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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Joyce Maynard's Top Ten Books

Joyce Maynard has written ten novels, including To Die For and Labor Day, both turned into acclaimed movies, and most recently Count the Ways, an epic portrait of an American family over four decades as it navigates a devastating accident against the backdrop of historical events and shifting  social attitudes. Maynard’s 2017 memoir, The Best of Us, tells the agonizing story of her second husband’s battle with pancreatic cancer – a battle he lost. But she is best known for her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, in which she wrote about her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger, in the process soliciting – in her words – near universal condemnation from those who felt she had sullied a great writer’s reputation. In a 2018 essays for The New York Times, she wrote that the vicious reaction “did not destroy my career or my emotional well-being, but it came close.” Accused by one critic of “oversharing” she offers a pithy response:  “It’s shame, not exposure, that I can’t endure. I’ve lived with so much of it. It’s the things that people don’t talk about that scare me.” Below are Joyce Maynard's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Joyce Maynard'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Time Will Darken It

William Maxwell

Published in 1948, this deceptively quiet, exquisitely subtle novel follows the story of a lawyer and his pregnant wife who allow a group of difficult houseguests to move in with them for what proves to be an increasingly challenging visit that nearly destroys their marriage. For many years an editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell may have been ...

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2
Plainsong

Kent Haruff

Though set in an utterly different world—the high plains of Colorado—and a different time (closer to present days), Haruf’s lyrical, big-hearted  novel stands as an interesting companion to Time Will Darken It. Like Maxwell’s work, this one offers the portrait of a small town and a set of characters—a pair of aging bachelor brothers tend ...

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3
Working

Studs Terkel

Back in the nineteen sixties, radio legend and oral historian Studs Terkel set himself a seemingly impossible challenge: to capture, through a series of wide-ranging interviews, the voices of a vast array of American workers—farmer, librarian, stone-cutter, professional baseball player, nun—speaking about their jobs. Studs Terkel himself remai ...

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4
The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

We all know how Anne Frank’s story ended, though that part isn’t documented in the diary. Still, this is a hopeful book, written by a true optimist. For much of my life, I’ve kept a postcard of her tacked over whatever desk I occupied at the time, to remind me of how lucky I am, to be alive, and writing. I often imagine what Anne Frank mig ...

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5
Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

Though this dazzling novel is now frequently assigned in high school and college English classes, it was out of print during my own young days. Back in 1971, when I entered college, there was not a single course in the Yale Blue Book on African American literature. The name Zora Neale Hurston was unknown to me. Forty-eight years later, when I retu ...

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6
Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

What could be more romantic than the story of a man who holds true to his passion and devotion for the woman he loves for his entire adult life? For me—an incurable romantic—this is the ultimate love story.

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7
A Wilderness Station: Collected Stories 1968-1994

Alice Munro

Choose any collection, you can’t go wrong. Over her long and brilliant career, Alice Munro populated a world of strange, troubled, damaged, unique and somehow also universal characters, set them into motion and let them live on the page. She never wrote a novel, and never needed to. I love the form of the short story—love Mavis Gallant and Shir ...

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8
Charlotte’s Web

E.B. White

Some might call this a children’s book, and that’s when most of us first encountered it. But if you haven’t read this one for a while—or never did (in which case, lucky you: there’s a joy awaiting) –discover it as an adult!  Set on a farm in Maine (once again, I’m drawn to small town American life), and featuring an unlikely cast of ...

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9
Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown & Illustrated by Clement Hurd 

I know, it’s just a picture book. And Monet just painted a lot of haystacks, and the Shakers just made some chairs. But if you ask me (and come to think of it, you did), one of the highest achievements of work that achieves the standards of art with total simplicity. I read this book a few thousand times to my children when they were very small. ...

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10
Several Short Sentences About Writing

Verlyn Klinkenborg

"Imagine it this way,” Klinkenborg says.  “One by one, each sentence takes the stage.  It says the very thing it comes into existence to say.  Then it leaves the stage.”  I pretend, as I read these words, that I am this sentence, stepping away when I reach that last word.  “It doesn’t help the next one up or the previous one down,” ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Michaela Coel's Top Ten Books

