The Very First Book

Anyone who knows me knows that I end up the secretary of every group, committee and team I join so it should surprise no one that I have kept an Excel spreadsheet of our book club choices for the past 13 years.  However, it didn't occur to me to put dates on the books we chose until 2008 which means there is no way to know the order in which we read the books for the first 8 years.   I do clearly remember the first book we read.  The year was 2000.  I had just turned 21. My sister-in-law (with whom we shared a house) and her friend, both teachers, wanted to start a book club.  We read our first book in September as school was starting - for them teaching, for me my second year at Santa Monica College.  Three other friends of theirs joined us, none of whom I knew.

The book was chosen by my friend D., a high school English teacher.  In order to ease our brains back into an academic frame of mind, she chose a young adult novel - Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. As I was not yet a teacher and had been a precocious reader, I had stopped reading young adult novels at least 12 years earlier, but I was game.  At least it was an easy assignment.  And I loved it.  That book has stuck with over all these years.  I am not the literary type really.  I don't revel in writing style or imagery as I read.  I tend to read for plot or information, but even I could appreciate how the author managed to sound like a youth, write in a way that would be understood by teens and yet still be compelling enough to maintain the attention of five educated adult women.

I still recommend this book to my students and I get excited every time I see a student pick it up.