day 2 of the 30 day book challenge

Day 02. A book that you’ve read more than 3 times

For a while in sixth grade, it got really cool to read. I was excited about this, as it was the only time I could do what I wanted to do ALL the time & get away with it. It was homework; it was a competition; it was what all the cool kids were doing.

We were getting ready for Story Bowl–a Jeopardy set-up, with teams of five kids reading a list of 20 or so books between them. I was on a team that wasn't quiiiiiite as into it as I was. I read 12 on the list, and I made time to read one of them twice.

"Tuck Everlasting"* is a book that calls back the specific details of reading it–the texture of my bedroom carpet as I lay there, sprawled out in my after-school clothes; the frantic feeling that I had to turn pages faster, push further before I got called to dinner; sitting, then laying, then leaning on my side because I couldn't sit still through the chapters. It is a book that represents everything I wanted as a child, and what I find myself still searching for: a great adventure, a world away from what everyone else knows, a recognizable life-changing moment. A situation where a young girl makes a decision that says everything about the way humans should be–for themselves and for each other.

I don't want to spoil the book, so here's a synopsis via Powell's Books:

Ten-year-old Winifred Foster's accidental encounter with the uncommon Tuck family, their hidden spring, and their extraordinary secret transforms her life and leads her to make a noteworthy decision.

 Not enough? Here are the tags that post has: social issues, fantasy, immortality, death/dying, classic, children. And don't cheat. The movie is slush compared to the book, and I still sneak chapters of it when I go home.

My mom found a copy of the book at the library, stuck into a rack of discarded books (a tragic adjective for any book) on sale for ten cents. She brought it home, and I still sneak chapters when I get back home to visit and find myself in the bedroom I share with my sister with a few spare minutes. It's still hard for me to sit still.

Unfortunately, my first reading of it (and the 11 others) turned out not to help my team much. I came down with a terrible flu, missed competition & got a phone call that night saying we'd been knocked out of the first round. They tried, my teammate said, but all of the questions were from the books that I'd read.


*I've been trying everything for months to fix a rather annoying problem: My blog does not register several pieces of HTML. Italics. Boldface. Numeric lists that I don't manually type numbers for. So until this is fixed, I'm stuck with quotation marks on titles. At least this way you understand that this girl understands a thing or two about a thing or two.