There are special books that mean the world to us, that we carry all our lives and that would be among the first things we would rescue, in theory, from a fire. Assuming we had the time. And the presence of mind. Which we almost certainly wouldn’t.

Still, there are books that we love and among the best are those that inspire a love of reading.

As much as I love Rebecca and Jane Eyre, the books that kept me inside my house, getting paler and more bloodshot by the day, were the Point Horror series, especially anything by R. L. Stine.

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I read and reread R. L. Stine books. I loved R. L. Stine books. I paid library fines for R. L. Stine books.

There’s no way I read all the Point Horrors when I was growing up, but I always wanted to, and there’s always my retirement to plan for…