I imagine that most of you love books or you probably wouldn’t read these posts. Books and grammar just seem to have a lot in common.
What is the first book you remember reading? Or owning? Or loving? 
It is probably important to know that I was a kid in the late 50’s and 60s. I remember some books that I read in childhood, although I don’t remember being read to. I am sure I was. Wasn’t I?
The first book I remember is the glossy and colorful cover of a book called Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But I am not sure I ever read it. At the same time, there were a few Bobbsey Twin books hanging around the house. They may have been my mother’s. I might have read a few, but the Bobbsey Twins never captured my attention. If they had ever had dust covers, they were no longer there, and even the covers were drab.
Then my favorite cousin, who was more my mother’s age, bought me two Nancy Drew books: The Hidden Staircase and The Secret of the Old Clock. Those are the first two books in the Nancy Drew series, and I would go on to read many more of them. She was so cool with that roadster she drove. In fifth grade I had a couple of male friends who also got me into the Hardy Boys, so I read a few of those and enjoyed them.
I also remember reading lots of Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a kid. Funny, I don’t like them so much now, And Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. M.y best friend and I would read them just to get scared! “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death” were a couple of our favorites. Oh, and “The Black Cat.”
I guess the book that had the most effect on my life is Mr. Popper’s Penguins because it led to a lifelong love of penguins!
Other books I remember fondly from my early years include The Diary of Ann Frank, Fifteen by Beverly Cleary, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
The only book I remember reading in elementary school was the first grade primer Ted and Sally (otherwise known as Dick and Jane in states besides Massachusetts).
Enter junior high. Why, oh, why, did we have to read such horrible books in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade? I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember Evangeline, that awful poem that begins, “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.” And yes, I still remembered those lines by heart. But I didn’t remember the author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Another real charmer from junior high school was Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Yuck.
And who can forget Beowulf? I don’t know if that was junior high or high school.
I think it was in 9th or 10th grade that I was put in a special reading class for advanced readers. This little club was in addition to our regular English class, but the books were better. I remember only the first book because the teacher talked about it for weeks and weeks before the class actually started. It was The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. This was a much newer book, written in the 1920s!
High school brought more boring books, but I remember only a couple of them. In 10th grade, we read David Copperfield — but only the first third of the book. Why? Who knows? It remains the only Dickens I have ever read, to my recollection. I may have started A Tale of Two Cities at one time. The Scarlet Letter was banned in my high school (yup!), so we read The House of the Seven Gables. Not too bad, I guess. I am sure we must have read something by Shakespeare, but I don’t remember. In fact, I don’t remember any other books we read in high school except the books I read in Latin: Julius Caesar in tenth grade, Virgil’s Aeneid in twelfth grade, and in eleventh grade…..Cicero????
Boring as my junior high and high school class reading was, I didn’t give up on reading! During those years, I read some science fiction, a genre that I don’t read at all now. I read some Asimov, I know. And I continued to read Agatha Christie. It is likely I didn’t do a lot of outside reading in junior high and high school because I had a lot of homework, being in college prep classes with Latin, calculus, etc. And I had my piano lessons and dance class….although I didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities in junior high school or high school except high school yearbook editor — for which I was chosen; I didn’t volunteer. My Latin teacher picked me because I loved Latin and he liked me.
to be continued….soon
****Photo pictures CSG Women’s Thermals
My first real novel was ‘Gone with the Wind’ by Margaret Mitchell. I was 8 at the time and the librarian refused to let me check it out – said it was inappropriate for my age. My uncle checked it out for me. There was a neatly trimmed piece of paper taped over the word ‘damn’ (Rhett’s farewell comment to Scarlett). I removed the paper, not wanting to be cheated. I suspect the librarian knew what my uncle was doing – it was a small town.
Loved Gone with the Wind…..but I was older than eight when I read it!
What a great post!
