What can you ever really know of other people's souls...? - CS Lewis

[If Babelbabe were a college subject, and you majored in it, more fool you, these are some of the required reading texts. They are subject to change, and the bookstore may not carry all of them.]

Childhood, or: I Was an Awkward Child
Roller Skates – Ruth Sawyer
Emily of New Moon/Emily Climbs/Emily’s Quest – LM Montgomery
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
The Katy books – Susan Coolidge
Every Trixie Belden ever written
The Cat Ate my Gymsuit – Paula Danziger
The Grounding of Group Six – Julian Thompson
Below the Salt – Thomas Costain
Came a Cavalier – Frances Parkinson Keyes
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood – Howard Pyle
Little Women/Little Men/Eight Cousins – Louisa May Alcott
Madeleine L’Engle’s fiction for children: Time trilogy; also Camilla, And Both Were Young, The Arm of the Starfish, and the Austin books

Education, or: How I Learned to Read What I Read
Satanic Verses/Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Robber Bride/Blind Assassin/Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Possession/ the Frederica Potter quartet - AS Byatt
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Red Noses – Peter Barnes
Arcadia – Tom Stoppard
Works of John Donne
Essays of Francis Bacon
Animalia – Graeme Base
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Pride and Prejudice/Northanger Abbey/Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Religion, or: How Christianity Screwed Me Up
Ethan Frome/House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood – Christine Rosen
Virgins – Caryl Rivers
The Small Rain/A Severed Wasp – Madeleine L’Engle
Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
The Bible, King James Version

Relationships, or: Nobody’s Perfect
A Big Storm Knocked It Over – Laurie Colwin
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
Spending – Mary Gordon

Family, or: Why I Have an Excellent Therapist
The Mask of Motherhood: How becoming a mother changes our lives and why we never talk about it – Susan Maushart
The Shell Seekers – Rosamunde Pilcher
Brain, Child magazine

Career, or: I Didn’t Have the Energy to Go to Med School
Ambulance Girl – Jane Stern
When the Air Hits your Brain – Frank Vertosick
The Coming Plague – Laurie Garrett
The Corpse Had a Familiar Face – Edna Buchanan
How Reading Changed my Life – Anna Quindlen
Ex Libris – Anne Fadiman
The Polysyllabic Spree – Nick Hornby
The Library – Sarah Stewart
Chicago Style Guide, 14th edition

Pastimes, Hobbies, and Interests, or: Just Because I Enjoy Reading about Mt Everest Doesn’t Mean I Want to Climb It!
Shark! Unpredictable Killer of the Sea – Thomas Helm
Eiger Dreams/Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex – Nathaniel Philbrick
The Runner’s Handbook – Bob Glover
The City of Florence – RWB Lewis
Home Cooking/More Home Cooking – Laurie Colwin
The Persian Pickle Club – Sandra Dallas
Jaws – Peter Benchley
Voyage of the Narwhal – Andrea Barrett

Viscera, or: The Essence of Me
Stones from the River – Ursula Hegi
The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
All of Josephine Tey
The Salterton trilogy – Robertson Davies
The Secret Garden – Mary Hodgson Burnett