It occurs to me now that the books I read when I was young affected me deeply, although it didn’t seem that way at the time. They weren’t presented to me in some sort of Skull & Bones ceremony as sacred texts or anything. It’s just what we had hanging around.
Over 50 years ago, many a child received a well rounded education outside of school. For us, books were scarce, because they were relatively expensive, but the libraries were much better than today, so we weren’t starved for reading material.
I think today’s children are much less well read, and they don’t get exposed to important, goodhearted allegorical images and concepts early in life as much as we did back in the day. Actually, I’m certain of that, because the third book on my list is currently banned. I’m sure others will end up on the pyre sooner or later, if they aren’t already. And the local library? It’s an expensive but useless civic appendix that only exists to collect vile stuff in one place.
This list isn’t intended to be exhaustive. I’ll only list what I can remember of books that were important enough to own, and have malingering on the shelf in our house. They got read all the more, some over and over, because there weren’t that many of them:
Aesop’s Fables– Aesop, I guess
It’s the bargain basement of morality. Something for everyone. Allegory is an important concept to grasp, and the sooner you get it, the sooner you realize that there can be meaning in the subtext of everything.
Aesop’s is training wheels for your soul. As an added bonus, if you’ve read Aesop’s you know where Bug Bunny re-runs got their material:
Grimm’s Fairy Tales– Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
A fairy tale is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish from a fable. Grimm’s is a great introduction to folk traditions, some of which once warned kids off of accepting sweets and story hours from weird strangers. The concept stuck with you, even when the gingerbread house morphed into a man in a van with candy, or a welfare program with strings.
Disney ransacked the Fairy Tale aisle, and he understood them perfectly. The spice of danger was introduced into a young person’s life a little at a time. Now parents watch slasher movies with their toddlers, and worship Halloween. Not the same thing.
Disney wasn’t the only one to make hay from the Grimms. Drop the book and turn on the TV, and Fractured Fairy Tales reruns were on the case:
McElligot’s Pool– Dr. Suess
Dr. Suess showed us youngins that the English language could get up and mambo, and morph into ragtime if you mastered it. Since it rhymed, it introduced children to predicting where a sentence was going as you were reading, mixed in with the fireworks of surprising turns of phrase. Chat GPT could take a lesson.
The good doctor’s Prosody 101 course introduced children to fluency, understanding poetry, reading aloud (which supports public speaking), and is an excellent foundation for writers of all kinds.
Inside all the fun, there are important concepts introduced in books like McElligot’s Pool. It encouraged the reader to listen to others, but also to use their own imagination to see things others might miss. It argued that a vivid imagination and a healthy stubbornness might win over others in the long run. Suess encouraged the reader to look the world over for inspiration, without demanding an alienation from the familiar world to do it. His open-minded view of the world got this book banned for his troubles.
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel– Virginia Lee Burton
I swear I was never able to become an Ivory Tower intellectual because of Mike Mulligan. That little book infects your mind with the concept that practical labor has value, both in a physical and a metaphysical sense. Ingenuity, hard work, and adaptation to circumstances can even happen in a ditch, you know. Those things are harder to find in buildings covered with ivy.
It’s not simply a soppy story because it has a happy ending. Mike Mulligan teaches you that time marches on, and you can fight progress with all your might, but sometimes it’s better to adapt and survive in a brave new world.
In case you don’t know what a steam shovel is, here’s one in action:
Greek Mythology–
I can’t remember the title of this particular book. It served as a pattern book for humanity. Archetypes. After fables and fairy tales, archetypes need to be introduced, and myths is as good a place as any to find them. Greek gods are mostly just descriptions of extraordinary persons, albeit with a key to the executive washroom on Olympus. The pantheon of gods is a catalog of human behaviors, writ large, if you discount the lightning bolts and winged shoes at par. The human horizon is bounded by myths, not facts. This is the book that taught me to look for them.
The Call of the Wild– Jack London
We had White Fang, too. It’s too facile to say you learn about nature from Jack London. What you really learn is that nature has no opinion. You’re supposed to test yourself against its arbitrary whims. It’s a scoreboard, not an opponent. London’s books showed that man, civilization, and nature are three legs of a stool, and something is always trying to saw off at least one of the legs..
Swiss Family Robinson– Johann David Wyss
This book is pretty old (1812), but doesn’t seem so. Unlike most man against nature tales, it pits an entire family against the elements, and eventually against the local pirates. It established the primacy of the nuclear family in overcoming odds together, and explored the friction that happens when people are added to it.
