The First IMPORTANT Book You Read

I remember dozens of books from my childhood.

I can picture myself breezing through any of the interchangeable dozens of American Girls books my mom had been forced to buy us on the dark, carpeted hallway that led to my father's tiny den. Or see me and my sisters snuggling up against my mother as she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, or cried through Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember gloating about the 437-page length of Amy's Eyes (though I now have no recollection whatsoever of what the book was about), a book I was directed towards after I exhausted my elementary school library's stock of John Bellairs stories, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.

But everyone has a FIRST most-important-book. A book that changed things for you, made you a reader, somehow inflected the literary life you've had since. 

For me, that book was James and the Giant Peach. 

I was five years old, and I'd been reading on my own for about a year when my mom handed it to me. It was a big-kids' book. It had real chapters. And the illustrations half-terrified me. 

I loved it.

I was so overwhelmingly proud of myself for being able to enter this world on my own, and I think, to some extent, it helped form my worldview. 

I mean, for anyone who knows me, can you think of two better adjectives than "childish" and "dark?" 

If I had to pick an author whose career I would most want to emulate today, Roald Dahl might top the list; his books for children are entrancing, but always a bit disturbing. The adults are grotesques, and the children face physically--and more importantly, emotionally--terrifying challenges. 

And alongside that career, one which launched a thousand readers (The Witches and Matilda were special favorites, too), he wrote some of the most blackly hilarious, occasionally perverse short stories for adults...ever. He was a literary Willie Wonka; as a kid, all you see is a man giving you free candy. Look more closely, and that chocolate is dark. 

So what were your "most-important books?" (I can list others--all of Tolkien, Alice in Rapture, Sort Of, and the entire Miss Nelson series, in fact, everything Harry Allard and James Marshall did together--immediately spring to mind.) 

Is there one that you can remember as the first book that meant something more?