The Gift Books,Part 3: Classics I Loved To Read

"It was A Little Princess that I loved most. I thought then and I think still that no more wonderful story for little girls was ever written. It has everything a good tale ought to have- a hero and a villain (or rather a villainess) and a princess in disguise (for Sara is really a princess because she is so noble) and a mysterious benefactor and magic and many adventures and a happy ending.It is much better than Cinderella, which it resembles, because it could have happened.

Probably in fact, it is a Classic. For a Classic is not something, as you may have wrongly believed, which you have to read in school and is very boring. It is a book so entertaining that it pleases people for years and years and years and readers never get tired of it." -Forward by Phyllis McGinley to A Little Princess

A Little Princess was first published in 1905. It is solidly in the classic tradition of 'orphan' stories, not all of which are written for children,but most of which feature a main character who is abandoned, stolen or loses their parents, if they have ever known them at all. Dickens had pretty much cornered the hit market on orphan boys for decades, with both Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, but nowadays the first literary orphan to come to mind is probably The Boy Who Lived, the deservedly famous Harry Potter.

Of course there are girl orphans as well, Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, and of course, Jane Eyre. Frances Hodgson Burnett herself would also write The Secret Garden, about the orphaned Mary Lennox (I owned this book too, and am very fond of it, but it was just a paperback.More on that distinction below).

Orphans are children who are forced to rely upon themselves and who must carry a lot of the book on their lonely shoulders, even long after they discover friends or magic or who they really are. I think in our modern society we are still so drawn to and fascinated with the idea of young people who must mold themselves when they don't have parents to help. Books like Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, Lemoney Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, and Rainbow Rowell's Carry On, along with so many others show us that this trend isn't going away anytime soon. If I had structured this blog a little differently I could certainly have done an entire category of orphan books, but it just didn't shake out that way.

In 1979 I was given A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett for my ninth birthday. The edition I was given, shown above, was beautifully illustrated by Tasha Tudor and published in 1963.
The story of Sara Carew, a wealthy girl at a boarding school who is treated like -and more importantly, tries to behave like - a 'little princess' no matter how her circumstances change entranced me.

I loved to pretend I was Sara Carew- both at the beginning of the book, when she is the wealthy pet of the entire school, and later in the store, when she is persecuted by the nasty Miss Minchin and when her only friends are Becky the scullery maid and a rat she tames in her attic at night.

This author is also well known for her other books, mostly The Secret Garden, which I also loved,but for some reason only had in a regular paperback. When my parents would give me one of the 'Gift Books' (how I always thought of them, capital letters and all) my mother would often write on the inside cover, a little note and the date and occasion, Christmas, birthday, etc.

Those inscriptions set these books apart for me. They seemed to indicate that I should pay especial attention, that these were books that merited some particular awareness. Otherwise why would my parents have chosen them? I also think that these books were all ones my mother had read and loved as a child and she was eager to share them with me and see what I found in them.

But to return to the theme of classics. I want to repeat part of the quote I began this post with because I think it bears remembering:

"It is a book so entertaining that it pleases people for years and years and years and readers never get tired of it."

Books that people never get tired of. The next three books I want to talk about are all strange in their way. Not always easy to read, told from a different perspective, full of detailed description and less dialog; all three of these books have definitely reached the status of Classic, but why? I can't speak for anyone else, but I was given all of these books at a young age and loved them then and still do.

One of the oddest but most charming books I have ever been given was Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates , by Mary Mapes Dodge.

Another wonderful Junior Illustrated Library edition, filled with both ink drawings and color plates.  The book was published in 1865, and the author starts the book with a preface,sort of warning the reader that she means to include an instructive guide to the Netherlands and its places and culture as well as her 'domestic tale'.  I'm going to give a breakdown of the story here since it truly does roam all over the Netherlands.

The main plot is the story of the poor Brinker family. The father is a mindless invalid after a head injury years ago, the mother barely able to keep their small cottage together with the help of Hans, her teenage son and his younger sister Gretel. Hans and Gretel both want to enter the great skaing race with the other kids of the town, but they can't afford skates, only crude wooden ones carved by Hans, that stick to the ice. Some of the other children befriend them and things improve for the Brinker family when a famous doctor takes an interest in the father's condition and agrees to operate on him.