I remember, aged about 3 or 4 (1945) sitting on my father’s lap learning to read children’s comics. Then the trouble when I started school because I could already read he had taught me the names of the letters ‘wrong’ (actually right: ay, bee, see …) because the school used ‘phonics’: ah, beh, keh …)
Later (about 10) we had a supply teacher while our form teacher was on maternity leave. He introduced us to books probably too old for us (Moonfleet, 39 Steps) but only had us read the first few chapters in class then leaving us to find the book in library if we wanted to finish it … a fantastic tactics as I became almost a fixture at the local library.
As a lifelong insomniac, I’ve read literally thousands of books while the world slept. My main passion was scifi and I think I’ve read everything published before about 1970 (Clark, Asimov, Heinlein, etc)
That supply teacher, whose name I sadly no longer remember, played a large part in turning me into the person (and author) I became.
39 Steps – I believe I have read that one…..I wonder if that was the point of reading the first third of David Copperfield, which I never finished on my own to my recollection. I think it was more a time issue.
More on the books I had to study:
The Old English and Middle English works I had to read in the original and translate (‘render’) into English.
From the Old English (or rather West-Saxon, to be precise): Beowulf, including the Finnesburg Fragment, which interestingly may be derived from a small town in the northern province of Groningen in the Netherlands: Finsterwolde -> fin’s ter wolde (Fin[n]’s [burg] in the wood[s]); the Old English Elegies; Juliana; Cynewulf’s ‘Elene’; The Wanderer and its companion The Seafarer; last but not least, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
All these texts served as material for the study of the language and the literature (I scored, respectively, 9 and 8 out of 10 for these prelims.
My nine-and-seven-twelfths-year-old granddaughter is getting quite fluent in English (what with TV series, films and gaming …), and I once quoted some Old English to her. The compassionate, pitiful look on her face has ever since been haunting me …
From the Middle English:
My favourite Middle-English poet was Chaucer: I wrote my thesis on the ‘fabliaux’ (rather spicy stories) in the Canterbury Tales, because I think that writing a thesis ought to be fun.
I passed.
My granddaughter could now discern a few ‘modern’ words from the opening lines of the Prologue: ‘Whan that Aprille … with hise … March hath … to the …’.
And then onwards to the ‘Ancrene Riwle’ (Guide for Anchoresses); Layamon’s ‘Brut’; ‘Ormulum’; ‘Havelock the Dane’; ‘Pearl, Patience, Cleanness’; ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’; Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’; John Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’; and works by Lydgate, Hoccleve, Skelton, William Dunbar, to name a few …
(to be cont’d)
Thanks for the comment….my favorite reading is pure entertainment, although there was Chaucer!
I love Chaucer – in the original. But I could never go as far as my brother who taught himself Classical Greek so he could read the Iliad, etc in the original
I don’t think I liked Canterbury Tales very much….and my reading taste has gotten much more low-brow as I get older!
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I take it that it was not ‘awful’ because of the poetry, but rather because of the theme?
Horrible what those Brits did to “… the primitive, simple-minded Acadians.”; not my words,
but to be read in Longfellows’own introduction to the poem.
It is one of the poems I chose to read when I studied English: it was mandatory to include
some poetry, prose and plays from Modern American Literature.
I found it in “A New Complete Edition, including ‘Miles Standish’ [1858] and other Poems”
from 1859, not a first edition, but a second-best new edition.
The whole thing was just awful to me. I still don’t like reading poetry. The only poet I have ever really enjoyed is e.e.cummings.
Or i.i. goings, perhaps?
Ha!
I can’t recall having been read to, either. The very first book I recall having belonged to me was a children’s book of Bible stories. I was not quite five years old. I honestly believe I must have taught myself to read. Luckily, my mother had a really nice collection of books that I enjoyed reading after that managed to read that first book. Jane Eyre was one of my childhood favorites.
