You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
– C. S. Lewis

This week’s 10 on Tuesday topic is a special one in honor of Beverly Cleary’s 100th birthday and Drop Everything and Read Day! Carole wants to know:

10 Books That Made YOU Want to Drop Everything and Read

Oh, man. How to choose! I am going to do a bit of a different take on this and go with my top 10 authors, which will still be almost impossible to narrow down, but I will try!

  1. E. B. White – Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. Three fantastic books that I just devoured. More. Than. Once.
  2. Laura Ingalls Wilder – The Little House Series. I have read these books dozens of times. Really. Dozens.
  3. C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity – books that transformed my life as a child and an adult.
  4. Mario Puzo – The Godfather, Fools Die, The Sicilian, The Last Don. Gritty novels that grab you from the very first sentence and don’t let you go even after you are done reading them!
  5. Hugh Howey – The Wool Omnibus. Science Fiction at its best.
  6. Tom Rob Smith – The Child 44 Trilogy, The Farm – a new to me writer who writes a fantastic novel!
  7. Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games Trilogy. LOVED! Such great writing. I devoured these books and could not wait to start the next one!
  8. J.K. Rowling – The Harry Potter Series. These I loved with my children. We read them together, or sometimes out loud, or sometimes impatiently waited for each other to finish them!
  9. Jussi Adler-Olsen – The Department Q Series. I simply adore Carl Morck and his imperfect but lovely manner.
  10. Dan Jones – The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England is the only book of his I have read, but it was absolutely fantastic. I read this with a boss as we drove to a conference. We did not want to stop!
  11. Diana Gabaldon – The Outlander Series. The first “romance” novels that I actually liked! I am adding this one as a bonus because season 2 of Outlander just started! If you have not read these – you should! They are so good!!

There are so many others I could add here – stories by that expert story-teller, Garrison Keillor; yarny tales shared by the Yarn Harlot; those lovely letters that EZ wrote from Schoolhouse Press; anything that Ernest Hemingway put to paper; the vivid poetry of Pablo Neruda – things that make you lose track of your day and get lost in the words of their world.

There you have my list – some timeless, some classic, some new literature – all incredible. Today is all about reading, so tell me what makes you D.E.A.R.???

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