But wait! Sprinkled throughout the main stories are paragraphs and sometimes whole chapters devoted to both Dutch history and geography. There are footnotes explaining how to say "Mr." and "Mrs." in Dutch and what wooden shoes ("klompen") are in Dutch.

But even more disconcerting than the translations and the chapter on the original St. Nikolaus (as a child I had no idea that Santa Claus originally brought dismembered little boys back to life) the main story of the Brinker family is abandoned in the middle for a kind of travelog of the Netherlands, when some of the other wealthy boys take a Victorian era skating tour and have all sorts of mishaps and adventures while visiting famous Dutch landmarks and staying in hostels. Rereading this as an adult, it is still just as charming, and ultimately confusing as it was the first time I ever read it.

Eventually the story gets back on track and Father Brinker is cured by the famous doctor and the great skating race occurs. There is actually a lot of period detail about Dutch life in this book that I really enjoyed reading about as a child and I had a lot of sympathy for the Brinker family and their plight, although I secretly wanted to be the rich and popular Katrina Van Tassel, who is also a great skater. I could not then and still cannot skate to save my life.

For my eighth birthday I was given a book that I personally think everyone should read. Certainly everyone who works with animals or cares about their welfare. I am talking about Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.

Anna Sewell was a devout Quaker. She published only one book, in 1877, and Black Beauty was not meant originally as a child's book, but, according to the author, for those who worked with horses, with, " a special aim to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses." 

I was already horse-crazy at a very young age. We had a dog and I loved animals in general but Black Beauty took this to an entirely new level.

Narrated entirely from the point of view of the horse Black Beauty tells his story from the time when he is a tiny foal with his mother, through his happiest years as the beloved horse of the squire and his lady at Birtwick Hall, where he lives with his dear friends, the pony Merrylegs and elegant Ginger the Thoroughbred, through his days as an upper-class carriage horse at the home of the Earl of W---- , then as a common hackney horse and finally to a well earned retirement, reunited once more with people who know and love him.

Throughout the book Beauty experiences owners and riders both kind and cruel, stupid and selfish men determined to wring the last strength out of him through mistreatment, but also gentle people, who recognize that a horse is a creature with feelings and intelligence.

The book deals with the issue of cruelty to animals- dogs as well as horses- but it also tells a story filled with action and friendship and descriptions of days gone by. In short, it had everything I required from a book as a child and more.

Years later I found myself working as a carriage horse driver in Chicago and I believe it would be honest to say that I never curried my horse or put a horse into harness without thinking of Black Beauty. There is an old fountain near the Water Tower in Chicago that is specially made for horses and I always thought of Beauty when I pulled my coach up so my horse could get a drink.

The last childhood Classic I want to talk about is yet another Junior Illustrated Library Edition. I received The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham for Christmas in 1980.

Originally published in 1908, it is a quintessential English story and is filled not just by animal characters who interact very normally with humans (who, for example, don't notice that foolish Mr. Toad is really in disguise as an old washerwoman) but also long, beautifully written and loving descriptions of the English countryside. This Edwardian story has been illustrated over and over again, made into plays and musicals and even into a Disney cartoon, but the book retains its original charm.

The story begins with shy Mole, who leaves his comfortable house (which would later remind me a great deal of a Hobbit hole) and ventures to the River, where he is befriended by a River Rat who convinces him to go exploring and travelling in the Great Wood. They have many adventures with their friend Otter, the noble Badger and foolish, greedy Mr. Toad of Toad Hall.

