Who doesn't love books? Books are great! See below for a couple of my favorites.
The Phantom Tollbooth
As you can probably see from the photo, my copy of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is quite well-worn. The cover has been taped back on, in fact. This is because I have had this book since I was a child (it is a children's book, after all!) and have completely lost count of how many times I have read it since then, even as an adult.
The book begins like this:
Milo encounters a strange tollbooth in his bedroom, and when he decides to set it up and drive through it in his toy car, he finds himself in a thoroughly unfamiliar world in which he makes friends, has an adventure, and finds when he returns home that everything looks "new—and worth trying."
The Lathe of Heaven
You may notice that this book also does not exactly look new, although I have not had it as long as The Phantom Tollbooth. After college, I spent a year living with my sister and working at a discount bookstore while I applied for master's degree programs. The job had its pros and cons, but certainly one of the pros was the employee discount; I acquired many books that year (both good ones and bad ones), and this was one of them. It was always a delight to encounter a book by a favorite author lurking in the back room, buried among the boxes of publisher overstock.
At one point I actually thought that this copy was gone forever. I made the rookie mistake of lending it to someone with whom I had been on a handful of dates, thinking that this person would be in my life for a little while. I was, of course, wrong. But in one of the rare cases when having a Facebook profile comes in handy, I ended up receiving a message—maybe a year or so after the fact, I don't quite remember—inviting me to catch up over coffee and get my book back.
I generally love Ursula K. Le Guin's writing, but she was so prolific that some of her output is a bit forgettable for me. The Lathe of Heaven, however, is a gem. It is high-concept science fiction that packs an emotional punch; in short, it does it all in 184 pages.