Growing up, reading was my lifesaver and my relationship to so many things. I was the youngest of seven kids, so I got lots of books foisted on me by enthusiastic older siblings, mostly science fiction and fantasy. As a teenager, I read through all the New Modern Library books on my parents shelves and used the public library all the time. I filled up notebooks with bad surrealist poetry, then got angsty and burned them. I planned my first novel when I was 12, but it was decades before I actually finished one.
The characters in Little Wrecks read a lot, but in the 70s and 80s it wasn't at all assumed that teenagers would read novels written for teenagers. I did read, and loved, Judy Blume, Madeleine L'engle and S.E. Hinton, when I was 11 or 12, I guess. I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy at least three times before I turned thirteen. We lived in France for a summer with only two books in English between six kids - The Phantom Tollbooth and Dune. We each read them at least twice, I think! Later I just read anything that made me feel or think - sci-fi, fantasy, Modernist fiction and poetry, essays, memoirs and biographies, whatever.
So over at Goodreads I made a Little Wrecks Reading List, using the reviews to explain all the books referred to in the novel, why they're there and what they mean to me.
Coming soon, the Little Wrecks playlist!
