I love to read book lists, best of lists or who’s reading what lists, so I was intrigued when I saw the following two books:
The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen is what the subtitle says a book of writers talking about their favorite books. There are some books you would expect like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird. There are some surpises, too – Patricia Cornwell writing about Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tomie DePaola writing about Kristin Lavransdatter. There are also generous lists of great books by the editors themselves. All proceeds go to the Read to Grow Foundation.
Stuart Kelly author of The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read will make you want to read books that don’t exist! He has all of the passion of a compulsive list maker. At the age of 15 he began to compile his list of lost books:
It quickly superseded my Book of Lists with its “Everyone in Star Wars That Wasn’t Made into a Figure,” “Dr. Who Episodes Lost by the BBC,” and even the list of books that I should read. This new list would be of the impossible and the unknowable, of books that I would never be able to find, let alone read.