Like so many others have said, hard to narrow it down to three. I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was quite young, maybe around age ten. I loved it but was puzzled by it. It was my first taste of the horrors of the Holocaust and I didn’t understand why they were in hiding in the first place. I was probably too young to be reading it. But it did intrigue me and I continued reading and still read books set in World War Two, specifically about the mistreatment of Jewish people.
The entire series of books by Maeve Binchy also left a mark on me. It’s all fiction but I love her writing and could just drink it up. What I enjoy about her books is that she writes about regular people. There’s nothing extraordinary in the characters or plots. But somehow she makes their stories so very interesting. It’s actually what got me thinking about doing some of the interviews I did when I first started writing. I love how the average unassuming person can have such a cool back story. Those are the stories I like to tell. I’ll take an average Joe over a Kardashian any day.
It’s hard to list just one more but I can’t leave out Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty. I know I’ve mentioned that book time and time again but honestly I learned so much from reading it. I learned how to think better and act better. It’s a constant daily struggle. I wasn’t born with one of those naturally sunny and upbeat dispositions. So I have to keep reminding myself what a good person is, and try to live it. I fall off the being good wagon all the time and sometimes my kids will tell me and so I climb back on it. I think that’s what counts though right? The trying.
bloom.planted.north 
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