Monday
Many of the memory-sharing conversations I had with my brother this past weekend—they were in town for our mother’s memorial service–involved the books that absorbed us as children. These books occupy 22 three-foot-long shelves, with the topmost ones accessible only by means of a special library ladder. I learned that sometimes we had similar reading experiences and sometimes not, which is only to be expected as my youngest brother Sam is nine years younger than I am.
For my own archival purposes, I’m listing some of our favorite books and book series. Please let me know if any of these are on your own life list:
–Louisa Mae Alcott’s Little Men. For some reason, this was the book we had, not Little Women, so I missed the back story.
–James Barrie, Peter Pan. Absolutely magical although unexpectedly dark.
–Betsy Bates, Beans in Your Ears and six others. Betsy Bates was my aunt so we recognized when she used my cousins in her fiction. Her books came out when I was older so I missed their magic.
–L. Frank Baum, the Oz Books. We had 20 of them, passed down from my grandmother to my mother. Especial favorites were The Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and Rinkitink of Oz.
–Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Both were among my very favorites. Later I came across The Little Princess, which I also enjoyed but not as much.
–Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, The Little Lame Prince. A disturbing but fascinating fairy tale.
–The Maxfield Parrish illustrated version of The Arabian Nights. Absolutely magical but, as it was abridged for children, lacking the sex that I discovered later when reading adult versions.
–Paul Berna’s The Knights of King Midas. One of my favorite novels growing up, largely because it’s a group of kids working together.
–Michael Bonds Paddington books, which I enjoyed as a child but discovered I couldn’t read to my own kids because they were so repetitive.
–We have three or four of Walter Brooks’s Freddy the Pig books. We devoured the complete collection in the American Library in Paris.
–We have eight or nine of the Thornton Burgess animal books, which my father loved as a child but which I could never get into myself.
–The N.C. Wyeth-illustrated versions of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and The Dearslayer. I’ve come to appreciate Mohicans but preferred Dearslayer as a child.
–Jean Craig’s My Side of the Mountain and the sequels. My kids loved these growing up.
–We have most of Roald Dahl’s children books—I missed them as a child but read them to my own children, who loved them.
–C. Day Lewis’s The Otterbury Incident. One of my favorites, and the copy we own is the exact copy that I used to check out from the library—and which my parents bought for me at a library sale.
–Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. In the pantheon of children books I loved, this ranks very close to the top.
–Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. Also much beloved.
–Milt Gross’s Nize Baby. My father used to read this example of Jewish humor to us with a fake Yiddish accent, which I now find myself wondering about.
–Ryder Haggard, She, King Solomon’s Mines, and Alan Quartermain. Wonderful adventures, especially the second.
–Lucretia Hale, The Peterkin Papers. These 1880 comic stories about a family which is always getting into trouble were somewhat formulaic but we loved them. The family is always set straight but a “lady from Philadelphia,” who bails them out with common sense solutions.
–Brian Jacques, Redwall and other books in the series. These came along in time for me to read them to my kids, who loved them.
–We have a complete collection of May Justus’s books, most of them autographed and one dedicated to me and my brothers. May Justus was a mountain woman from Grundy County, Tennessee and a good friend. Although she was shunned by many for supporting integration, the local library is now named after her.
It’s getting late so I’ll finish up with the rest of the collection later this week.