Some books stay with us long after we first read them. Many endure because of their humor or imagination; others capture unnameable feelings that grow as we grow. Here are seven reads that The Atlantic's writers and editors still return to. It was easy to love this book the first time I read it, when I was somewhere around the age of its protagonist, Francie Nolan, an 11-year-old growing up in Williamsburg in 1912. Actually, that's not quite true. Until I picked it up, I'd harbored a strong suspicion that the book was one of those dutiful, moralistic classics that adults are always trying to get kids to read'important, sure, but probably boring. What I discovered instead was a nuanced, unsentimental portrait of a family and a neighborhood in flux, written in the kind of loving but unsparing voice that could belong only to someone who'd seen (and suffered) it all herself. (One of Smith's wry asides, about the brutality of public school circa 1908: 'Child psychology had not been heard...
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