The tone of this book is hard to place. It has comic scenes, largely provided by Mr. Toad, and 'on the road' adventures with Mole, Ratty and Otter. Badger is wise and stern, but also kind- and willing to stand to mayhem when our friends decide to storm Toad Hall and help Mr. Toad regain his home from the evil stoats and weasels who have taken it over. At one memorable point, Ratty is going around the room chanting happily,

" Here's a sword for the Rat, here's a sword for the Mole, here's a sword for the Badger, here's a sword for the Toad! Here's a stick for the Rat, here's a stick for the Mole, here's a stick for the Badger, here's a stick for the Toad! Here's a pistol for the Rat, here's a pistol for the Mole, here's a pistol for the Badger, here's a pistol for the Toad!" as they gleefully prepare to storm Toad Hall through a secret tunnel. I loved that part when I was little and the nursery-rhyme like rhythm of the words.

But a lot of this book is made up of beautiful, almost mystical passages and paragraphs about the land itself; the River gurgling and flowing as it speaks merrily to itself, the sweeping silence of the Wood covered by snow, and even the appearance of the mysterious and Great God Pan, the God of the Forest, who is found playing his pipes in the mist one morning, standing watch over Otter's lost child as Ratty and Mole search the wood for him.

But my all-time favorite scene, which I return to every Christmas comes when, after a summer and autumn of wandering happily with the Rat, Mole is suddenly struck with homesickness. As he and the Rat are caught in the Wood in the middle of a heavy snow, Mole suddenly scents his old home and finds his way back to his own front door.

At first Mole is sad and guilt-stricken at how lonely and chilled his little house is, and how thoughtlessly he abandoned it when the urge came upon him to wander the River. But Ratty makes himself right at home and soon has a warm fire going and a meal made up of staples from the pantry and Mole is wonderfully cheered and happy to be sheltered in his own sitting room with his friend.

But then- the best part!- suddenly the two friends hear the sound of carolling outside and Mole realizes it is the field mice, who come singing carols every Christmas Eve. They welcome the mice in and share a basket of treats together and Mole and Ratty end the evening with a comfortable nightcap in front of the fire. Before he falls asleep in his own bed for the first time in many weeks, the Mole has these thoughts:

"He did not want at all to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage.

But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."

Since becoming an adult, I have lived in the third largest city in the country for many years. I have lived in dozens of apartments and more than one house and have made my home in every one. But I have never found a phrase or words better to express how I always feel about going home to my family in Ohio than the sentences above. It is a wonderful thing to go out to have adventures, but also wonderful, and perhaps even a better one, to always have your home to come back to.

The Gift Books, Part 2: A Lot of What I Learned, I Learned from Louisa May Alcott

"Why everybody liked him was what puzzled Jo , at first. He was neither rich, nor great,young nor handsome; in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing or brilliant; and yet he was as attractive as a genial fire, and people seemed to gather about him as naturally as about a warm hearth. He was poor, yet always appeared to be giving something away; a stranger, yet everyone was his friend; no longer young, but as happy-hearted as a boy; plain and peculiar, yet his face looked beautiful to many and his oddities were freely forgiven for his sake. Jo often watched him, trying to discover the charm, and, at last, decided that it was benevolence which worked the miracle."- Little Women, Louisa May Alcott


I think I was given my first Louisa May Alcott when I was 8 years old. I know that we had moved to Dover and I believe the book was in my Easter basket. It was Under the Lilacs, which is undeservedly not as well known today as it was when it was published.

Ben is an orphaned boy who runs away from the circus where he and his beloved poodle Sancho are being mistreated and who both find refuge and a home with a kindly widow and her two daughters and friends in the grown-up brother and sister who come to open up the Big House for the sister's wedding. People- and Sancho- run away or go missing, adventures are had and the story is filled with interesting details about people living in the 1800s. But there is a simple goodness, for want of a better word, that runs through this book. The lessons it showed me about kindness and generosity, honesty and responsibility run through all of Louisa May Alcott's works, but this is one of her shorter and more simple books and it made a strong impression on me that prepared me for the next gift I was to receive: Little Women.

 

This is the original Junior Illustrated Library edition that I own. (hooray again for the Junior Illustrated Library!) There are many abridged editions of this book available now for young readers. While I know that not all children are adept readers at a young age, I have to say that I am not a fan of abridged editions. They leave out too much that is crucial to understanding  a book and just move the bare bones of the plot along, like a Cliff Note, and a child is left thinking that they have read the book, when all they have gotten is a sniff of the dishes on the table, instead of the entire meal.

