Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Get Me Feeling Nostalgic

Top Ten Tuesday is an original weekly meme feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. We’d love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists. For the list of past topics and future schedule, click here.

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Books That Get Me Feeling Nostalgic 

These are two of my top nostalgic books. I could add several more, but the post would be forever long.

Looking for Alaska ~ John Green

I understand there are many people who have read more recent reads of John Green’s and have burned out, and that there are others who do not appreciate this book due to the topic. This book means the world to me, and every time I think about it or look at it, I am reminded of the vibrant life of my cousin. Alaska is so like my cousin Ricky, who would be 31 this June. Like Alaska, he had inner demons that plagued him that he could not share or work through. The vision he had of his life and his future were exactly like Alaska’s: bleak.

I read Looking for Alaska in my adolescent literature class, which was a requirement for my degree plan to teach middle school language arts. At first I wasn’t very excited about this book, and somewhere along the way I fell in love with Pudge, the Colonel, Takumi and Alaska. I was blown by the sheer dedication Pudge had for Alaska.

This is the only John Green book I have read, and I am so grateful John Green wrote it. I am thankful my professor required this in our reading selection. Six months after I read this book, we lost my cousin Ricky. I would never have read this book after losing Ricky. Never.

It’s been almost five years and I still remember that day with crystal clarity. There is no amount of love or emotion that time can erase, and that is the love that Pudge has for Alaska.

 

The Snitch, Houdini, and Me: Humorous Tales of Death-Defying Childhood Misadventure ~ Johnny Virgil

Johnny Virgil is hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. I wish I lived on their street as a kid. I might have been a selective friend and kept my distance for the love of life, but I still wish I had lived on their street because they are awesome.

Johnny, his younger brothers (The Snitch and Houdini) and his friend Markie (The Slug) come to life in this incredibly funny collection of memoirs. I reviewed this book summer of 2013 in my first year of blogging.

The stories and shenannigans that Virgil details remind me oh so much of my cousins Ricky and Mikey as kids, and all the hell they put me and my cousin Crissy through. Oh, those china berry trees…how they got us in so much trouble! Reading this brought back so many wonderful – and scary – memories of my own childhood.

Even as a girl, I can relate to and appreciate this wonderful collection of life stories from a time of the past when it was “Go out and play and don’t come home until it’s dark.”