• Flowers in the Attic
• A Wrinkle in Time
• As I Lay Dying
• Mists of Avalon
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
• The Hobbit
• Little Women
• Anne of Avonlea
• the Bible
• Cold Mountain
• Angela’s Ashes
• The Celestine Prophecy
• Dreamland
• Speak
• The Hot Zone

A list of books you can find at garage sales or friends of the library sales?  Probably.  But the above-named books are also just some of the books I chose to read in high school.  They weren’t assigned books but instead were books that friends and I passed around.  Of course we read Hemingway, Salinger, Achebe, and Shakespeare in school.  Well, we “read” those.  I can tell you exactly which assigned books I read and which ones I “read”.  But the books I picked on my own and the ones my friends were all talking about?  Those I didn’t put down until I turned that last page.

I…