I've been meaning to do updates on some of the We Recommend questions for a while, and happily, someone has actually gone ahead and made this exceedingly easy for me by writing in. Remember when we asked people for ideas about an initiation ceremony? Well here's what happened.

There were many interesting suggestions, many of them of books I haven’t
heard of or read (and mean to investigate further), and many of them books of
which I thought “aha, now there’s an idea!” – especially the Earthsea books,
Neverending Story, and Peter Pan. I also quite liked your suggestion of doing
The Jungle Book for the second time J But in the end, I changed my focus and went for Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter
by Astrid Lindgren. If you haven’t
read it, the book starts with the story of how the girl Ronia is born. She has
dark hair and dark eyes, like my daughter, and all in all it fitted quite
nicely as a description of how overwhelmed and joyous one feels as a new parent
to the miracle that is a newborn child.

This, to me, is what has been so very excellent about having this blog. Not only are all sorts of interesting ideas tossed around by you guys, but there is an apparently endless stream of interesting book recommendations. So thank you, everyone who writes in for recommendations, everyone who suggests books, everyone who comments; it's really a pleasure.