Our Favorite Writers Share Their Favorite Childhood Books
Ben Dolnick, author of AT the BOTTOM of EVERYTHING
My Teacher Fried My Brains, by Bruce Coville
This book is a sequel, apparently, to the better-regarded My Teacher is an Alien, but I had a child’s happy indifference to convention (as well as a child’s happy ignorance of the meaning of the word “sequel.”) The scene that got me was when Duncan, the book’s hero, gets taken onboard an alien ship. There he encounters a device that turns each of his thoughts instantly real—he imagines a bowl of ice cream, and there one is. This didn’t occur to me as a metaphor for reading or for imagination, despite the fact that I was right then clutching just such a device. For the first time in my reading life, my brains had been happily fried.