Author Guest Post + Contest: Amy Plum with Kate's Bookshelf

Here today is Amy Plum, debut author of Die for Me, to share some book picks. But these aren't just any favorites. Nope. These come right from Kate, the protagonist of Die for Me! And then stick around after Kate's spotlight to enter for your chance to win a copy of Die for Me!

 
Thanks, Kari, for asking about my bookshelf!

I should say that I’ve always been a big reader. While my sister Georgia was playing with neighborhood kids in the park, I was perched up in a tree with a book. And not much has changed since then. (Except for the tree.)

My favorites when I was little were the “Eloise” books and “Madeleine” books, not surprisingly set in New York and Paris: the two cities I’ve spent the most time in. (We’ve spent summers in Paris with our grandparents for as long as I remember.) Followed by the “Anne of Green Gables” and “Little House on the Prairie” books.

When I visited my grandma in France, she would read in French to me. I pretty much memorized la Fontaine’s fables (which EVERY French person knows) and Charles Perrault’s fairy tales (Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard—and no, those aren’t English stories!). I loved the Fantômette stories by Georges Chaulet (about a teenage masked crime fighter) and “Vendredi ou la vie sauvage” (“Friday and Robinson”) by Michel Tournier.

Around eleven or twelve, I really got into fantasy and science fiction. I did love the Harry Potter books, but most of the books I read were straight off my mom’s bookshelf, so a bit “vintage”. (She would have hated me saying that.) For example, I loved Tolkein’s “Ring” trilogy, C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” series, Madeleine l’Engle (loved “A Wrinkle in Time”), Isaac Asimov (especially “Foundation”), Heinlein (“Have Spacesuit, Will Travel”), and Bradbury (especially the “Martian Chronicles”).

Oh, and I went through quite a mystery phase as well, and read almost every Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers book out there (I loved her “The Nine Taylors”, and named one of our cats “Wimsey” after her detective—Lord Peter Wimsey). I loved the Sherlock Holmes books as well as “A Strange Disappearance” by Anna Katharine Green. And I gobbled up P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves books and Wilkie Collins’s “Woman in White”.

But since I moved to Paris, I’ve been missing New York, and am devouring novels that are set there. “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is probably my favorite book, and I’ve picked it back up lately. “A Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin is pure magic. I really enjoyed the immortal/history-visiting side of “Forever” by Pete Hamill. “Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey” by J.D. Salinger are so New York that I can almost taste bagels when I read them. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote is wonderful. “Washington Square” by Henry James is a classic. And the Edith Wharton books, especially “House of Mirth” and “The Age of Innocence” are amongst my all-time favorites—I love to imagine myself in her Old New York. Chaim Potok’s book “The Chosen” took place not far from where I lived in Brooklyn, and I truly loved its peek into the Hassidic Jewish life that I saw only from the outside.

I could go on and on. This is just a little dip-of-the-toe into the lake of books that I love. Ask me again in a year, and I’ll give you completely different lists!

 Thank you, Kate, for sharing your favorites! I was a huge fan of Madeleine when I was growing up too, and Narnia is certainly a classic for any age!


Now for YOUR chance to win a signed copy of Die for Me, just fill out THIS form!

Contest IS international, and ends May 15!

No entries will be accepted through the comments, but they are very welcome!

What were some of your favorites growing up?