The Three Musketeers– Alexandre Dumas
Forget the Ginger/Mary Ann dilemma. You have to choose early on between Dumas and Victor Hugo. Dumas was ever so much more fun than Hugo. The book demonstrates what lies one step past the adventurous family. The Three Musketeers is a great introduction to growing up, physically, mentally, and morally, and what happens when a young man leaves the nest to make his way in the world. The story demonstrated that notions of individual honor should be subsumed in fellowship with others, or they don’t mean much. It was also a blast to read.
Treasure Island and Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
The original title of Treasure Island was the blase: The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. In its day, it was well regarded by every author who mattered, but eventually fell into disfavor with the usual suspects who lord over libraries and faculty lounges. Robert Louis Stevenson has enjoyed a better reputation in the recent past, but still nowhere near his due. These two books are basically the Ur-volumes of their respective genres, and no matter what the original title says, girls like them too.
Treasure Island is a bildungsroman, and no one has mapped out the moral and psychological transformation of a young man in a more lively maelstrom of action. Treasure Island is in the running for the most durable stories ever told, with uncountable adaptations in text, radio, stage, and screen. Stevenson’s image of a pirate with one leg, an eye-patch, and a parrot on his shoulder remains the canonical form.
At first, Kidnapped seems like more of the same, but it’s more than just a coming of age story. It introduces the concept of justice, not just fairness, which are often two different things. It also illuminates the possibility that two very different people can come together to right wrongs for very different reasons. It’s a fantastic suspense novel, too. The mental image of young David Balfour creeping up his creepy uncle’s staircase in the dark, only to find out it ends in a bottomless pit when lightning flashes, is the scariest thing I ever read, at least until I grew up and got a look at a 1040 Form.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas– Jules Verne
I suppose you could lump Verne in with Stevenson and Dumas in the adventure category, but you’d be making a mistake. There’s plenty of adventure in his books, but the direction the adventure comes from is completely different. It’s technological, geographical, and scientific. It puts the explorer front and center in the action, and often has the whole world as its backdrop, indeed, other worlds, too. Jules Verne’s men of action are the wellspring of characters like Indiana Jones. Captain of the football team and valedictorian rolled into one.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court– Mark Twain
This might seem an odd choice as the primo example of Twain if you had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the shelf. But Connecticut Yankee is a completely underrated book, especially for a young person. It’s funny as hell, which makes it lively reading. But it has trenchant commentary on economics buried in it (Hank almost gets hanged after trying to explain that how much you earn is not as important as what you can buy with it). It’s not quite the first science fiction story, but it’s close. It might be the first time travel book ever written.
It’s a better illustration of the evils of slavery than even Huckleberry Finn, because he points out its evils as a universal practice, not just a local problem. Twain also eviscerates the very idea of inherited nobility, but tempers his opinion by pointing out that progress without checking with Chesterton’s Fence first can be just as unpleasant as being backward.
It was pretty prescient, too. It was written in 1889, and it predicted the kind of slaughter that trench warfare and technology run amok would turn World War I into.
Also hidden in the text is an amusing and touching exposition of courtly love. Hank Morgan falls for “Sandy” while being constantly annoyed with her. A love that lasted centuries.
Of course there are many roads to enlightenment, so you can list all the books you preferred in the comments. If you put Harry Potter in there, I may come looking for you, though.
21 Responses
Hi, Sippi. I was hanging right with you, until you got to London. I did read Call of the Wild, but not White Fang. Moving along… once I discovered SciFi, that was almost all I read, until high school. Among early books, The Sneetches, the 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins, and Bartholemew Cubbins and the Ooblek are among those I enjoyed. I don’t know what lessons I got from them. I’m sure there were reading assignments and book reports in grade school, but I barely recall them. For a time, I did devour everything the library had on Greek and Roman mythology, plus most of the Col. Colby books they had.
Among the SciFi, Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel come to mind as early favorites, as well as a couple from Lester DelRey, the titles of which escape me.
I can’t say that any of these affected me deeply. If so, I lacked the self awareness to recognize it at the time. I was probably more affected by Star Trek.
If we can skip ahead to adulthood, I’ll name Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Atlas Shrugged. I think I’d like to re-read both, but I’m not sure I have the stamina for Rand, and I have a huge list of books I have yet to read.
And Mary Ann, without a doubt.
