I Read All These Books and Boy Are My Lips Tired
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.
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