Gone

Madeleine L'Engle has died. As an adult, I find her books insipid and sentimental. But as a kid, her books introduced me to science fiction and the awesomeness of physics. They made me consider science and religion in new ways, and made me think of ideas that probably led directly to my agnosticism. They gave me lonely, outcast female characters that I could identify with, and presented those characters as heroines. They had an enormous effect on my childhood and are the first books that I remember devouring over and over again, to the exclusion of all else.

A few years ago, I bought all of her books that I could find at Half-Price so that they will be on the shelf waiting to be discovered by the next generation when the time comes.