I loved these books, though I read Ivanhoe all the way through. Yes, and The Bridge Over the San Luis Rey. I managed to slog through the plays of Henrik Ibsen, Sister Carrie, and Madame Bovary which for unknown reasons, I even read twice. Cyrano de Bergerac convinced me that European prose and poetry of the period was . . . not my cup of tea. I simply loathed Sister Carrie. Egad. I also read The Scarlet Letter which seemed so very dark and dismal–and miserably unfair. Yes, I read Evangeline, too. In elementary school we read the Dick and Jane books, and another series (which I don’t recall the name of) but one book was called something like, If I Were Going. It whetted my interest in travel. (It’s a good thing I married a Naval officer!) I’ve read a boatload of Shakespeare’s plays, Longfellow, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Poe, The Comedy (or the Divine Comedy, if you will). I even read The Odyssey (but not the Iliad–go figure). That was in my freshman year of college. The first paper I had to write in that class was to compare and contrast the Masque of the Red Death with The Tempest by Shakespeare. I had actually read both of them, but for the life of me, all I could think of regarding them both was that neither one of them had anything at all to do with the other. I really had to dig hard to finish that paper. I may have read Pride and Prejudice more times than any other human alive. (I’m not joking, either.) I must have read Mr. Poppers Penguins, too, since I’ve had a lifelong love affair with penguins. (That’s a secret, by the way. ) But then, I also like Sea Otters. I read a few old versions of The Bobbsey Twin–books my father had read as a little boy. I loved them, too. I read several Trixie Belden books, too, when I was a trifle older–and a nice little book called The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Everybody always knew what to buy me for birthdays and Christmases. Books weren’t among my secret pleasures. I’ve read the classic Sci Fi books, too: Asimov, Pohl, Silverberg, Herbert, Heinlein, Bradbury, Arthur Clarke–but the most haunting one of them was a short story called The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. Shirley Jackson kept me awake one warm August night in Albuquerque, New Mexico while reading The Haunting of Hill House. I nearly froze to death and a tall currant bush in front of one of my bedroom windows kept scratching against the glass because the wind had risen after the sunlight departed from the night sky.
I’ve always loved, loved, loved the smell of old books in old libraries–loved going into the stacks in my college library. I’ve always wished I had had the time to read everything inside. I’ve traveled the ages, the entire earth, and even danced among the stars in books. I can’t imagine living in medieval times when entire herds of deer or cattle were required to make a ream of “paper”. A book was quite literally a gift for a king.
I love your comment! Thanks. I am going to respond to some of it without giving away part 2 of my series, which is likely college and young adulthood…..I may have read Madame Bovary, and I remember I loved Wuthering Heights. No Ibsen that I remember. No Cyrano or Sister Carrie. Shakespeare and others came later as I was an English lit major along with journalism. I may have forced myself to read the Odyssey in adulthood when I found it in my daughter’s room (or school, on her part). I finally did read Pride and Prejudice. I also loved Little Women. And I finally read Jean Eyre. I probably read a few Bobbsey Twins because they were there, but I don’t think I was very impressed, next to Nancy Drew! I think I read some Bradley and Heinlein, and I know I liked Dune by Herbert. Thanks again for the great comment!
Okay, you made me think about it, so I’m leaving a comment. Anne of Green Gables –all seven in the series, but I read the first one over and over. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I think I read the first three in the series but I read the first one over and over. I liked the idea of the wardrobe that opened onto a winter wonderland. I had a favorite Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits, because they made gingerbread cake with peaches. Alice in Wonderland, I read over and over, just through the tea party. I didn’t understand the rest of it. I don’t remember any assigned books. I think we had to read Tom Sawyer, but it was read aloud in class also. These are the childhood classics I remember. Oh, also The Borrowers. I thought it was magical.
Loved Beverly Cleary, but I cannot ever remember reading any of the others you mention. I must have read Alice in Wonderland! I don’t like fantasy now, and maybe I was always like this!! I liked mysteries….no magic for me, I guess.
My first book was ‘Dick and Jane’ when I was four-years-old. When I was six and in the 1st grade, it was the required textbook so the teacher let me read the newspaper.
That’s funny — I can picture you reading the newspaper at your first=-grade desk!! I don’t know why we had Ted and Sally instead of Dick and Jane!
It was funny when she called on me to read an article about our assistant principal. I pronounced the word assistant as ASS-it-tant. He was in the room at the time and I was never called on again.
🙂 🙂