Mini-meme (hahahahaha! Insert Austin Powers/Dr. Evil joke of your choice here*)

Name three favorite children's book series:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia. I STILL re-read them, as an adult - they are part of my "anti-down-feelings" kit.

2. The Moomintroll series. Not so much a tightly sequential series, but as it's a group of books with the same characters, I think it counts, even though you can totally read them out of order without any problems.

3. Hmmmm....Probably the Miss Bianca books by Margery Sharp. Loved these for the mice but also for the writing. (Margery Sharp also wrote "grown-up" books).

Name three favorite non-series children's books:

1. My Side of the Mountain. Yes, I know, there was a sequel or two, but they are not as good and I do not consider them "canonical", even if they were written by the same author.

2. Stuart Little. Again, mice. Anything with mice was good when I was a kid.

3. I'm going to say Bill Peet's "Farewell to Shady Glade" although all of Peet's books held a pretty important place in my early childhood...the library in the town where I grew up had nearly all of them, and I remember checking them out multiple times.

Name three favorite children's book characters:

1. Eeyore. As I've said before (and I think I read somewhere), some children are strongly attracted to 'sad' characters. I do not know if it's a fact that "hey, here's a character who recognizes that it's not always sunshine and flowers" or if there's the thought that "maybe I'd be the one to cheer them up"

although in the original Milne books, Eeyore is more cynical than merely sad.

2. Miss Bianca. She was so poised, so gracious - she knew how to talk to anyone, even if she lived in a Porcelain Pagoda and was the charge of an Ambassador's child. And she was brave! And she was clever!

3. The fillyjonks (And yes, it's not clear in the books if they are all members of a species or are all the same individual). Again, they weren't perfect - like Eeyore - prone in some cases to be bossy, and in others to be borrowers-of-trouble. (One of my father's regular comments to me when I was a child: "Erica, don't borrow trouble" when I was worried about something). I remember reading "The Fillyjonk who Believed in Disasters" for the first time and being absolutely amazed - here was a book character who felt a lot like I did, who could see all the things ready to go wrong. And yet, when things really did go wrong for her - when her house blew away in a storm - she survived it, and actually wound up sitting on the beach afterwards and laughing about it.