The Books That Changed My Life

i was searching online for the peter pan book i have. it's packed away for the move right now and i don't know who did the illustrations, but i want to find out because i am attempting to find reference material for the tatto i'm designing. I want to get it with my rebate money. peter pan flying or standing over the prow of hook's ship on my lower back on the left.

as i was searching for this book i realized that this book changed my life. and i started thinking about all the books that changed my life and thought it may be cool to write them down because i've been spending so much time cutting books apart lately. kind of my way of repaying the book karma, recognizing all the greats.

so i'll start in chronological order. i probably won't get all the way through them to date, but i'll get them done in subsequent posts if i don't finish tonight. and there are probably going to be spoilers, so beware.

Number One:

Not actually a book, but a story. I don't remember the name of it, and it's packed. I will get back to you on the name later. It's in the Collection of Grimm's Brother's Fairy tales that I have had probably my entire life. When we lived at my grandparent's house my grandma read us those stories at night. There was one in particular that to this day I remember. It's a story about a bunch of kids (baby goats) who get left at home when their mother goes to the store. she warns them not to answer the door for anyone but her. The wolf comes along and pretends to be the mother but his voice is too low and the kids know it's not the mother.

So the wolf goes off and buys what i think they refer to as chalk, or putty, or something that he uses to make his voice higher (again if i could just find the darn thing i could tell you what term they actually use). i remember that many times while my grandma was reading this she would stop and tell us to never use the stuff the wolf had used to make his voice higher.

I always said 'ok' and made sure i remembered how much my grandma didn't want me to use the stuff. But to this day i have no clue as to what she had been talking about. In my adult life i have never once heard of anything that can do that. All my life i have been ensuring that i never use this stuff, and all for naught. this story changed my life, at probably 4 or 5 years old.

I also love the part in that story where the mother finds the wolf sleeping at the pond's edge after eathing her children, then cuts him open. she then fills him up with rocks and sews him back up. when he wakes up he feels very thirsty cuz of the rocks inside him, and he goes to take a drink from the water. The rocks knock him off balance and throw him into the water and he dies. to this day it's still my favorite fairytale.

Number Two: The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner.

Mostly just the first two or three which i read several times between the time i started reading big books and 2nd grade or so. The first set of books that i read multiple times. I can't really remember them now, but every once in a while something will suddenly remind me of something in the book and i'll go... "man...that's from the boxcar children... i haven't thought about that book in years". I remember i loved violet. i don't think that i even remember the other kid's names. I don't know what it was, but the story affected me to the point that i still think about it to this day.

Number Three: A Dog Called KittyBy Bill Wallace.

I found this book in 5th grade and have read it probably hundreds of times, most recently about a year ago. Its about a boy who is terrified of dogs because he got rabies shots when he was a child because he had been attacked by a sick dog. He finds a stray puppy and eventually befriends him, naming him kitty because he comes when the cats are called for dinner.

To this day i still laugh out loud at some of the conversations between him and his father, and cry every single time kitty dies. it's a beautiful story and i don't think i would be the same having not read it.


And my boyfriend is hungry so i have to go cook now, i didn't get as far as i wanted to, but i got a start. more to come