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This Dell Yearling edition from 1985, with illustrations by Helen John, is the one I remember best.

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All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (1951, Follett Publishing Company)

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All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (1951, Follett Publishing Company)

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I grew up in Tennessee, in a small city and a very Christian bubble, surrounded by people who went to church every Sunday (and Wednesday and sometimes AGAIN on Sunday night).

All-of-a-Kind Family, the story of five Jewish sisters in an immigrant family at the turn of the 20th century, taught me (and, apparently, many others) so much about American Jewish history, immigration, and about Jewish holidays, from big ones like Rosh Hashanah to smaller ones like Sukkot. It made me more aware of where some of my classmates, the ones who did not have to nod to the cross during morning chapel at our Episcopal school, had come from, and why their families went to synagogues instead of churches with steeples and refused to drive German cars. All-of-a-Kind Family and its four sequels sparked a big interest in learning about other religions beyond my own. I do not remember how I was introduced to this book and its four sequels; it's likely I just grabbed them off the Waldenbooks shelf on one of my many Saturday-morning pilgrimages there. But I wore them out; the copy of this one that still lives on my bookshelf today has a cracked spine and loose pages and is treated like a museum piece.

I remember taking a family trip to New York in the late 80s - when the Lower East Side was decidedly unsavory - and begging to go there so I could see where All-of-a-Kind Family took place. Now, of course, we have the Tenement Museum to help out there, but at the time, I was left to my own imagination. But it was so helpful to have the visual and I was grateful that my parents understood that! We even ate at a Jewish dairy restaurant there for the full experience.

All-of-a-Kind Family helped me learn that books broaden the world beyond your own and invite you into lives you could not experience on your own.

The Israel-Gaza war has brought more than a few kids and their parents to my library desk asking for books about Jewish kids. I always direct them to All-of-a-Kind Family. I hope this series based on the books ultimately gets made; I think it could be instrumental in getting the books into the hands of this generation so affected by the war.

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Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Ray Cruz (1972, Atheneum Books)

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Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Ray Cruz (1972, Atheneum Books)

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In the 1970s, when I was in preschool, there weren't many books about having negative emotions and expressing them as freely as you did the positive ones, as there are now in my young son's collection. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day was the rare story that encouraged little kids to sit with their feelings.

One of my parents read to me every night when I was a child (a privilege, for sure). And when I was 3 or 4 years old, more often than not, this was my selection. Once I could read myself, I read it to them.

I grew up in a very loving but very WASPy family that put a premium on not complaining. We did not feel our feels; we compartmentalized them and slapped on a smile.

Alexander's family never told him to stop whining or complaining. Instead, our young hero says at the book's conclusion (after several iterations of the book's title refrain throughout the day in question ), "My mom says some days are like that." And some days are, and that's ok. I still quote this book on the regular; it is cathartic to say those singsongy words aloud.

Alexander and his exhilarating freedom to express just how awful was his day (those railroad pajamas! So itchy!) have come up more than a few times in therapy over the years. This was one of the first books I can remember reading to my own son when he was an infant, so eager was I to tell him I was here to listen to ALL of his feelings.

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This 1979 Avon Camelot cover was the one I owned and the one our teacher read to us as well. 

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Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson (1977, Thomas Y. Crowell Company) 

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Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson (1977, Thomas Y. Crowell Company) 

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My third-grade teacher, Miss McKenzie, read Bridge to Terabithia aloud to our class over the course of a couple of months, chapter by chapter, whenever we had a few spare minutes at the end of the day. We were enraptured, no other word for it. And every single one of us sobbed at the end, grieving together for this kid we'd come to know as well on paper as we knew each other.

I was a very fast reader at that age, and I ripped through books, but remember thinking that it was so special to take a book very slowly and to share the experience with a group.

I was also a daydreamy kid who made up a lot of worlds and spent a lot of time building hideouts in the park behind my house with my friends. I knew exactly what it was like to leave your house and everything in it — people and emotions — and disappear into a space of your own creation, where you were in charge (a rare experience for a kid, even an 80s kid) for a while. Jesse and Leslie's Terabithia felt personal.

I tend to conflate the experience of reading this one with the 1986 Challenger explosion, though that took place the following school year, because we experienced it in the same multi-age space where we read Bridge to Terabithia and our class reaction to it was the same - and I think we grieved that more fully and openly because we had been through Bridge to Terabithia together.

This article focuses on both the book and the 2007 movie based on the book (which I have never seen), but it mentions how often this book is challenged because of its frank discussions of child death, and wonders how realistic it still is that kids are given as much freedom to roam the woods and live in their own heads as Jesse and Leslie were. To that I say, on behalf of my daydreaming past self, I hope so.

