From the Riverbank to Middle Earth and Beyond

I received Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows as a present on my seventh birthday. My mother probably read it to me at least fifty times in the next few years. A cousin suggested it as a gift for me. One of her teachers fi nished out class time reading aloud from her favorite books, of which The Wind in the Willows was one. I later learned that my cousin's teacher continued to read it every other year for the rest of her life. Her devotion to it and the comment of an adult fictional character on TV that The Wind in the Willows was her favorite book convinced me that it isn't just for children and that I could go back to it. I now read it once a year.