“I’m very nervous about doing this,” says Coel with admirable candor. “My memory is really bad, to the point that I forgot how bad my memory was.” She does, however, recall being spurred to spend a summer reading books by her local library which gave a medal to anyone who reached a goal of reading ten books. Coel, the child of an immigrant Ghanaian mother, won that library medal after devouring Marieke Nijkamp’s series of graphic novels for kids, Goosebumps. “I wasn’t really into things like sports, I didn’t dance, so reading really occupied me that summer and took my brain somewhere else, for which I’m forever grateful.” The actress, screenwriter, and director, who found acclaim in the UK with her series, Chewing Gum, and then as the lead in Black Earth Rising, Hugo Blick’s intense political thriller for Netflix, is a keen writer herself: she went through 191 drafts of her autobiographical HBO-BBC series, I May Destroy You, before she felt ready to release it into the world. The series won her a British Academy Award, and she is nominated for four Emmys this year, including for actress, writer, and director. If that was not enough, she has just published her first book, Misfits, based on a wry, moving, often witty lecture she was invited to give at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in 2018 (you can watch it online here) in which she talked about the racism she’d encountered in drama school and the wider entertainment industry. Her book expands on and deepens the themes of that lecture.  Below, are Michaela Coel's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Michaela Coel'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Society Within

Courttia Newland

The first book I read that was adjacent to the world in which I lived. It’s about a girl on a west London housing estate, who is a conduit to the lives of all the other people in her orbit. Until reading this, I didn’t realize that books in which I could recognize people from my own life, could be written.

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2
Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari

I was drawn to the book because of the subtitle: A History of Tomorrow. It had been a year since I left church and I was having what I now understand was an existential crisis and spinning out of my mind: what the fuck is going on, where am I, what is happening? I didn’t understand anything because I’d so whole-heartedly adopted the Bible’s a ...

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3
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson

Because it helped me give less of a fuck.

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4
The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

Originally published in China in 2006, but now translated into English, this took me about eight months to read because I had to keep going back. It’s a book that I struggle to explain—it flashes back and forth in time over a million years and across solar systems—but it totally helped me escape this planet. It’s not offering a utopian visi ...

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5
The Dark Forest

Liu Cixin

The second in Liu’s trilogy (see above), that takes off in new and wonderful ways.

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6
Flowers for Algernon

Daniel Keyes

The story of a mouse in a lab undergoing an experiment to make it more intelligent is juxtaposed with a parallel story in which Charlie Gordon, a cleaner in a bakery with learning difficulties, undergoes the same experiment. It may mean different things to different people; for me it was about what you lose when you trade naivete for intelligence ...

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7
Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut

Reading this reminded me of people who approach life like a video game, without consequence. I love it so much that I included a homage to Kurt Vonnegut in I May Destroy You, in episode two when Arabella is at the clinic and meets a woman who is covered in blood, having been assaulted. The woman says, ‘Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, ...

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8
Exhalation

Ted Chiang

I’m usually drawn to novels, but this beautifully-written collection of short stories was recommended by the same person who recommended Three-Body Problem, and they weren’t wrong.

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9
Poor

Caleb Femi

I’ve never read about life on a housing estate written with such beauty. Femi is a poet, and this is a combination of short stories and poems and photography, and—a little like Society Within--it’s about life for people in working class London who are Black, so again it’s a book in which I saw myself.

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10
The Book of Eels

Patrik Svensson 

I never thought I would see myself in an eel, until I read Svensson’s beautiful book, in which he anthropomorphizes eels and shows how mysterious they are, and how little we know about them. It’s a beautiful book that makes you realize that the eel is our cousin—we are the eel, and the eel is us.

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Mike White's Top Ten Books

When HBO, desperate to feed the pandemic TV appetite, asked Mike White if he wanted to create a new TV show, the veteran actor, writer, and director didn’t need to be asked twice. “The filtration system of getting something on the air is aggravating and time-consuming,” he told The New Yorker recently. “I thought, If they go with this, it’ll be like a boulder they can’t stop. I can do exactly what I want to do.” The “this” was his runaway hit, The White Lotus, a veritable Trojan Horse--a spiky critique of class and privilege dressed up as a murder mystery. A second season was greenlit before the first season--six episodes each written and directed by White--concluded with what was among the most satisfying TV finales in recent memory. White has one of Hollywood’s most eclectic resumes, running the gamut from the comedy musical, School of Rock, to the lauded HBO series, Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, to, well, The Emoji Movie, but his not-so-secret passion is competing on reality TV. He has been a contestant on The Amazing Race, twice, and on Survivor. “As a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does,” he told The New Yorker, “To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird shit and capture your attention.” When he’s not writing, directing, acting, or competing, White is a reader, as this list of books reflects. “These may not be my 10 favorite books, that’s impossible,” he writes. “But these come to mind and are ones I’m always recommending.” Below are Mike Whites's books, available to purchase individually or as a set. Photo: Courtesy of Jason Yokobosky

Mike White'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Independent People

Halldor Laxness

What a masterpiece of a novel. I’ve recommended this book with enthusiasm to so many people and almost none of them have managed to get through it. I have no idea why. It’s funny and brutal and transportive. It’s about a crofter in Iceland putting his poor family through the wringer so he can prove he is an independent, self-sufficient man. A ...

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2
Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

Oh God, this book. It almost made me a believer in middle American Christian goodness. Talk about a feat of imagination and compassion. There’s something about the voice of John Ames that makes me cry just thinking about it. He is a fiction but I don’t care, I love him. Glory be to God.