I was able to tell Miss McKenzie recently how much the experience of reading this meant to me, and it turns out she felt the same way — she said she'd read lots of books to lots of classes, but ours was special.

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The Olivia Hussey/Leonard Whiting movie was the one we watched in class (we were pre-Claire Danes/Leo DiCaprio), and thus the one I associate with my first reading of the play. 

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Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare (1597)

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Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare (1597)

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I attended an all-girls school from grades 7-12. In 8th grade, we had to read Romeo & Juliet in English class and write a paper on it. I do not remember the specific assignment; I do remember that I wrote something critical of classmates who viewed the play as cute and romantic when it was actually about family feuds and star-crossed lovers and ended with a double suicide. How could they not see this?!

I got the paper back with the infamous red "See Me" across the top.

Turns out, my teacher, Mrs. Ratliff, saw some potential in my writing and wanted me to join the school newspaper. She also wanted me to apply for the honors English class for 9th grade. I did both. I finished high school as a co-editor in chief of the paper and with a top score on the AP English exam; without that one teacher's belief in me, I'm not sure that's the path I would have created for myself.

Reading Romeo & Juliet was the first time that I remember thinking, there's way more below the surface of these words than there is in the words themselves. And even when I don't feel that emotional pull to something, I still have a knack for writing about it, and a knack for seeing things in a work that other people might not. And Mrs. Ratliff saw that in me at a time when I felt very disconnected from other girls my age, more introverted and more into school than into socializing. She pushed me to challenge myself and not fall back on the easiest path to good grades.

I made writing my career for a very long time, and I will always credit Mrs. Ratliff for seeing that path for me during our Romeo & Juliet unit and setting me on it. It's a favor I hope to return to someone as a librarian.

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Girl by Blake Nelson (1994, Touchstone Books)

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Girl by Blake Nelson (1994, Touchstone Books)

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I still cannot believe a grown man wrote this novel, because it so exquisitely describes what it was like to be a small-town teenage girl in the early 90s who yearned to be more "alternative" than her conformist friends. In particular, that feeling when you want to be seen for doing something new but the actual act of doing the new thing — whether that's listening to a new kind of song or wearing a thrift-store dress instead of the Gap or talking to a guy everyone else thinks is weird — makes you feel exposed and raw.

I was a Sassy reader (indeed, Girl was even excerpted in Sassy! The coolest endorsement imaginable! Even Blake Nelson himself agrees!) in a sea of Seventeen readers, a Liz Phair devotee in an endless stream of country radio hits. None of this made me any cooler, of course, just weirder. But Girl resonated with me hard at a time when I was splitting off from friends I'd had for years, making new friends who shared my new interests and getting ready to move away to college. It was a time when big cultural shifts were happening, especially for young women (the 1992 "Year of the Woman" election, Planned Parenthood v. Casey that upheld abortion rights, grunge and alt music and fashion) and I wanted to be part of them, not on the outside looking in. Girl felt like the key that unlocked the door to doing just that.

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The cover I own; Clyde Edgerton signed my copy at the Southern Literary Conference. 

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Raney by Clyde Edgerton (1985, Algonquin Books) 

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Raney by Clyde Edgerton (1985, Algonquin Books) 

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In the early 90s, when I was in high school, the Southern Literary Conference was held every other year in my hometown, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My dad, a big reader like me, used to take me to hear writers speak, and then we'd stand in line and get them to sign their books.

After the first conference I attended, I came home with Clyde Edgerton's Raney. I hadn't read a book that sounded like the people who lived around me talking that wasn't also making fun of them. Southern accents and Southern mindsets are very often the butts of literary jokes. Edgerton said in this interview that he advises writers to write for themselves as the audience, and any good Southerner is going to recognize at least one piece of themselves in Raney whether they want to or not.

And Edgerton turned a book about a woman realizing that her worldview needs broadening without making fun of either her southernness or her femaleness. I read this at a time when I was getting ready to move far away from home to go to college, and was quite aware that my worldview, too, needed broadening and that not everyone was going to be kind about it. Reading about Raney's process of popping her insular bubble helped give me confidence to take on new experiences outside my own bubble. I even quoted Raney in my high school yearbook: "If Jesus could make wine, he could just as easily make it fermented as not, couldn't he? Why mess around with half a miracle?"

I love BBQ, too, but Raney is my real comfort food.

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This cover is as evocative as the words within of what it's like to have an eating disorder. 

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Plenty of books talk about eating disorders but this was the first book I read that evoked what it's like to have one through the writing. The constant voice in your head telling you that you aren't enough, you'll never be enough. The things you want to say and cannot, because your brain won't let your real self go.