To my mind, if a child is able to read and comprehend a big book like Little Women (my Junior Illustrated Library edition clocks in at 546 pages, a daunting number for many adult readers) let them at it. If they have trouble following the plot or with too many words, then put the book aside until they are up to reading it. I remember the heft of this book, how it felt in my hands to have this heavy mass of words waiting for me.

The story of the March sisters is a timeless one, and has been made into several movie versions, but none of them (even my favorite one, with Winona Rider as Jo and the adorable pre-nose job Claire Danes as Beth, who always makes me cry-I love pre-nose job Claire Danes.) can encompass the whole of the work. Louisa May Alcott put her heart and soul into this book, more than any other and it shows.

 Each sister, with all her strengths and faults is a loving portrait, and Jo's beloved best friend Teddy and her great love Mr. Beahr, both added to my understanding of what standards men could be held accountable to at a very young age. My father was my hero and still remains for me the gold standard of how an adult man should behave, along with my brother and my husband. But the first idea that there were such standards of behavior in how one treats both the opposite sex and other people in general, came from Little Women.

None of the girls in the book are asked to stifle themselves or their personalities, only to strive to be better people, to be kind and generous to others. There is a great deal of Victoriana about 'womanly virtues', but as a child, I sort of over-road that and took the lessons that you are responsible for what you care for. If your home is yours, you must care for it and try to make it a pleasant retreat both for yourself and for whoever else is living there. You should try to support your friends and loved ones, but always, always be honest with you advice and try to help them on their path.

I always identified with Jo,the most adventurous of the sisters, who travels off to New York City to become a writer. But I love to cook and am very domestic and found a friend in 'Gentle Meg' who tries so hard to make a home for herself and her young husband. But Amy wants to travel and become a great artist; I went away to art school and found that I had more in common with Amy than I realized. Sweet Beth was the one I could always relate to the least as a child, but as an adult I find that her patience and care for everyone else does make her a backbone of the family, a constant around which the pendulum of the others revolves and returns to over and over again.

I have read this book many many times over the years. I always still laugh at the funny parts, cry at the sad ones and celebrate each little triumph of the March girls and suffer each loss with them. If that isn't the mark of a great book, then what is?

Of course I later learned that Jo and Mr. Beahr's story continues in Little Men and Jo's Boys, when they open the great house Plumfield as a school.

It is a wonderful thing to love a story and then find out that it continues. Old friends from the first book are grown wise, but stay merry and kind. All of the boys and the girls in these books have personalities so delightfully drawn that I was always interested in each one- and in Jo's Boys, going all the way through college, got to find out how each one turned out!

As with the first book, any morals and messages are so sweetly presented here that I truly believe they made me a better child without my even realizing it. Louisa May Alcott had a great talent for writing everyday characters that are relatable, and whose small adventures, trials and successes really meant something to her readers. Even now when I reread these books, I feel as close to the people in them as I did as a child.


My parent's house has a huge basement with a lot of big closets with sliding doors along one wall. There were a lot of odds and ends there, including a box of old books that had come from my great-grandmother's house. My grandmother Shirley was the youngest of three girls and I am sure these books were bought for her and my great aunts, Helen and Ruby. I like the idea of them, excited at having new books and reading them, and then me, feeling and doing the same. These were hardcovers, printed on cheap, thick paper. I don't remember all of them, but as a girl I was surprised and happy to find two by Louisa May Alcott: Eight Cousins and Rose In Bloom.


                                                     

Again, these books are less well known than Little Women, but they were absolutely engrossing and charming to me as a girl.

 Eight Cousins is the story of Rose, a wealthy orphan who is brought to live in Boston with her relatives and her uncle who is a doctor as her guardian. The hill her house is on is known as the 'Aunt-Hill' for her aunts who all live close by and she is soon surrounded by them and her seven boy cousins. The family is Scottish and the boys are soon teaching Rose about her heritage, her uncle is teaching her about the importance of health over fashion and encouraging her to run around outside and play and she befriends a servant girl named Pheobe, who loves to sing.

