My Life in Books – Part 1
I imagine that most of you love books or you probably wouldn’t read these posts. Books and grammar just seem to have a lot in common.
What is the first book you remember reading? Or owning? Or loving? 
It is probably important to know that I was a kid in the late 50’s and 60s. I remember some books that I read in childhood, although I don’t remember being read to. I am sure I was. Wasn’t I?
The first book I remember is the glossy and colorful cover of a book called Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But I am not sure I ever read it. At the same time, there were a few Bobbsey Twin books hanging around the house. They may have been my mother’s. I might have read a few, but the Bobbsey Twins never captured my attention. If they had ever had dust covers, they were no longer there, and even the covers were drab.
Then my favorite cousin, who was more my mother’s age, bought me two Nancy Drew books: The Hidden Staircase and The Secret of the Old Clock. Those are the first two books in the Nancy Drew series, and I would go on to read many more of them. She was so cool with that roadster she drove. In fifth grade I had a couple of male friends who also got me into the Hardy Boys, so I read a few of those and enjoyed them.
I also remember reading lots of Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a kid. Funny, I don’t like them so much now, And Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. M.y best friend and I would read them just to get scared! “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death” were a couple of our favorites. Oh, and “The Black Cat.”
I guess the book that had the most effect on my life is Mr. Popper’s Penguins because it led to a lifelong love of penguins!
Other books I remember fondly from my early years include The Diary of Ann Frank, Fifteen by Beverly Cleary, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
The only book I remember reading in elementary school was the first grade primer Ted and Sally (otherwise known as Dick and Jane in states besides Massachusetts).
Enter junior high. Why, oh, why, did we have to read such horrible books in 7th, 8th, and 9th grade? I don’t remember all of them, but I do remember Evangeline, that awful poem that begins, “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.” And yes, I still remembered those lines by heart. But I didn’t remember the author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Another real charmer from junior high school was Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Yuck.
And who can forget Beowulf? I don’t know if that was junior high or high school.
I think it was in 9th or 10th grade that I was put in a special reading class for advanced readers. This little club was in addition to our regular English class, but the books were better. I remember only the first book because the teacher talked about it for weeks and weeks before the class actually started. It was The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. This was a much newer book, written in the 1920s!
High school brought more boring books, but I remember only a couple of them. In 10th grade, we read David Copperfield — but only the first third of the book. Why? Who knows? It remains the only Dickens I have ever read, to my recollection. I may have started A Tale of Two Cities at one time. The Scarlet Letter was banned in my high school (yup!), so we read The House of the Seven Gables. Not too bad, I guess. I am sure we must have read something by Shakespeare, but I don’t remember. In fact, I don’t remember any other books we read in high school except the books I read in Latin: Julius Caesar in tenth grade, Virgil’s Aeneid in twelfth grade, and in eleventh grade…..Cicero????
Boring as my junior high and high school class reading was, I didn’t give up on reading! During those years, I read some science fiction, a genre that I don’t read at all now. I read some Asimov, I know. And I continued to read Agatha Christie. It is likely I didn’t do a lot of outside reading in junior high and high school because I had a lot of homework, being in college prep classes with Latin, calculus, etc. And I had my piano lessons and dance class….although I didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities in junior high school or high school except high school yearbook editor — for which I was chosen; I didn’t volunteer. My Latin teacher picked me because I loved Latin and he liked me.
to be continued….soon