I was anorexic for at least two years, maybe a little more, beginning at the end of high school and stretching through my junior year of college. I fit the profile of the disorder pretty neatly: White, upper-middle-class teenager consumed by perfectionism and insecurity. Indeed, in neither high school nor college did I stand out for being obviously sick; in a lot of ways, I think of my eating disorder as a symptom of being a student in the places I was. But for all the stereotypes, there is very little out there written about the disease from the perspective of the one suffering from it.

Intrusive thoughts cut into the narrative throughout the book, and words and phrases are written in strikethrough. Halse Anderson said in this interview that she viewed this technique as a graphic illustration of the way the disorder takes hold of your brain, and it really is powerful that way. The narrator is frozen between her thoughts and her reality, unable to crack the ice but unwilling to hand anyone else the ax. Anorexia is a prison of ice. It's a simple but effective metaphor.

I picked this book up over a decade after I recovered from my eating disorder, and I'm glad, because I would not have recognized the experience for what it was while it was happening. It is not a treatment manual, or even an endorsement for seeking help. It is the book you turn to to help you understand what you went through, and hopefully will help others in the same boat.

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Everyone says grief takes one day at a time. This book said, what about one song at a time? 

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Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield (2007, Crown Publishing Group) 

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Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield (2007, Crown Publishing Group) 

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When I was 22, I met the guy I was going to marry. When we were 25, he died after receiving two liver transplants — one to stop the trajectory of a fatal liver disease, one to correct a mistake made in the first. But he was too sick to pull through. I was absolutely devastated, and this was compounded by this being the time in my life when all my friends were getting married and having kids. I felt completely alone and out of sync with what everyone else seemed to be experiencing.

Reading Rob Sheffield's memoir about his young wife's premature death showed me that at least one person out there understood what I was going through and how unfair it was, and helped me mourn.

The author of this review focuses more on the music mentioned in the memoir than on the story, but does make the point that Sheffield discusses music as a technique to remember Renee, his wife, rather than trying to recreate Renee through his musical memories. My relationship also had a soundtrack (I think most do) and after I read Love Is a Mix Tape just after it was published, I made a playlist to trace our short but awesome romance and found that to be incredibly healing.

Love Is a Mix Tape helped me to learn to remember the best parts of us without getting lost in what could have been, and to keep those things alive without falling apart over the rest.

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This came out while I was in journalism school. We studied the methodology and were able to speak with the author at the time of its publication.

It reads like a novel (or the plot of a Bravo series), but is the product of a journalist embedding herself with a family in the Bronx for more than a decade and writing about their lives — everything from partners going to prison after drug deals and teen pregnancy to amazing details about falling in and out of love and how families are sometimes made and sometimes chosen.

It was a way of writing about ordinary people and their quotidian lives — even if the way they lived their lives was not the same way you lived yours — with dignity and respect. It greatly influenced my own work over the years. People are people and everyone has a story. You're much more likely to have them tell it to you if you treat them well.

The New Yorker ran an interview with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc ten years after Random Family was published, and in it LeBlanc talks about her immersion in her subject to the point that she nearly lost herself. While that's extreme, I think most readers can relate to losing themselves completely in a story, and it is true for writers of those stories as well.

We read a lot in this class, and in library school, about the importance of having certain stories told so that people can see themselves reflected in it. Random Family is proof that one writer can see that important story in the smallest place and make a much larger impact.

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I read this completely on a Kindle and don't think I'd ever even registered the cover before this assignment! It's kind of terrible for such an important book. 

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Expecting Better by Emily Oster (2013, Penguin Random House)

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Expecting Better by Emily Oster (2013, Penguin Random House)

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I met my current partner when I was 37 and had a baby at 41 in 2017. Because of my age, the experience was a bit fraught; I had an easy pregnancy but there were a lot of tests and ultrasounds happening, plus my son was breech (head up, instead of head down).

Expecting Better gave me the confidence to assert myself during the process and the data to understand the relative risks I was taking by making any of the million choices that felt like matters of life or death during this time — everything from drinking coffee to exercising (I mentioned in our class introductions that I ran a marathon during my pregnancy; I would never have done this if not for Emily Oster!) to the birth itself.

There is a lot of noise around pregnancy and motherhood. This book helped me cut through that and focus on what worked for me, personally, which is something that gets lost quite often in the very medicalized experience of what is, horribly, called "geriatric pregnancy."

And when I met my mom group — nine women who all had our kids in the span of two months in late 2017 — we had all read this and we spent hours over Friday brunches on maternity leave dissecting it and how much better it made our shared experiences.

A lot of pregnancy books seem to have the goal of making the experience scary and miserable. This one actually seeks to educate you and make you question what you are being told elsewhere (even by doctors), and make the correct decisions for you and your body. It is an empowering read. Oster's website, ParentData, which she created out of the response to Expecting Better and which every parent I know reads religiously, continues that empowerment of modern parents, and I don't know what I would do without it.

