Guest blogger Mindy Klasky is the author of six fantasy novels, including the award-winning, best-selling The Glasswrights’ Apprentice and numerous short stories. Her latest novel, Sorcery and the Single Girl, is the second book in a series about a love-struck D.C. librarian who discovers she’s a witch. Ten percent of proceeds from the sale of Sorcery and the Single Girl and Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, will benefit First Book.

When I was a child, I loved stories that swept me away, that made me think of the world in a very different way. My first “favorite book” was Goodnight Moon, because of the “Goodnight Nobody” line - I was tickled by the idea that we could talk to “Nobody” any time we cared to. I fell in love with A Wrinkle in Time, traveling with Meg Murray to distant planets. I was swept up in The Lord of the Rings, believing in the struggle between good and evil and the ability of one person to change the world.

I was overcome with a Sense of Wonder.

When I wrote my Glasswrights Series, I tried to weave that sense into my words. I created an entire world, populating it with gods and men, defining its rules and rewards, setting barriers and rewards for a young woman forced to choose her life’s path. In Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft and Sorcery and the Single Girl, I attempted to show “wonder” in daily life, intertwining my librarian-heroine’s real world with a magical one, where she is a witch.

Recently, I started reading a new series of books by Naomi Novik. The first volume, His Majesty’s Dragon, had sat on my to-be-read shelf for months. Friends had raved about the book - an alternate history of nineteenth-century Britain, where dragons and their riders serve the Crown in the war against France - but I had been skeptical. After all, what did I know about the Napoleonic War? I had tried other naval fiction and been bitterly disappointed; even Russell Crowe could not salvage the movie, Master and Commander, for me.

And yet, from the very first page of His Majesty’s Dragon, I felt that old sense of wonder. I believed in Captain Laurence. I loved his dragon, Temeraire. I cared about the characters, and their world, and their plot. I caught myself talking to people as if the books were real. The characters lived for me. I was home again, home in a wonderful, magical, place filled with other-ness.

What books have grabbed you with their sense of wonder?