The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
So you’ve begun to get really busy at work and you’re feeling stressed out.
Then you watched The Sixth Sense (by yourself, after dark) so you can discuss it on a podcast.
And finally, you just know you’re going to have nightmares and possibly be afraid of the dark if you wake up having to make that trip out of bed … based on the last time you watched that darned movie.
What do you do?
What DO you do?
You pull out your trusty copy of The Wind in the Willows, that’s what.
This gentle, imaginative tale of small animals who straddle both animal and human behavior in the most charming way will pull you in and have you thinking of Rat’s splendid picnic basket, Badger’s den beneath the Wild Woods, or Toad’s way of being infuriating while his friends love him anyway. It pulled me into that fantasy world as a child and does so again when I read it as an adult.
Highly recommended (after all Teddy Roosevelt can’t be wrong … and this book has his letter to the author in the introduction).