I “owned” dozens of books, some of them confiscated from my parents’ shelves and others bought with my allowance. A few can still be found on the shelves of my old bedroom, including a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers, a long-forgotten series of volumes to which my parents wisely subscribed on my behalf. It was the Best Loved Books series that introduced me to Beat to Quarters, Call of the Wild, Jane Eyre, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Sherlock Holmes stories, among many other good things. They were, to be sure, abridged versions, but what did I know?…
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