Good morning, readers. The lovely and talented plf515 is off this morning, so I'm filling in. This diary is where we discuss what we're reading, what we've read lately, what we recommend and what we condemn. Sometimes we have a theme, as we do today, which is Favorite Books from Childhood. A lot of these will be children's books, but some might not. Depends on how fond you were of rifling through your parents' bookshelves or the local library. I'm also not limiting this to early childhood, but all the way through your teens. My own list includes books that I read as a child and also books that I read to my daughter when she was a child, so pretty much anything goes, as long as it had some sort of impact on you. So let's jump below the fold, and I'm asking that as well as being Gentle Readers, you are also gentle, readers, as this is my first diary on DKos. Let the foot-wetting begin!
I was lucky as a small child to live in a house full of books, and only two doors away from a branch of the San Francisco library, where I lived when I wasn't at home. My father was a writer and we had writers coming in and out of our flat all the time, usually broke ones cadging free meals or a place to sleep when having a roof over their heads was a daily crapshoot. Generally I didn't pay them much attention, because I was too busy reading everything I could get my hands on. I loved having the library on our street, it was a safe haven to hang out in, and the librarian watched over me with the fondness of one reader toward another.
That doesn't mean I didn't get out and run around and play, I did. One summer some kids had set up a lemonade stand down the block, and I was jealous that they were making money--I wanted in on the action. I didn't have any lemonade, but I did have books. Specifically, I had my dad's books. First editions and autographed copies of everything from The Maltese Falcon to On the Road. So, thinking I was being terribly clever, I set up a used-book stand on the street in front of our building and began trying to hawk my dad's precious collection. Fortunately, he caught me before any books got away, and he was mad at first but couldn't help laughing about it later. "What really hurt," he said, "was that you priced them all so cheap!" That's true: the sign on my stand read "All Books 5 Cents." I am guessing that in my mind, I was really competing with Lucy's Psychiatry Booth.
On to the books:
Happy Families: It seems like a lot of the books that I read as a kid had to do with families, whether happy or not. I was envious of large families because I came from a small one, so I enjoyed reading Cheaper By The Dozen and its sequel, Belles on Their Toes, as well as Clarence Day's Life With Father. I loved My Sister Eileen, and laughed at the adventures of the girls in Junior Miss. I was more disturbed by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Diary of Anne Frank. And I couldn't have gotten through childhood without the incredibly enjoyable memoirs of James Thurber, especially stories like "The Night the Bed Fell on Father." Most of these books were classics when I was a kid in the 60s...I wonder if they still are? I know Anne Frank is, but Clarence Day?
Fairies, Talking Animals, and Hobbits (oh my!): I have always loved stories about animals, beginning early on with The Color Kittens, Edward Lear's The Owl and Pussycat, and Are You My Mother? I also loved all of the Dr. Seuss books, and classic fairy tales like Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen. I was so enchanted by Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass that I truly believed there was a whole other world behind the mirrors in our house. Later on I got hooked by The Hobbit and other fantasies, including Mary Stewart's Merlin/Arthurian novels. But here I have to say that I am a bit jealous of my daughter's generation, because they have all this stuff PLUS the fantastic Terry Jones' Fairy Tales and Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, among others.
When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be a Gumshoe: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were fun, but in my world they didn't hold a candle to Tintin. We used to line up in front of the school library to be first to get the new Tintin books when they arrived. Now my daughter has most of the Tintin books, so that's another obsession that passed from one generation to the next. In middle school I was reading Mary Stewart's mystery/romances (The Moonspinners, The Ivy Tree, Airs Above the Ground, etc.) as well as starting in on classic Hammett and Chandler novels, which I still love. Another gift from my daughter's generation are the Hank the Cowdog books, which are hilarious.
That's just a taste of the books that got me through childhood. Now I'd love to hear about yours, as well as what you're reading this week.
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