I’m participating in the A-Z Blogging Challenge, where I post every day in the month of April (except Sundays) and each day is a letter.

My theme for the month is a series of posts about the things that shaped me.

The Westing Game

This is it.

This started my whoooooooooole mystery obsession. I never would have read Agatha Christie, or watched any detective shows if it hadn’t been for this book. This was a gateway book to a whole new genre, as yet unknown to my 10-year-old self.

The Westing Game tells the tale of a mysterious old man dying a mysterious death, and his sixteen heirs competing to solve his murder in order to win his millions. It sounds a bit morbid for a kid book, but there’s some terrific humor and it’s SO. MUCH. FUN.

It’s a book of puzzles and wordplay, where the answer is staring you in the face from the beginning, but you can’t see it until it’s revealed. And it’s one of those books that really should be read. I have never heard the audiobook, but I feel like something would be lost if you don’t have the visual text in front of you. (There’s apparently a movie, too. Which I’ll never watch. I don’t trust it.)

I know a lot of people read a mystery and once you get to the solution, you’re done and you’ll never read it again. Me, I love to reread mysteries to see all the details I missed. And even though I know exactly how it ends, I still enjoy reading it again and again, at least every couple of years.

It still holds up.

I know a number of people who never read (or even heard of) The Westing Game, and when they finally read it they loved it — but were sad they never read it when they were young.

So, if you know of any readers (or even not-really readers) anywhere between fourth grade and seventh grade, give them this book. Save them from a life of regret.

Wayside School

I best remember the Wayside School books being read out in class by my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hall. Every couple of days she would spend a half hour or so reading out loud to us, and we went through both Sideways Stories from Wayside School and Wayside School Is Falling Down.

Goodness these are fun books. I’ve been rereading some snippets, and Louis Sachar really understood the sense of humor of elementary school children. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny to me now as an adult the way it was in fourth grade, but you can still see why we all loved them so.

You kinda have to be a kid to get how someone could accidentally build a thirty story building, when he was supposed to make a one story building with thirty rooms. To a seven-year-old, that kind of absurdist logic really makes complete sense.

I miss those days.

Wonder Boys

And now for something just as absurd, but a bit more grownup.

I can’t read Wonder Boys without wanting to write a novel.

Or wanting to go back to college.

I loved college so much, I went back a few years later for grad school. (It may or may not have coincided with the first time I read this.) And reading about Grady Tripp, English professor and so-called “wonder boy” for his astoundingly great first novel, just makes me miss those days on campus, lugging around a backpack full of books and notebooks and pens, listening to academics waxing poetic on every topic under the sun.

But I digress.

Wonder Boys makes me want to write, but at the same time, it makes me feel like I’ll never reach the quality of Michael Chabon. It’s like getting inspired and being confronted with your own inadequacies all at the same time.

He creates characters and situations that start off relatively normally, but by the end you’re asking, “How in the hell did we get here??” And his use of the English language is astounding; for example:

I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.

or

All male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glory and questionable adventure.

Chabon is a beautiful writer, and he makes the most interesting, flawed characters. Everyone in this novel is crazy, and weird, and broken, and it still makes me want to be in that hyper-literary, collegiate world.

And I still want to write that novel.

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