What's on Your Apocalyptic Bookshelf?

"If I had known the world was going to end, 

I would've brought better books." 

(Dale, from the TV show, "The Walking Dead")

Besides making me laugh, this line got me thinking - what books would I want with me if the Super Flu hit or the zombies ruled or the whole deserted island thing happened?

Surprisingly, the woman who waffles over pretty much everything - including whether or not to have waffles for breakfast - knew right off the three books on her apocalyptic bookshelf, followed quickly by two more additions. 

The Stand by Stephen King  (Oh, the irony!)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Any of the Calvin and Hobbes collections by Bill Watterson

Yes, I know - the smart thing would be to choose books about surviving, but since I'm pretty sure I wouldn't last all that long anyway, I'd rather go down reading some of my all time favorite books. They all have a depth and a heart that draw me back to them over and over. The characters are old friends yet the stories offer something new with each re-read. All of the books ground me yet take me somewhere else - a plus when you're hiding from vampires or werewolves or whatever is roaming around out there waiting to eat you.

What books would be on your "end of the world" bookshelf and why?

To Re-Read or Not To Re-Read

When I was a kid, I re-read books all the time. I'd get to the last book in The Little House on the Prairie series or in the Anne of Green Gables series or the last story in a Stephen King short story/novella collection then go right back to the start. But, as I got older, I did that less often. I'm not sure why, exactly. Maybe because I had more access to libraries and bookstores, more money to purchase new books, more knowledge of upcoming titles that sounded intriguing?

Lately, though, I find myself turning back to old favorites (for a variety of reasons)...and loving every minute of it. Here are some of my recent re-reads (including the links to past posts if you want more of a review):

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell for The Heroine's Bookshelf's GWTW Read-Along. Still love it, probably love it even more now. It reminded me of how it feels to be caught up in a true saga.

Life as We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer. These are the first two in her YA Moon Book series and I re-read them because the third one had just come out and I wanted to experience them all in a row. (I'm geeky that way.)

Still Missing by Chevy Stevens. This was just as creepy the second time around, maybe even more so because I knew what was going to happen on the next page or in the next chapter and I was helpless to stop it. The reason I re-read this one was because I didn't enjoy her second novel as much as I had hoped. Don't get me wrong, it was good, but it didn't freak me out the way this one did, and I had wanted to go back and see if I had built the first one up in my head. Nope.   

Do you re-read books? Why or why not? Are there any books out there you keep meaning to go back to but haven't yet? (I want to go back to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and The Betsy-Tacy Books by Maud Hart Lovelace.) Any favorite re-reads you'd recommend?

More Than a Tree Grew in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of my favorite books of all time.  I read it as a girl growing up in Brooklyn but you can be an adult living in Georgia or Indiana and still love this book.  Its author, Betty Smith, died this week back in 1972.

Do you have things in your home that you love but after awhile they seem to blend in and become sort of like wallpaper?  Well, this happened to me recently, and it was coming across the date of Betty Smith's death that triggered my renewed attention to one of the best gifts my husband ever bought for me.

The two pages are framed and hang on my office wall.  One is an ad by Harper and Brothers from (I believe) The New York Times Book Review (circa 1942) two weeks before the publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  It tells the story of how the book came about, how the editors loved it - "For as soon as they read it the editors lost their heads and their hearts..." -  how advance orders skyrocketed.   Here's a description of the book itself:

"Betty Smith's novel was warm and salty and moving and, most of all, alive.  Within the compass of her characters was all of humanity: the good, the bad, the pitiful, the ridiculous, and those with stardust in their eyes.  But what made it so extraordinary was the incredible richness of universal experience - a remarkable achievement for any writer."

The second is also an ad by Harper and Brothers in The New York Times Book Review (April 1944) two years after the book was published.  This one sums up some of what happened since the book's publication.  Here's my favorite part of the page -

"Where do we go from here?  Who knows?  It's a big country.  If we can get the paper to keep up with the demand, we feel certain that The Tree will break all records.  All this has happened to a grand girl from Brooklyn and her first book..." 

Hmm, any other girl from Brooklyn we can apply this to?  Hey, you never know.  You just never know.