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March 26, 2010
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More books
All this talk of influential books is making me think about the books that shape us before we hit our teens and can read at a more or less adult level.
Some of the books I remember reading before I was ten--and that are still very much with me, very much a part of my imagination and general sensibilities:
--Charlotte's Web. Read more times than I can count.
--Harriet the Spy. Ditto. I got a notebook. I spied. I wrote. I don't spy anymore, but I watch very closely. And I still write.
--The Oz books. Not The Wizard of Oz, but all the rest of them. Amazing stories, amazing illustrations. Plus, a little known fact, an early tale of transsexual identity formation! (Ozma was not always Ozma, and not always a girl.)
--Roots. Read at nine; rocked my world.
--Gone With the Wind. Also read at nine. I was so proud to be reading a grown-up book. It had 1029 pages and the cover featured a lurid picture of Rhett Butler bending over Scarlet O'Hara's heaving breasts. I tried to keep that covered up when I was reading in public.
--The Once and Future King. "Fewmet" is the best word ever.
--The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It changed my sense of landscape, of forests, of rings, of hairy toes, of perseverance, of friendship, of wonder. Or maybe "changed" isn't the word -- "shaped" is probably more true.
--Lots and lots of kid biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Helen Keller. I loved their goodness and their strength.
--Diary of Anne Frank. It's very hard to get children--or even young adults--to develop a sense of history. They have no history themselves. But this did it for me.
--Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I was fanatical about Judy Blume. I wrote her a letter. Amazingly, she wrote back.
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Comments:
I was ten in 1960 - Balzac's Droll Stories - My Mom told me it was too adult, so I read it.
I have this old version of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales (I've seen facsimile reprints at Barnes & Noble, alongside many other versions). I read that thing cover to cover at least a dozen times before age 12.
It's interesting to read it as an adult and see all the torture, rape, and incest that somehow went over my head as a kid.
Of course, I read Hobbit and LoTR (The Ringwraiths gave me nightmares at age eight).
The King James Bible (which we had and read from frequently in my house. My parents made it a point to actually have our family read it out loud all the way through from beginning to end and then start over again. Including all the boring stuff in the Old Testament).
The Phantom Tollbooth.
The Chronicles of Prydain.
Fewmet! I got it from a Wind in the Door.
L'Engle! I especially adore everything about the opening of A Wrinkle in Time, which so memorably begins: "It was a dark and stormy night."
Before I was ten? Jeepers. I'm feeling pretty old--about all I can really remember is The Wind in the Willows. Between ten and thirteen, as I was being groomed for my bar mitzvah, they had me reading the Bible (aka the Old Testament for those who read the rearranged version). The Book of Joshua made a pretty big impression and might well have been what set me on the road to atheism. It was probably a couple of decades before I could really see how much there was to value in the scriptures.
Great about covering up Gone With The Wind! Who killed RHETT BUTLER? No one has written it until now: www.deathofrhett.blogspot.com
Great books, Ms. O'Connor. But may I suggest that these are not the most appealing to young boys?
I would add almost any of the legendary Encyclopedia Brown series, and one of my childhood favorites, "Clyde Tombaugh & The Search for Planet X".
Any for young teens, Issac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" is a must!
I loved Encyclopedia Brown. Also the Great Brain books -- very good for boys, too.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton, Walter R. Brooks's Freddy the Pig series, A Wrinkle In Time, the Danny Dunn kid sf series, Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander, the Three Investigators mystery series, the Horace Higby series, the Boy Scout handbook (I was too young, but bought a copy at a garage sale), various paperback reprints from Mad magazine.
