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Day 4 - your favorite book

Ohh!  I love books.  I have already admitted to you my blog readers that I am a hopeless book-a-holic.  And my library is only growing.  I have added two stacks of books since that entry.  I love the the way my books look on my shelf, lined up in wobbly rows, spines out in a rainbow of colors and type.  I love dust jackets, protecting the books with raised text and bright colorful pictures.  I love the slick feel of the smooth matte paper covers of my trade paperbacks.  I even like the ease of reading pocket paperbacks in those horrid "perfect" bindings.  I love the comfortable, homey way my room smells when filled with the books.  I love knowing that what bows down my shelves is not just soul-less paper and ink, but good friends and familiar adventures in welcoming worlds.

Picking just one of my 900+ books as my favorite is hard, and I have never been able to narrow it down to just one book.  Even on my desert island list, I have 3 books:

Anne of Green Gables -- Anne Shirley is a good friend, and her world is a familiar to me as my own.  I have read the book more times than I can count, but it never gets old, and there is something new to discover in each reading.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten -- the collection of short stories is perfect for when all I have is time for quick snippets and self-contained tales.  I first read the book at the suggestion of my high school religion teacher, after she read the title essay to the class.  I was not disappointed and still turn to the stories when I need re-affirmation that there is good in the world.

The View from Saturday -- this is a book geared toward children that I did not read until I was an adult.  But it was a life-changing book when I did read it.  The story of misfits finding themselves in each other really hit home to me.  I was always a quiet person, always on the outside of groups -- never specifically excluded, but never actually invited to join either.  The Souls appealed to me and I saw myself in them.

Those are the books I would pick to take with me on a desert island.  The books I would save from a burning building, that's another subject and much harder to decide...