Childhood books

Sheila has a post up about children's books that influenced you.

Some of mine are totally predictable, but some are less known.

1. The Chronicles of Narnia. I first got "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" as part of a set of books - it was five books, called something like "Classics of Children's Literature." Black and green bindings. Also had Mary Poppins, and Wrinkle in Time, and Little Women, and one other...some horse novel, I think. (I never cared for "horse novels" like Black Beauty when I was a kid).

Oh, wait. National Velvet. I don't think I ever actually read that. Part of it was that horses scared me a little (and still do). They're so BIG. And they can break your foot by stepping on it without their even knowing.

But back to Narnia - later on, a relative of mine (I think he was a second cousin) passed his entire set on to me, with a series of letters describing each book. (The idea was: I was supposed to read them in order. I wasn't allowed to open the next book until I had read the previous one. The letters were to pique my interest for the next book.)

Well, I TORE through the books. Loved them immensely. I loved the language. I loved the talking animals, that they could be grave and dignified, that they weren't just cartoons. (I loved Reepicheep, and I cried when he set off to find "the Utter East" in his little coracle. And like Lucy, I would have been horribly tempted to pick him up and hug him at times.)

I still re-read them from time to time. I know, they have their detractors (Philip Pullman is one), but I love them. I don't see them as being misogynistic (a common charge) at all - basically it is a chivalrous world with slightly different rules from our own, that's how I always justified it, when I needed to.

2. The Moomintroll books. I loved these for the characters. Tove Jansson (the author) apparently patterned them after people she knew. What I loved is that the characters were IMPERFECT. They had flaws. They sniped at each other sometimes.

My favorites - and the one I have sort of adopted as a bit of a "totem animal" (though without the religious significance) were the fillyjonks. They were a group (species?) of tall thin creatures. Only females seemed to show up in the books. They were flighty and houseproud and worried and tended to "borrow trouble." And I loved that these books had a character that I felt UNDERSTOOD me. (one of my father's classic admonitions to me as a child was to tell me not to "borrow trouble.")

And besides, sometimes the books are very droll. And they have this great otherworldly quality to them.

3. My Side of the Mountain. Jean George. This is the story of Sam, who ran away from home (with his parents' blessing!) to go and live in the woods in upstate New York. He finds a hollowed-out tree and makes a home in it, he tames a falcon to hunt for him, he makes salt from walnut twigs (funny how I remember that all these years later). It read like a how-to manual of self-reliant living.

I loved it.

I wanted to run away and live in the woods and catch my own dinner and endure storms and all of that. I wanted that solitude and that sort of meaningful work - where you had to keep your own self alive.

But even at eight or so, I knew that was a fantasy.

I still read "back to the land" type books to this day (both novels and the how-to manuals that you can buy out of the back of places like Mother Earth News). They make for great fantasy reading. But I know, as soon as I ran out of toilet paper, I'd be coming back out of the wilderness.

4. No Flying in the House. Betty Brock. This was the first "chapter book" I remember reading at school - it was in first grade, it was during "free read" time (do schools still do that?). It was from the classroom's "library" of books.

It was about an orphaned girl, Annabel, and the fairy-guardian who watched over her - Gloria, who took on the shape of a dog.

I must not have read the whole book though - or I forgot the second half. For years I remembered it as ending very hauntingly. Annabel had done something that had mortally offended Gloria - maybe it was that she revealed she was a fairy to someone? And Gloria sat down in the rich lady's curio cabinet and WILLED herself into a tiny golden statue.

So sad. And it seemed like a perfect ending to the book - very open, very haunting.

Well, years later when I tracked down a copy at the used bookstore, I found out there was a whole other half to the book - Annabel found her parents again (she was actually only half-fairy; her father was human). There was a conventionally happy ending - with the reunion, and Gloria going on a "world tour" to show off the tricks she knew, that sort of thing.

You know? I like the way it ended when I read it as a child better. (I really do wonder if the ending in the newer version I found was a later addition; I so strongly remember Gloria turning herself into a statue and that being that from my childhood reading).

5. This isn't a fiction book, but it was one that affected me a lot (and, ha ha, I found the title again): Steven Caney's Kids' America.

I had this book out from the library All. The. Time. (I remember it as having come out about the Bicentennial, but the Amazon page says 1978...)

It was basically a big compendium of STUFF - how to make things, recipes, games. I remember it had a recipe for corn dogs and how to make mobcaps and clowning and handwriting analysis and all kinds of crazy stuff. It was basically a book that celebrated American history and American culture by showing kids how to make stuff that related to topics.

I had a "magpie brain" even as a child - where I was interested in tons and tons of things and I could get interested in new stuff easily, and this book totally fed that interest.

So there's my five. There were a lot of other books that were important to me as a child:

The Beatrix Potter books. Part of the reason I loved these was that the library in my town had the little Frederick Warne library-bound editions - tiny green hardback books, which all lined up in a row on the shelf and looked so appealing to me. I think we checked these out and read them multiple times, first when I was of the appropriate age, and then when my brother was.

The Bill Peet books. These were big picture books, mostly about animals. He had one about a capybara, I remember, which made me curious about them. And he had a couple about mythical animals - a dragon and a griffon. (I loved mythical beasts when I was a kid). I think I read all of these multiple times as a child (again, these were mostly library-books).

It's funny, you know? When I think about the Beatrix Potter and the Bill Peet books now, I can picture the children's room (the way it used to be, before they renovated and "modernized" the poor old library) of the library in my town. I remember the funny reading-benches, which had the tops set at about a 45 degree angle, so you could sit and read and prop your book on the lip at the bottom of the table, and it would be at an ideal angle for reading. And I remember the "Story Hour" that they used to have - in the cold tiled basement of the library! (But it was still fun; we had such a wonderful children's librarian that it didn't matter that we were relegated to the basement for Story Hour.)

I also remember reading "She was Nice to Mice" (by Ally Sheedy, no less!). And the Daniel Pinkwater books which were bizarre and wonderful.

Any my mom checked out (from the adult section) Edward Gorey's Amphigorey. (My mom has a bizarre sense of humor; she loved his "Bug Story" where the red bugs and green bugs and blue bugs are invaded by a big black bug that terrorized them, until they all conspired together to drop a shoe or something on the big black bug. Hahahaha. I can still picture the bugs at the end of the story, all dancing around the corpse of the big black bug.)

I remember as a child, summer afternoons - either when it rained, or when it was too hot to go out - going into the living room with my big big stack of library books, and lying on the couch (which I was not allowed to do otherwise) and READING. And just having the time and freedom to read for hours on end. It was great.