Mary Stewart's The Little Broomstick (1971) Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974) Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) If I'd looked back to my childhood reading, I would have described myself as being much more comfortable with witches and dragons, enchantments and whangdoodles, than
If Oprah had had a bookclub in 1954, she would have chosen Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel. And I say this because, despite the ongoing debate amongst booklovers about the significance of Oprah's Bookclub, she has featured many of my favourite writers (e.g. Jane Hamilton, Ursula Hegi, Rohinton Mistry, Barbara Kingsolver,
Kristjana Gunnars' The Rose Garden (1996) When I bought my copy of The Rose Garden, it was shelved in Fiction at The Bookshelf in Guelph, which is such a good bookstore that eventually I had to move to the town so that I could visit there more often than once
Robert C. O'Brien's Z for Zachariah (1975) When my copy of Z for Zachariah came through on library loan, I was a bit disappointed: it was a relatively new paperback and the cover wasn't anywhere near as disturbing as I remember the cover of the edition that I read as
Ray Robertson's Moody Food (2002) A hundred pages into Moody Food, I was still wondering if this was really The Book for Me. And, admittedly, that's the feeling I had right at the start: a football scene is not a cozy welcome for this reader. But there was also a
