Mrs. Why
When I was a kid, my mom would take me to the library on Thursday afternoons. She'd give me a little wicker basket and let me fill it up with books; only five, though, otherwise I'd lose them. Every time we went, I'd return last week's reads through the little slot next to the door and then run, basket in hand, past the librarian's desk, past the bronze statue of the boy with a can of worms, straight to the shelf with all the Newberry Award winners.
See, that was one of the rules: only five books, and two of them had to be Newberry Winners. After I picked those two, I could read whatever else I wanted. (The remaining books would invariably be about either the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. I, um, was kind of going through a phase.)
In the summer of 1997, after reading everything from Jacob I Have Loved to The Egypt Game, I eventually came across A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle.
And that sort of changed things.
That book, more than anything else, changed my (admittedly underdeveloped) ideas of what a writer could be. The sensual, emotional way L'Engle wrote just grabbed me by the front of my t-shirt and simply hauled me into the story. She may even have been the one who planted the inkling of a thought that I might be a writer someday too.
Madeline L'Engle died Friday in Connecticut, according to the New York Times. She was eighty-eight years old.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
*
See, that was one of the rules: only five books, and two of them had to be Newberry Winners. After I picked those two, I could read whatever else I wanted. (The remaining books would invariably be about either the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. I, um, was kind of going through a phase.)
In the summer of 1997, after reading everything from Jacob I Have Loved to The Egypt Game, I eventually came across A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L'Engle.
And that sort of changed things.
That book, more than anything else, changed my (admittedly underdeveloped) ideas of what a writer could be. The sensual, emotional way L'Engle wrote just grabbed me by the front of my t-shirt and simply hauled me into the story. She may even have been the one who planted the inkling of a thought that I might be a writer someday too.
Madeline L'Engle died Friday in Connecticut, according to the New York Times. She was eighty-eight years old.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.
*