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3
The Poetics of Space

Gaston Bachelard

This is theory - and French, no less - at its best. It is not “deconstructing” poetry - it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.

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4
Love and Death in the American Novel

Leslie Fiedler

If Bachelard is theory at its best, this is criticism at its best. So funny and inspired and bursting with ideas. I am jealous of anyone who has not read this book - because reading this for the first time is like going on a literary thrill ride through the tropes of our culture. Is it all true? Who cares? It will jiggle your mind and broom out the ...

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5
In the Freud Archives

Janet Malcolm

I think I have read every published sentence of Janet Malcolm. She is non-fiction prose at its sadistic finest. Talk about assuming the intelligence of the reader. She suffers no fools. I chose this book because I share her love for the writings of Freud - for Freud, like her, wanted to crack open the reader’s skull and leave a permanent mark on ...

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6
The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

Like the voice of John Ames, the melancholy Bernardo Soares stays with you forever. I love the values of this book - inertia, passivity, confusion. What an antidote to most things we read. Following around this civil servant as he journals about his mundane, depressing life, I feel weirdly giddy with life’s possibilities. We should all have heter ...

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7
Outline Trilogy

Rachel Cusk

The most uncanny and sober of fever dreams. What the fuck are these books? Why did I chew through them - as if they were the most compelling of murder mysteries - yet nothing ever happens and I can’t remember a thing after putting them down?  Dissociative perambulations but written with such urgency. These books cast a spell on me. Maybe Rachel ...

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8
The Scorpion Fish

Nicolas Bouvier

There are so many travel writers I love - hard to choose one. But Nicolas Bouvier’s writing is unmatched and this book is a major freak-out. Stuck in Galle, Sri Lanka - he loses his mind as he watches strange tropical bugs invade his squalid hotel room. He is in a haunted colonial Hell and the whole time I’m reading, I just wish I could be ther ...

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9
A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul

Speaking of colonial Hells! This is such a strange, grim, beautifully rendered book. Its nihilism about the human condition is so convincing! (And if that’s not a glowing recommendation, I don’t know what is - lol!) It’s hard to call this a “favorite” book but it has stayed with me longer than most. Ugh.

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10
My Lives

Edmund White

So many gay writers have influenced me - Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Stephen Sondheim, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde yadda yadda. I also wanted to include an autobiography. Edmund White is a great writer - so erudite, curious about all things, a great aesthete. And as honest as anyone can be about sex and the motivations of self. Honesty is everythin ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Francois Ozon's Top Ten Books

“My mother was a French teacher, so literature was very important to the family,” says Francois Ozon, the acclaimed film director behind such contemporary classics as 8 Women and Swimming Pool. The director, who in 2002 adapted one of his favorite novels - Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel - describes his childhood reading as a way to understand the world. “I was so curious as a young child, and I was a dreamer, and books were a way to discover the other side of my reality,” he says. “It’s like finding the secret behind the door. My problem with literature now is that I’m always thinking as a director, so when I read a book I’m viewing it through a director’s prism: would it make a good movie? When I was young and only dreaming of becoming a director I could be fully lost in a book.” Ozon's latest movie, Summer of '85, is currently on general release. Below are Francois Ozon's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Francois Ozon'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

I dove into Wuthering Heights when I was 15 or 16, and read it in a single sitting, starting in the afternoon and reading late into the night. I was thrilled by the idea of passionate love. It’s a very English novel, very gothic, whereas French romanticism is more rooted in disillusion. We had a big library in our home and my parents let me read ...

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2
The Lily of the Valley

Honoré de Balzac

I read this for school, and didn’t fully understand it at the time but I remember that I found it shocking. In contrast to Wuthering Heights, this is romanticism in the French style. It’s the story of an older woman, Henreitte de Mortsaud and a young suitor; they have big conversations, they talk about love, but they never have sex.

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3
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

Jean Rhys

A friend of mine recommended this to me in my twenties as a suggestion for a film because Rhys is so good at portraying women’s lives, all of which are in various ways portraits of herself. I love the book, I love the writing, and I love the story of Jean Rhys herself - she was obscure, and unlucky in love for most of her life, and only became fa ...

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4
The Waves

Virginia Woolf

I love the structure of The Waves, which I read in my twenties: to make a portrait of someone who is dead, in which each character has their own point of view, felt truly radical. It’s reminiscent of the Mankiewicz movie, The Barefoot Contessa, but like Marcel Proust she is a writer who would be very difficult to adapt in movies. Neither of them ...

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5
Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi

My mother suggested I read this as a teenager. I remember crying as I read the book. There is a kind of hope in his account of life in Auschwitz that makes his own life story--Levi committed apparent suicide in 1987--all the more devastating. I was destroyed by that. This book is a little forgotten today, but if I had a child I’d ask them to read ...

