The blog of The Top Ten author J. Peder Zane.
Reading Across the Ages
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Most "Top Ten" contributors ranked their ten favorite books. Richard Powers, who won a National Book Award this year for his novel "The Echo Maker," took a different approach, naming his top pick at various stages of life.
Richard Powers
Age 5: Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
Age 10: The Bible; The Odyssey by Homer (dead heat)
Age 15: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Age 20: Ulysses by James Joyce
Age 25: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Age 30: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Age 35: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Age 40: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Age 45: My Ántonia by Willa Cather
Age 50: Something wholly unforeseen, that will change all these others, again
The youthful blogger at Isabel Archer tries his approach:
Age 5: L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
Age 10: Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl
Age 12: William Sleator, House of Stairs
Age 17: Barbara Brandon, The Passion of Ayn Rand
Age 20: The Sound and the Fury, The Aeneid, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Age 25: Pride and Prejudice, Adam Thorpe, Ulverton
Age 30: ?????
What are your greatest hits through the ages?
Posted by J. Peder Zane at 11:00 AM
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Oh, gosh, this requires a memory, something I'm short on these days.
I'll take a stab at it:
Age 6ish: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Age 10ish: Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
Age 12ish: Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Age 14ish: Dickens, Dickens and more Dickens
Age 16ish: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Age 20ish: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kenney O'Toole
Age 25ish: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Age 30ish: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Age 35ish: The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov
Age 39ish (where I'll be holding a while): In progress
well, i don't know how on earth to go about this! for example, i read Pride & Prejudice when i was 10 and loved it, and i read The Neverending Story when I was much older (in my teens? in my twenties??) and it's still one of my favorite books today, even though i'm 31!
some books never go out of style, for me.