Hi Jed- Star Trek was one of those things, wasn’t it? It got cancelled pretty quick because it wasn’t popular enough. Then they made four hundred and ninety eight versions of it because I guess it was popular enough. The first one was a blast, so to speak. The others, not so much.
Excellent recommendations. I was overly fond of dogs and horses as a tween, so I read all of Marguerite Henry’s and Albert Payson Terhune’s books from the library. I once did a book report on a Terhune book (fifth grade maybe?) and the other students liked it so much that they wanted the teacher to read it to us. Alas, the language was too advanced for her. Another classic author that is not well known is Ralph Moody of Little Britches fame. Laura Ingalls Wilder is another one who will teach children about history and the realities of life.
Every time I see one of these kinds of articles, I’m reminded of some book I hadn’t thought of in years. Little Britches! Yep. If I understand correctly it was made into a movie, that I saw with my grandmother (interesting how I seem to remember who took me) and then read the book. Which, of course, was more interesting than the movie.
I was poring over The Sword in the Stone long before I was able to understand it (and full understanding came many decades later, with the reading of the entire trilogy as well as the tag-end Book of Merlyn). But things like “Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!” “Poof!” were funny from the start. The deeper meanings, as I said, are really aimed at adults, and adults familiar with Nazism.
In sci-fi, as in all genres, coming-of-age books are everpresent; one series that caught my attention was the Tripods series by John Christopher. I have not re-read these since I was a boy. Don’t know if they would hold up after all this time.
For me a supreme coming of age book, that probably few have heard of, is Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton. Two boys (joined soon by a third) living in rural Canada around the turn of the century go to the woods for a couple weeks to live as Indians. Also full of tidbits of woodcraft.
In the “fantasy of the past” genre, The Taran Wanderer series from Lloyd Alexander caught a lot of my attention. Based on Welsh legends, it’s like a more clearly written Lord of the Rings that doesn’t rabbit on and on like Tolkien.
Of course I devoured the school library’s (rather extensive) selection of sci-fi top to bottom. Less commonly mentioned are Philip K. Dick and Frederik Pohl. Of course everyone knows about “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” becoming the movie Blade Runner, but how many people know that there was a novel called “Blade Runner”, that dealt with underground illegal medical supplies in a dystopian future? (I dunno, maybe everyone knows about this. But I read the real Blade Runner book several years before the Blade Runner movie which has a completely different plot came out.) Much less frequently mentioned is Dick’s “Time out of Joint” which i pretty darn creepy, and I’ll leave it at that. So much of sci-fi predicts trends, not so much technical, but societal. It may be that there were so many thousands of predictions about future society that some of them were destined to come true. But how many people have remarked the similarity of Hari Seldon’s calculator and the modern “smart” phone? The phenomenon of ever-more-complicated armaments that are defeated by something simple. The phenomenon of people operating systems that are so complicated that they have absolutely no idea of how to repair them or how they actually work. The increasing divide between people who work with their heads and those who work with their hands, and the assumption that people who work with their hands can’t use their heads, and that people who work with their heads would be soiled or lessened by working with their hands.
Oddly, I did not read the originals of Grimm’s Fairy Tales till recently, and was interested to discover just how dark they are.
There was a great children’s adaptation of the Odyssey called “Odysseus Comes Home From the Sea” that I think told the story accurately, but of course was way easier for a young person to read than a direct translation of Homer.
The single most fortunate factor of my upbringing was to have a mother who was an English teacher and who fully supported and reinforced the habit and pastime of reading – reading pretty much anything. I don’t think any book in the house was off limits – I guess she figured that if I was old enough to persevere with it, I was old enough to handle the subject matter. Nobody else in the family besides us two was a big reader, but no one opposed it, so I’d go every week or two to the library, come home with a big sack of books, and hole up for days reading till I’d get headaches from it.
The movie based on “Little Britches” was “The Wild Country.” A Disney movie, nothing compared to Moody’s books. Our family’s reading of Moody began with “The Fields Of Home” the story of young Ralph going to live with his grandfather on a farm in Maine, where they clash frequently over the use of modern technology like a mechanical manure spreader. Our kids loved it, especially when we read it out loud by a campfire.
Hi JC- Ah, trips to the library. Fantastic. Before weirdos and computers, I mean.
Hi Omaha- I’m not familiar with any of those, so I had to lean on London for all my dogs and horses requirements.