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6
Angel

Elizabeth Taylor

Angel is the only book I ever adapted into a movie. It’s the ego of a writer who is utterly selfish, like a a portrait of what an artist doesn’t want to become. It’s very funny, very clever, but I now think I should have made it in French.

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7
Time Regained

Marcel Proust

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time functions as a key to the whole series, summarizing what’s come before. You can return to Proust at any point, just a few pages can prompt reflection. It’s such a pleasure to read his descriptions of feelings, of characters. It’s like a Bible for people who love literature, and probably impossible to ...

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8
Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

I read Lolita as a teenager, and would love to reread it from the perspective of these times. Is it a novel in favor of paedophilia or against paedophilia? I think it’s very ambiguous, not least because the reader is in Humbert Humbert’s head. That kind of ambiguity would make it impossible to publish today.

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9
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Roland Barthes

This is a book I turn to when I am stuck or lost. As with Proust, there is always something to learn. I found it in my mother’s library, and I know she was a big fan of the book, so reading it was a way to understand her.

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10
Forbidden Colors

Yukio Mishima

All of Mishima’s books are exotic for us occidental people - they’re very Japanese, with themes of sacrifice, of guilt, of cruelty and humility, and a lot of trauma. Being gay was a big deal for Mishima, and here he describes the gay community of the 50s and 60s in Japan. It’s a book I’d love to adapt but I think that’s impossible because ...

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LATEST BOOKSHELVES

Viet Thanh Nguyen's Top Ten Books

After emigrating from Vietnam with his parents as a child, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and its upcoming sequel The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen spent hours immersed at the local public library in rural Pennsylvania, where his family was relocated. "I vividly remember Curious George, Tintin, Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys," Nguyen recalls. Now, as a father to Ellison, 7, and Simone, 1, Nguyen is revisiting both the classics he remembers from his youth and books he overlooked. "I remember not being attracted to books like Madeline, Babar and Where the Wild Things Are " he says, "whereas I find them more interesting now. Many of these books bear the marks of their time, for good and bad, and I do read some of them with Ellison and try to contextualize them if necessary."  His daughter Simone, meanwhile "can almost say 'book' and has her own library, which she loves to delve into. She picks out favorite books, holds them on her lap, and turns the pages. I’m happy that I’ve developed a culture of reading for them." Though Nguyen is predictably busy as a novelist, the critic-at-large at The Los Angeles Times and a professor of English at the University of Southern California, he makes sure to involve himself in the literary world of his children too. "Although I have a limited interest in the children’s versions of superhero stories that my son loves. But his passion for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Captain Underpants, The Bad Guys, Hilo, and Dogman have brought those books to me, which I think are great. I wish I had had them when I was a kid. They’re great stories and they don’t come with the racial and colonial baggage of the books I had. I’m looking forward to the young adult world of literature that he’ll expose me to." Below are Viet's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Viet Thanh Nguyen'S FAVORITE BOOKS

1
A is for Activist

Innosanto Nagara

Memorable, often humorous poems that teach the alphabet through activist political examples. Never too early to expose your children to Justice.

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2
Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown

Wonderful rhymes and a modernist, surrealist rendition of a childhood bedroom that is so successful it just seems normal.

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3
Superman Smashes the Klan

Gene Leun Lang

Lang updates the Superman origin story with an Asian American, antiracist twist. My 7 year old read it three times in a week.

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4
Baby Beluga

Raffi

The book is based on a song by Raffi that is lovely and memorable, and I like to sing it while I read the book to my children.

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5
Sidekicks

Dan Santat

A graphic novel about a superhero’s pets who are actually superheroes themselves. I love Santat’s visual and narrative style.

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6
Madeline

Ludwig Bemelmans

The French have no idea who this Madeline is and I never read her as a boy, but I’ve come around as an adult.

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7
The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter

The whimsy and charm of Potter’s story and especially her illustrations are truly timeless. I enjoyed this as a child and my son responds too.

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8
The Adventures of Polo

Regis Faller

Visually inventive and wildly imaginative, this book is all pictures and no words. It’s like Buster Keaton embodied by Snoopy and drawn by Salvador Dali.

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9
Sofia Valdez, Future Prez

Andrea Beaty

We love everything about Andrea Beaty. Her rhyming series about children with amazing futures - which includes Ada Twist, Scientist and Iggy Peck, Architect - is a beacon for our family and, I hope, a preview of the future. And let’s hope we see a woman of color president in our lifetime.

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10
Your Personal Penguin

Sandra Boynton

I love this book or really anything by Sandra Boynton. We have so many of her books. But this one with a song by the Monkees’ Davy Jones is the favorite.

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  • Kehinde Wiley


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