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Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us by Alison Mariella Désir (2022, Penguin Random House)

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Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn't Built for Us by Alison Mariella Désir (2022, Penguin Random House)

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I am a runner, though I was not one growing up and only started training in my 30s. I like to run long distances. I have run six marathons and probably 30 half-marathons. At his point in my life, I compete in a lot of local races and usually do a half-marathon or two each year. I belong to a running club and we work out together three times a week. I've made most of my closest adult friends through running, including my best friend.

All that said: I'm a cishet, white, thin woman. Beyond getting catcalled on runs and dodging bad drivers, I've never felt unsafe or out of place in the running world. That was not Allison Désir's experience, and it was not that of many BIPOC runners I know.

Five years ago, I worked for New York Road Runners, the organization that puts on the New York City Marathon, along with many other races and community running events. During my time there, the pandemic happened. My communications team was laid off. But at the same time we were losing our livelihoods, we were going through the nationwide reckoning with racial violence, overt and less overt, that was taking place in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Earlier that year, Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, had been killed while on a run, and that was fresh in our minds as well. Indeed, Running While Black came about after Désir wrote an essay about Arbery in Outside that roiled the industry.

We had lobbied to cover Arbery's story and our event in his memory on the NYRR website, and had been told not to by our public relations staff.  Many of my coworkers accused NYRR of perpetuating systemic racism. We succeeded in having the CEO and several members of senior leadership there removed. One of the incidents raised by many coworkers was the seeming erasure of the Black man who had initially proposed the idea of the New York City Marathon, with a white man taking credit for the idea (and publishing an op-ed in The New York Times about it, which the paper of record ran without researching it properly). Désir, an activist and the founder of Harlem Run, a popular running club in New York, wrote on Instagram that she had pitched The Times with the correct story, only to be told they did not have time to research it properly.

So when Désir wrote Running While Black two years after my experience at NYRR, I was ready for her to spill the tea. Instead, this book blew my mind. It is, as Désir writes, a complete takedown of "the unbearable whiteness of running" and the industry that rose up to keep entire groups of people out of the sport.  And it has changed the way I interact with the running world now. I am very choosy about races I run and companies where I buy gear. Just a magnificent work of history, art, and sport.

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My mom reading to me, November 1977. (I was 17 months old.) 

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Exploring my reading life sounded quite daunting at first. I decided to jump in headfirst, though, and made a master list of every book I could think of that I felt some deep connection to. Fifty books later, I still hadn't gotten to any nonfiction, and I decided to reconsider the assignment.

What were the significant moments in my reading life when a book crossed my path and made me a different kind of reader? Who were the key people  in my life who showed me certain books, or asked me to read a book that changed my life? What books had I used to cope with certain events in my life, major or minor?

That list was more manageable. Then I looked at my options and pretended that I was at my job in a library, and I was handing these books to a younger version of myself. How would I give that book to someone in my particular position? What would I say about it to emphasize its importance at that moment? That did the trick and got me to 11.

As a kid, I was a precocious reader, and a voracious one. That's not a flex. Obviously, being a good reader is a fantastic skill to possess, but being sent to take spelling tests with third graders as a first grader because you blew through the first-grade spelling book in a week was more awkward than awesome at that age. So was getting the lead in a play because I was the only one who could read the lines well enough. Giving up after-school sports to practice for the regional spelling bee, same deal. So I often found myself relating to characters in books better than I did my own classmates, and losing myself in fictional worlds instead of, say, learning multiplication tables. All of the choices I made for my reading autobiography between elementary school and college point to that kid who felt isolated and weird and found my best connections in books.

As an adult, I'm a researcher. Whether I'm grieving, or dealing with a fork in my career path, or pregnant at 41, or trying to make sense of big cultural events around me, I'm reading about it to make sense of it. The books in my autobiography from my adult years show a person who no longer feels quite as left out as she once did, but who still turns to books to make sense of it all.

In my library work, I encounter plenty of children and teenagers who feel more at home with books than with people, as I did. My work is to make them feel seen in the books I recommend to them. I think by examining my own reading life more critically through this assignment, I have gained some perspective in deciphering what people need in a book versus simply falling back on my own experiences with certain titles. The book autobiography will be a very valuable tool in my library career.

I used Padlet to design my book autobiography, and laid it out chronologically, matching each book or books to a phase of my life. I had never used Padlet prior to enrolling at Rutgers; it's now one of my favorite tools for creating interactive presentations because it's easy and intuitive to use on both ends.

I suppose if I had limitless time, I might have worked out a more creative layout, but I am happy with the way my project came out and how it reflects me.