A blog post in the San Francisco Chronicle gave some of us at Books and Review a case of some serious nostalgia this morning. That post by mama blogger Amy Graff started off by asking us to think back to the first book that got us excited about reading. After she gets our wheels turning to the past, Graff tells us about her struggle to instill the love of reading in her 9-year-old daughter. She tells us of her unwitting comparison of her daughter to other children who devoured books unlike her daughter who had for most of her reading life seen reading as a drag. And her disappointment when her daughter proclaimed that reading was boring to her.

But recently, Graff tells us that some thing changed in her daughter and she came down to breakfast with a tattered book that she couldn't pull herself away from. Her daughter was entranced in a way that she had never been by a book and in the way her mother had longed for her.  The book, "Penderwicks" by Jeanne Birdsall was what finally broke the "reading is boring" spell. The authors telling of her daughter's first love affair with a book reminds us that reading can in fact be for everyone if we can just find a book that speaks to us.  The right book doesn't have to be what everyone is reading.  Graff's daughter wasn't into the books all her friends and other children were reading like Harry Potter, for instance. 

So what was the first book that you couldn't put down? Some of the books that folks here shouted out when we asked them included "James and the Giant Peach," "Ramona Quimby," and "Charlotte's Web" to name a few.