IWSG - June 2025

It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.

The awesome co-hosts for the June 4 posting of the IWSG are PJ Colando, Pat Garcia, Kim Lajevardi,  Melisa Maygrove, and Jean Davis!

 

This month''s question is a good one: 

What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?

There were a bunch of books that had a huge effect on me growing up.  I actually wrote a whole blog about The Outsiders and how much that book changed my life here, so I won't go into detail about how much S.E. Hinton's books impacted me.

As a lifetime reader - and I'm talking a really long time here; I learned to read at three and haven't stopped since - there are a lot of books that have affected me in different ways.

As a very small child (under five) I loved the picture books by Tomi DePaola, especially the ones about the witch Streganona.  I remember being taken to a bookstore to meet him once, and still have a copy of The Clown of God and Nana Upstairs and Nana Downstairs that he signed.

There's the Willard Price adventure books, all 13 of them from Amazon Adventure all the way through to Arctic Adventure.  I was utterly obsessed with these books from the time I was about eight until I was eleven or so and read and re-read them over and over.  A lot of what I know about nature and science and stuff like that comes directly from these books.  I re-read a handful of them again when my kids were young, thinking they might like them as much as I did.  But you know what?  They're actually kind of dreadful...

The same thing happened when I re-read The Eagle of the Ninth, another book I was obsessed with for a while when I was young.  I literally read two copies of this one to rags.  But it's really not that good.  Actually very boring..  What I saw in it, I don't know.

When I was a teenager, there were the Hinton books I mentioned earlier, but also a book called Center Line by Joyce Sweeney and one called Term Paper by Ann Rinaldi that had a big effect on me.  And one I can't remember the title of, but involved a bunch of kids digging a huge hole in their back yard.  If you know what I'm talking about, let me know...  I thought it was by Elizabeth Winthrop, but I couldn't find it anywhere in her catalogue so that might be me dreaming.

I did have a tendency to get obsessed by books as a kid.  We moved a lot and while we usually had access to a library, often they were small and not very good so I was forced to revisit my own bookshelves frequently.  And when I was young, YA wasn't what it is now, so once you graduated from the kids' section there wasn't anywhere to go but the adult section.

I read a lot of very age-inappropriate horror at twelve.

I feel like some books I re-read so many times their text has become part of my DNA.  Books that are so much a part of me, I'm not even sure they were things I read or things that actually happened to me.

I still can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing...

What books had an impact on you?