Influential Books

Well--with all those reading friends out there--NO ONE has tagged me to do the "Ten Books that have Stayed With You" list.  So I am doing it anyway--but am dividing it into two lists:  books from adulthood, and books from childhood.

These books from adult years (of course the Bible also) have stayed with me.  There are others, but like the others who have done this list, I could go on and on.  This does not include the classics that I have read with literature classes.  That's an entirely separate list.

1. My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers.  I still remember studying this book with my dear college friend, Barby, night after night, in our summer staff dorm room.
2. Shadow of the Almighty by Elisabeth Elliot.  Barby and I devoured this one also.
3. Lies Women Believe by Nancy Leigh DeMoss
4. A Gospel Primer by Milton Vincent
5. To the Golden Shore by Courtney Anderson, moving and thought-provoking biography of Adoniram Judson.
6. MacArthur commentaries - several of them.
7. A Garden to Keep by Jamie Langston Turner, my favorite, for deeply personal reasons, of her many novels.
8. Musings of a Mother by Doris Coffin Aldrich - taken from her magazine columns ("Out of the Mixing Bowl") and now out of print; her lovely devotional style of writing as the mother of nine in the early '60s is worth trying to find a copy on eBay, Amazon, or elsewhere.
9. Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Deibler Rose - outstanding missionary book.
10. Birds of Eastern North America by Roger Tory Peterson.  My go-to book for birds for 28 years now.

These books from childhood or young adulthood have stayed with me:

1. All the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. Separate Star, The Edge of Time, The Years of the Locust, and others by Loula Grace Erdman.  She was a fiction writer in the 40s and 50s, and her characterizations are outstanding.
3. The Cherry Ames series by Wells and Tatum.  Standard young adult series fare, but I loved them - especially Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse and Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse.  These books captured for young adults some of the timeline, and some of the horror, of World War II.
4. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
5. The Peggy series by Dorothy Martin - Moody Press around the same time as the Danny Orlis series.  There were about eight books or so in the series, such as New Life For Peggy, Open Doors for Peggy, and so on.  
6. The Bible in Picture for Little Eyes by Ken Taylor - we read one of these stories every night when I was a child, and the illustrative paintings are classic. Also Stories Jesus Told by Butterworth/Inkpen - actually from my children's childhood.  Great re-tellings and artwork of Jesus's parables.
7. Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories - loved by my siblings and me, as well as my own children.
8. Not My Will and Light In My Window by Francena Arnold.  These are still favorites and were more from young adult years than childhood.  She was an early novelist for Moody Press.  I think many of today's modern popular Christian fiction writers need to read Not My Will and take a lesson from Arnold's outstanding pacing in her plot and character development.
9. Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Ferris.  As a child, I loved reading this, or hearing my mother read this.  I also remember Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.
10. Grosset and Dunlap Signature Series biographies such as The Story of Edith Cavell, The Story of Florence Nightingale, etc., and many other The Story Ofs. . . . These were the go-to biographies when I was young, and there are many historical titles.  Two of them are the middle picture above.

I'll think of many more later.  That's just the way it goes.  But here they are for now!