caroline d emerson

International Book Giving Day

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International Book Giving Day Website

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

Stephen King

Books I Would Give to Everyone:

  • The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim DeFede
  • The Magic Tunnel by Caroline D. Emerson

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else.

George Saunders

Others Recommendations:

  • WRITING: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style from the Copy Chief of Random House by Benjamin Dreyer
  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
  • POLITICS: Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America by Jared Cohen
  • MEMOIR: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
  • Life’s That Way by Jim Beaver
  • SPIRITUAL: A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals by Thomas Merton
  • A Walk with the Saints by James Martin, SJ
  • POETRY: Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Poetry and Color by Mary O’Neill, John Wallner, illustrator
  • FICTION: Here be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

Mary McLeod Bethune

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else’s story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Download and color your bookmark today!

International Book Giving Day Bookmark. Permission to use. One per person. (c)2023Download

World Book Day

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On this World Book Day, I’d thought I’d share my favorite books.

The Magic Tunnel by Caroline D. Emerson was my very favorite book as a child. I still have it although the book jacket is almost long gone. It takes place in New York City and the main characters, children about my own age at the time took the subway and ended up somehow in New Amsterdam. It was a combination of my favorite things: time travel, history, and being that I lived in NYC it seemed plausible to my child mind.

Maybe one day I would get on the subway and end up somewhere far away and long ago.

My second favorite book came to me as an adult while working at Waldenbook’s. It was the cover illustration that caught my eye, and of course the title: Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman.

Like The Magic Tunnel this was also historical fiction, no time travel though; this time taking place in Medieval Wales during the time of Llywelyn Fawr, the Prince of Wales. It set my on a path of learning Welsh history and discovering myself. I was enthralled with the story and even more enchanted by the author’s note that revealed how much of the fictional account had actually happened, including burning mattresses, adulterer’s murdered, and in the third book a kidnapping by pirates! Not to mention the release of Llywelyn’s son from the King’s custody as spelled out in the Magna Carta no less.

Everything you could ask for in a book!

The most recent books I’ve read (out of about eighteen for the year so far), and all that I would recommend include:

Lily Dale: The Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker,

The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho,

When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and

Inside Camp David: The Private World of the Presidential Retreat by Michael Giorgione.

50-31 – The Magic Tunnel

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The Magic Tunnel by Caroline D. Emerson was one of my favorite books as a child, and it still resides on my bookshelf. I will take it out on occasion and thumb through it, reading bits and pieces and remembering what I loved about it.

It was multi-genre, taking on adventure, history and historical fiction, and time travel, and it probably influenced the direction of my interests more than I would have thought at the time. It had everything a voracious reader in elementary school could ask for.

I spent my elementary years in NYC – Queens with grandparents in both Queens and the Bronx. The brother and sister in The Magic Tunnel also lived in New York City, and in taking the subway, something I did with my uncle and on class trips, they found adventure in the past before NYC became New York. It was originally New Amsterdam, and in their travels, they met the original Dutch colonialists, the Native Americans already living in the area, and Peter Stuyvesant.

They explored the Dutch settlement and saw other aspects of Dutch colonial life and recognized much as what they had been learning in school as well as straightening out some misconceptions from that time period.

In the years after reading this, I immersed myself into history and science-fiction, still two of my loves. I also continue to have an unfinished novel from college in the same multi-genre way, combining time travel, adventure, and history. Without realizing it, I’m certain that The Magic Tunnel was a strong influence to begin and continue that story. Even today, I still come back to it and try to tweak and add elements, thinking maybe the story is relevant and can still go somewhere.

After college, I joined a re-enactment group to study and fully immerse myself in The Middle Ages.

I still love train travel, and am thinking of how to take a train trip for a writing excursion, although I’m not sure that I want to travel to another dimension or plane.

Published in 1964, it may certainly be dated and somewhat stereotypical, but it is still worth a look to see how our past was perceived and may have been perceived by two elementary age siblings just trying to get home.