This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Some books stay with us long after we first read them. Many endure because of their humor or imagination; others capture unnameable feelings that grow as we grow. Here are seven reads that The Atlantic’s writers and editors still return to. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith It was easy to love this book the first time I read it, when I was somewhere around the age of its protagonist, Francie Nolan, an 11-year-old growing up in Williamsburg in 1912. Actually, that’s not quite true. Until I picked it up, I’d harbored a strong suspicion that the book was one of those dutiful, moralistic classics that adults are always trying to get kids to read—important, sure, but probably boring. What I discovered instead was a nuanced, unsentimental portrait of a family and a neighborhood in flux, written …