Reading is not fundamental for entertainment anymore. We read to find out what time a movie is showing or to keep current on news, but few of us curl up under a blanket on a crisp autumn night with a good book. Instead of using our own imaginations to create the pictures, we have television, movies, the Internet, radio, and audio tapes do the work for us.

Wouldn't it be horrible if, due to the lack of usage, the muscle in the brain that helps us imagine and create images based on the written word atrophies and stops functioning? Okay, this probably won't happen anytime soon, but just in case, annabelle wants to get people using their noggins and reading again.

And, we're not talking about those New York Times bestselling books that people read to impress. No, we're talking about those forgotten books that not only entertain, but also have an emotional impact on us.

We asked some of annabelle's friends what books made the biggest impact on their lives. Our poll asked the following questions: What book made the biggest impact on you when you were in fourth grade, eighth grade, and high school? What book was the biggest waste of time? What book did you dismiss as a child only to rediscover it as an adult? And, finally, what book would you recommend that everyone read now?

Our pollsters were mostly in their mid-to-late twenties and early-to-mid thirties (Generation X-ers, for you Douglas Coupland fans). We threw in a couple old-sters to spice things up. An x and a number in parentheses after the title and author shows the number of times a title was mentioned in that category. Here are the results:

Biggest Impact - 4th Grade (15 titles)
This must be the age of high impact because more books were mentioned here than in either eighth grade or high school. Highly impressionable, this is the age when boys and girls are discovering the differences of the sexes and curiosity is getting the better of them. Children are living in that in-between phase of pre-adolescent innocence (Charlotte's Web and Encyclopedia Brown) and teenage sexual awakening (Joy of Sex and Our Bodies Ourselves).

Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank, et al.
Encyclopedia Brown, Donald J. Sobol
Forever, Judy Blume
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E. L. Konigsburg (x2)
Joy in the Morning, Betty Smith
Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort
Nancy Drew, Carolyn Keene
Our Bodies Ourselves, Boston Women's Health Book Collective
Stuart Little, E. B. White
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Judy Blume
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Outsiders, S. E. Hinton (x2)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Biggest Impact - 8th Grade (10 titles)
Another period of individual discovery, here it seems kids are developing more sophisticated ways of viewing the world around them. Their minds are also being challenged, but given the lack of title numbers, it seems kids are not that interested in literature. They're probably too busy figuring out if Billy a) likes Cindy, b) likes likes Cindy, or c) doesn't like Cindy and likes Bobby instead. (Circle One).

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
Exodus, Leon Uris
Firestarter, Stephen King
Forever, Judy Blume
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
Prometheus, Aeschylus
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
The Pigman, Paul Zindel
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough

Biggest Impact - High School (11 titles)
We all know high school is a stressful time. If teenagers aren't focusing on "the rest of their lives" and studying for their Advanced Placement tests, they're being humiliated over a dropped tray in the cafeteria (The Scarlet Letter), figuring out 101 ways to rebel against adult figures, or trying to make some sense of a very confusing world (The Catcher in the Rye). This is the age where high test scores are vehemently pursued, along with the perfect prom dress. It's hard to find time to just simply be entertained by a book. Only nerds did that.

The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
It, Stephen King
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (x2)
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Stranger, Albert Camus (x2)
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

"The Pearl was pointless..." Go To Page 2

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