I learned to read on my own at age 3 because my older brother would start to read the same book over and over…and then stop when he got bored. It was the first of the “new” Tom Swift books, “Tom Swift and His Flying Laboratory”. I’d look over his shoulder as he’d read out loud to me, hanging on every word. And then, about the time he got to the first line drawing (the giant airplane careening around an airport) he would just stop. I got to where I could predict the words, and that led me to figuring out that those letter-thingies had actual meaning in terms of sounds.
It was pretty simple after that; but my pronunciation of new words was…let us say, “quirky”. That, combined with a terrible case of amblyopia, led to some interesting dinnertime conversations when I’d throw in a new word I’d just read and my whole family would turn and look at me to try to figure out what I’d said. We had a World Book encyclopedia that I’d take one volume at a time and read through the whole thing…well, not all of it, the political and biographical stuff I just skipped. But even today I can see in my mind’s eye the page for “Tires” right next to the illustration of the sinking “Titanic”.
The first book I ever read on my own was Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” (same as “jed” above) and I’ve been hooked on SF ever since. I went through the holy trinity of early ’50’s SF (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke) by age 5, and was finally allowed into the adult section of the library because the kid’s section was garbage. I bless my mother, who would take me to the library (a fair drive away) once a week to get my limit of 10 new books every week; I bless the librarians who (used to back in the 60’s) keep a good stock of interesting books for readers.
To this day I spend far more time reading than anything else useful. One of the major requirements for our new house was that I had to have enough wallspace for all of the bookshelves. I read the things I love over and over again, like seeing a favorite movie. I’m compelled to finish a book once I start it, even if I throw it across the room and feed it into the woodstove once I’m done. I feel bad for people who “don’t like to read”; it’s a gateway to other places, things, and people.
Hi Blackwing- I never got to read Tom Swift books. Not enough dough in the book budget, I expect. But I sheepishly testify that because they were in the house, and so was I, I read all of my big sister’s Nancy Drew mysteries. If I recall correctly, they were a cut below Scooby Do in complexity.
First thing I remember reading on my own was from the bookmobile…Gone With the Wind.
I was 10. Then I got The Nun’s Story. Decided not to go to nun’s school.
Never did get around to sci-fi.
Hi Jean- Nuns were a thing back then,, weren’t they? Sister Bertrille, Heaven knows Mr. Allison, The Bells of Saint Mary’s. I love in the Godfather movie, Kay asks Michael if he’d like her better if she were a nun, or barring that, if she were Ingrid Bergman.
Read all those, and loved them. Beau Geste, Count of Monte Christo, The Old Man and The Boy were joys. The Red Fairy Tale Book and its successors were a good substitute for Grimm. One of 10 kids, so never enough money to go round, but the library would hold book sales. $2 for a box of books was a screaming deal, and if they noticed a few swaps of various books from other boxes, they never said a word. God bless those librarians.
Hi Tom- In (Catholic) grammar school, once a year they had book fairs with cheap paperbacks on offer. We loaded up pretty cheaply. The library never sold anything. I’ve been pillaging libraries as an adult, though. They sell, or chuck out, the best books, and in hardcover, to make room for more drivel these days.
To my sorrow, much of what the library sells these days is of the “Eat, Pray, Love” persuasion, and I am not in that target audience. You may enjoy Claire North, The Games House was a fine book.
Much of what is written these days seems to be filtered through an exclusively female screen, as if the publishing houses had decided males are uncultured, smelly, and barely literate. In my case, the first two might well be accurate, but I draw the line at the third. There are no Louis L’Amours out there, writing for men AND women. I would welcome a resurgence of male writers, but it seems unlikely at present. Clearly, that makes me a misogynist, these days.
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you had the nuns…. I had British boarding school in Zambia. Saturday we didn’t exactly have school but we were in classrooms part of the day with literature and art. The first thing Saturday morning after breakfast though we had the library. one was expected to go pick out a book and have it read in 2 weeks an extra week’s grace period was given if needed. they would ask if you read it and you were on the honor system to say you had. I often hadn’t. I was a poor reader and it was drudgery until I found Dr Seuss’s hop on pop. I checked that thing out week after every other week until they told me I had to stop.
