The Gift of Reading – Part 2

Last week you read a guest post from Lorraine Segal about the gift of reading she received in childhood.  Her words made me remember snippets of my childhood that involve books and reading. 

When people read my memoir, they tell me they are surprised by how much I remembered. While I may not remember what I ate last night, I do remember things clearly from my youth — but really snippets that are clear as day, not entire sequences of memories. I may remember what I wore to a certain event, but nothing about the event itself.

First of all, I want to say that I am sure my parents — or at least my mother — read to me, but I don’t remember any of those books that were read to me. One of my first memories of books was of  a few books that we had in the house. I am not sure if they were bought for me or they were my mother’s books, since these books first came out in the early 1900s. First, there were a couple of Bobbsey Twins books. I just looked them up on Amazon, and the originals (hardcover of course) had green covers, which is exactly what I remember. I think I read them, but they were not my favorites, and I don’t know if we ever added to that small collection. The other book I remember clearly is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I remember our copy had a glossy cover with a color picture of Rebecca. I couldn’t find the cover I remember on Amazon. I probably read that one, but it doesn’t stand out in my mind. Another book I had as a child, one that I think was bought for me, was Uncle Wiggly and His Friends, which according to Amazon, first came out in 1955, which makes sense. And the cover I remember is the one in this post and on Amazon. 

I was very close with my maternal grandparents, who lived around the corner, and I spent a great deal of time at their house. I remember a fairly small, narrow bookcase that was next to a chair I used to sit on in the corner of the living room. On the top shelf of that bookcase was a collection of classics — it looked as if it perhaps came from the grocery store when they used to give a new book out each week (am I dating myself?). I think among those books were Thackeray’s Vanity Fair,  Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Little Women might have also been there. There were probably fifteen or twenty books on that shelf. I don’t know if I read any of them, but I used to look at them a lot. 

My cousin — who was closer to my mother’ s age — bought me my first two Nancy Drew books, The Hidden Staircase and The Secret of the Old Clock. I loved them and went on to read many, many Nancy Drew books. I tried reading one of them as an adult, and it wasn’t quite the same, but now that I am writing this, the urge hits me again to read a Nancy Drew book! (I just reserved one at the library – the print book, since reading it in e-book form just didn’t seem quite right.)

In fifth grade I had a couple of “boy” friends who introduced me to The Hardy Boys, so I read a couple of those too and liked them.

My best friend through elementary and junior high school  and I got into reading Poe and used to scare each other with our own Poe-like stories. We would say that the birds (probably pigeons) in the air were really bats. I remember The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Gold Bug, The Telltale Heart, etc.

I haven’t read science fiction in decades, but I did read it as a kid. I remember reading Heinlein and Bradbury — and Frank Herbert’s Dune at some point. Maybe I was older when I read that one.

I still like a good mystery — mostly cozy mysteries now– but I was a big fan of Agatha Christie in my youth and read a lot of her books.

Some of my favorite books from my preteen and teenage years were A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Good Earth, and especially Fifteen by Beverly Cleary. 

Poetry? e.e.cummings. I don’t read much poetry, and he is still my favorite.

And I cannot forget the magazines my best friend and I would read. Aside from the fan magazines, we read Teen and Seventeen, where we learned our first things about makeup and fashion. There were two famous models at the time: Colleen Corby, a brunette, and Teri Reno, a blonde. I would pretend to be Corby, and my blonde friend would pretend to be Reno.

In junior high and high school I started writing song lyrics (my ambition at the time was to be a songwriter), and I faithfully read Billboard Magazine. When I thought I might not become a songwriter after all,  I decided I wanted to write for Billboard Magazine; that is really what started my whole writing career — although sadly, I never wrote for Billboard. 

The awful things we had to read in junior high and high school at that time also stick in my memory. Evangeline by Longfellow: “This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks” (yuck). And Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (double yuck).  And David Copperfield wasn’t much better. In my high school in Massachusetts, The Scarlet Letter was banned, so we had to read The House of the Seven Gables. And Moby Dick, which I didn’t like. I do remember being put in a special reading club for more advanced readers, maybe in 10th grade? We read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge Of San Luis Rey. For some reason, I never forgot that one. And my favorite book? At least from my “youth”? A Separate Peace by John Knowles, although I was a bit older when I read it. 

I like to read now as much as I ever did. Call me a nerd. And thank you for the compliment!