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Texas Author | ||
| Julie Lake | |||
| Favorite Books | |
| When I was growing up, I read everything I could get my hands on. I was particularly fond of stories set in big, gloomy English houses. (I lived in a one-story house and longed to explore a really big house with stairs). |
Reading with my daughter Chloe |
| In addition to stories featuring kids who had to outwit witches, goblins and unreasonable parents, I also loved stories about the American frontier and the pioneers. Beanie Malone, Nancy Drew, and Caddie Woodlawn were some of my favorite characters. | |
| How My Arms Got So Long | |
| Most of my books came from the Casa View Public Library, which was a 15-minute walk from my house in Dallas. If you’d driven down Ferguson Road in 1970, you might have seen a skinny girl with long blond hair and glasses staggering along with a stack of books reaching her chin. That would have been me. I checked “The Borrowers” out many times and pretended that my Skipper doll was Arrietty from that book. I’d sneak around the house pilfering spools of thread, shoeboxes and those empty green plastic containers that cherry tomatoes come in. My sister Mary, who is eight years older, thought my side of the room looked like a rat’s nest, and she was probably right. | |
| The Wonders of Encyclopedias | |
| When I was really bored, I’d open up the Encyclopedia Britannica and look to see if any of my family members were famous. “Gerard Lake” had a paragraph or two, but I don’t think we were related to him. We also had an illustrated children’s encyclopedia set, which had a neat section on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were particularly cool. | |
| Once my own children came along, it gave me a good reason to delve once more into the world of children’s books. And I was sure glad I did. Somehow I had totally missed Roald Dahl’s books as a child. I was thrilled to find out that not only was he a great writer, but that he wrote a lot of books. My two daughters and I have read all his works several times, but we keep hoping that they’ll find some old grocery list of his up in an attic in Yorkshire. | |
| Some Favorite Authors of Children’s Books | |
| Laurie Halse Anderson Bruce Coville Karen Cushman Roald Dahl Bruce Hale Lois Lowry Helen Oxenbury Louis Sacher Lemony Snicket Jane Yolen |
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| Some Favorite Adult Authors | |
| Isabel Allende Maeve Binchy Rick Bragg Olive Ann Burns Tracy Chevalier Harriet Doerr Ken Follett Ursula Hegi Barbara Kingsolver Jon Krakauer Amy Tan Mary Willis Walker |
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