my father gave me. I remember sprawling out on the living room carpet as I pored over the gorgeous pictures and read the stories. My regret in giving away two sets of Family Classics books to younger members of the family. I want my own set again! I read those books everywhere and anywhere. From bedroom to kitchen to outside in the backyard with the fragrance of cut grass washing over me.

I liked your idea of the memories...

Probably most of us can remember some point in our childhood when we seriously fretted about the future and our parents offered encouragement by assuring us that we could become anything we wanted to be through hard work and determination.

Steven Spielberg said it much more succinctly:

"The past may dictate who we are, but we get to determine what we become."

I read Lord of the Rings in college during one very lonely Christmas break. I was sort of glad there was no one around to bother me.

It was during the fall/winter of 2002. I saw the first movie before I cracked the series, then read the second and third books so I would have something to compare the next two movies to. I then went back and read the first book over Christmas of 2002, and I was sorry the experience ended. It was a magical joyride, and I loved Tolkien's spellbinding nature and his attention to detail.