follow friday (13) & cover love (3)

This week's question courtesy of Parajunkee's Follow Friday is:

Q: Talk about the book that most changed or influenced your life (was it a book that turned you from an average to avid reader, did it help you deal with a particularly difficult situation, does it bring you comfort every time you read it?). 

This is an insanely difficult question. No one book was a magical book that turned me into a voracious reader; it was more the culmination of all of them. When I was little I was very lucky in that we had tons of children's books around, and that my mum would read to me at night. What's even more lucky is that I had people around me that would indulge the very small, younger me in signing me up for a library card and carting me back and forth - most of the time with 10+ books out at a time - from home to the library. However, I have to say that reading these books opened my mind up to so many possibilities that it gave me a wild imagination and an intense curiosity to find out what else might be possible if I just read more. (I also wrote tons of terrible stories when I was little, as I just had so much stuff in my head that I needed to get it out in some fashion. I still write, and hopefully it's not so terrible now.)

Here's a list of children's books that I loved then and still love now:

Strega Nona by Tomie DePaola
Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina
Go, Dog, Go! by P.D. Eastman
The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf & Robert Lawson
The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

I also grew up reading whatever else lay around the house, which ended up in a lot of the following: any and all Dr. Seuss, National Geographic (we had a subscription at the time), tons of the Great Illustrated Classic books (Black Beauty, Heidi, Journey to the Center of the Earth...), Shel Silverstein, and these random abridged versions of books that Reader's Digest used to produce that my Pop (grandfather) had on the shelf. I also read a lot of Reader's Digest.

I am grateful to each and every one of these books and people as they shaped my interest of reading to what it is today.

Next up is... cover love! Courtesy of Melissa at iswimforoceans. :)

Title: Witchlanders

Author: Lena Coakley

Publisher: Atheneum

Publish Date: August 30, 2011

Genre: Fantasy

Fun Fact: Although the cover shows a picture of a girl, the MC is indeed male.

Why I Have Cover Lust: I just love everything about this cover. The textures, the shades of blue (my favorite color), the wispy branches falling in her face and the slash of red across that comes in perfect contrast. This is a book that I've had aside waiting - and boy, has it been difficult to wait - to be read for over a month now, and will get to soon as it's almost time for its book birthday.