Later I found a biography of Wyatt Earp. that is the first I remember of rapture from reading and immediately looking for a book of a similar genre.
somewhere in there was Christopher Robbins now we are six that someone gave my little brother when he turned six I still often think of the Knight whose armor didn’t squeak.
as I got into 7th 8th and 9th grades I discovered the Hardy boys. as an adult I’m very unimpressed by them. as a young man I devoured those and they are instrumental in me being in the mid 90th percentile when it comes to vocabulary and reading. of course there’s always reader’s digest the small snippets of humor they provide. I got bored enough that I started reading the short articles and then finally the one at the end of magazine.
certainly mother goose and the Grimm Brothers was around and I actually read the original translated not illustrated fairy tales which those are really really dark.
earlier I mentioned that Saturday we had art and literature. I remember so many of the different books we read but that was someone reading to me and me just soaking it in. Charlie and the chocolate factory, the George and the giant peach guy Jock of the bush velt, watership Downs, the yearling, Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, Lord of the flies The brare rabbit story, those don’t get read anymore I know that as well as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. man we had a stream running through our playground and we all wanted to build log rafts and sailed to the Gulf. second grade Dr Doolittle 3rd grade water babies. I’ve never return to those but they filled my imagination for a year.. in high school that was introduced to Patrick McManus which is probably not literature but good fun as well as the princess Bride, hitchhiker’s guide series.
listen I know in one of your posts you said you weren’t an author…..but you’re a published something and here’s the most wonderful thing about it is I can’t unload my thoughts to Mark Twain or A. A. Milne but I get to talk to you and have a reasonable expectation that you’ll actually see it. And let’s face it at least some of your writing holds up to any of those guys. I know you did some serialized stuff and never really wrote the last chapter. I’m waiting for an end to some welding stories. but I have often shown that short you wrote about the kind of furnishings have in a baech rental what people do on vacation when they go to the beach. something about fireflies. And I do have your book to so you might not think you’re an author but I got a bunch of tree carcasses that say otherwise…
cheers Leon
Hi Leon- There’s a lot to unpack in that comment. Let’s start with this: you had the nuns…. I had British boarding school in Zambia. If that was the opening line in a book, I’d buy it. Or maybe write it if no one had yet. Graham Greene would be proud.
This right here: I was a poor reader and it was drudgery until I found Dr Seuss’s hop on pop. I checked that thing out week after every other week until they told me I had to stop. Now that’s what I’m talking about. Dr. Suess manufactured readers like GM made cars. His effect was so outsized it can barely be measured.
And thanks for lumping me in with these dead guys: I can’t unload my thoughts to Mark Twain or A. A. Milne but I get to talk to you and have a reasonable expectation that you’ll actually see it. I find that comment particularly piquant, because it has occurred to me from time to time that as a young man, I could have driven down to Long Island and knocked on P. G. Wodehouse’s door, and he probably would have let me in. I likely wouldn’t have learned anything, but I at least could have darkened his doorstep, and his hand towels.
sorry I proof read it after I published and couldn’t figure out how to edit it. if you could delete the first publish in this one I’d appreciate it
I was a poor reader and it was drudgery until I found Dr Seuss’s hop on pop. I checked that thing out week after every other week until they told me I had to stop……Dr. Suess manufactured readers like GM made cars. His effect was so outsized it can barely be measured.
An acquaintance recommended that I look up a Colombian colleague when I took my tour of South America. I gave a Dr. Seuss book in Spanish to his daughters. Years later he told me that his daughters read that book over and over and over again. And over again.
The sister of a childhood friend became an author. When she was an elementary school student she won a statewide essay contest, which pointed to her future profession. A decade ago she wrote an online article about how our local library influenced her love of reading. At the time, the library was open on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoon. The librarian–practically a volunteer—was a sweet elderly woman who got paid a pittance— ?$20 a month.
The author, in recounting her experiences in the library, could remember which authors the librarian recommended her to read. Agatha Christie, for one. She could not remember the librarian’s name. I remembered the librarian’s name quite easily—she was also the aunt of childhood friends. I did not remember any books or authors the librarian recommended me. Maybe I didn’t ask for recommendations, but did my own searching. I recall reading a lot of books on Roman history. That had to be my choice. Or baseball. Or maybe because I forgot which books the librarian recommended me.
Childhood books: Milne’s Pooh/Christopher Robin books. Decades before Disney took them over. Thornton W. Burgess’s animal books. My father kept the Burgess books he read when he was a child, and bequeathed them to his children. The old Burgess books had much better pictures—plates—than the newer versions. Coincidentally, in my adult years I knew a woman who had worked at the Thornton W. Burgess center in the Berkshires.
Peter Cottontail!