The story continues in Rose in Bloom after Rose and her uncle, with Pheobe as her close companion return from travelling the world (the Campbells are a seafaring and trading family, which was extremely interesting to me) and return home to Boston to find that the girls and the cousins have all grown up and everyone around them is determined to play matchmaker.

Rose is just as determined to try to have everyone go along in 'the same old way' and sets herself to be a philanthropist, even as Pheobe goes to London to study for the opera. All of 'the boys' have very distinct personalities and everyone continues to grow up.

In fact, these books showed me a lot about growing up. Secretly I wanted to be Rose (who wouldn't?) but these stories also gave me, at a very young age, a glimpse that being rich, popular and pretty would not guarantee happiness, and that those things even brought their own problems with them.

In summation, nothing that Louisa May Alcott ever wrote that I read did me anything but good and gave me things to think about.Big things like how we treat one another in this world and how to see your own faults and work on them, not give up on yourself and how to be a better, kinder person. These are some of the truest books I have ever read, and I find myself still trying to live up to their good examples today.

 By the time she wrote this third installment about the Marches, the author had gained both the fame and fortune from her writing that she had worked towards for many years. She had written dozens of things, but everyone still wanted books about the March sisters and their families.

In fact, in Jo's Boys, not only has Plumfield become a college with old Mr. March as its chaplain and Professor Beahr at the helm (along with wealthy Teddy, now known as Mr. Laurence financing the whole thing) but Louisa May Alcott must have had a great sense of humor, because there are some very funny bits of self parody in Jo's Boys. 

 Jo herself has become  a well-known authoress, famous for her book completed at the end of Little Women , about she and her sisters. In the final book, Mrs. Jo flies about her house on the college grounds, trying desperately to dust and houseclean and get ready for the homecoming of her nephews and is constantly stopped by autograph seekers who just want to 'catch a glimpse of the dear woman at her little writing desk' and who pop onto her private porch asking for autographs and frustrating her to no end as she tries to remain patient and polite and is finally reduced to hiding and hoping to be mistaken for a housekeeper.

And now I cannot resist ending this post with a quote from the very end of Jo's Boys.It is so apt and one of my very favorite Louisa May Alcott quotes ever:

"And now having endeavored to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall forever on the March family." 

Amen to that. May all of our families get such a happy ending.

The Gift Books, Part 1: Tales and Delights

"It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is 'Run and find out' and Rikki-Tikki was a true mongoose."

"We be of one blood, Ye and I!      - The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling


When I was about five or six years old and still living in the little yellow house in New Phila my mother was cleaning out the closet that was just inside the front door. On a high shelf she found an old cardboard box with a musty, dusty smell and as she removed something out of it, she became terribly upset. I remember sitting on the floor and watching her and I believe that she cried. I asked her what was the matter and she held out a book (the cause of the musty smell) and said that it had been hers when she was a little girl and that it had gotten damp in the cardboard box in the closet and was ruined.

When my mother was a very small girl she had lived in Cleveland in an apartment building (which always sounded very glamorous to me until I was older and had lived in several apartment buildings myself). One of the neighbors there was a little girl whose mother was an English war bride and when that girl was invited to my mother's birthday party she brought a very English and very wonderful gift: The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. This was the musty book my mother cried over so many years later when I was a little girl myself .

The next holiday ( I think it was Christmas) I was given the book in the picture above. (This is the same edition. I was to become very fond of the Illustrated Junior Library).
Not only did it contain amazing stories from far away and long ago, with big, juicy difficult words in them, but it had both pen and ink illustrations every few pages and COLOR PLATES. This warrants a capitalization because although I was still reading picture books and enjoying them both alone and with my younger brother, I had really already come to feel that 'grown-up' books with big chunks was words were where the action was.

But secretly I still sometimes missed illustrations. Here was proof that you really could have it all- big blocks of tricky words, black and white drawings AND color pictures, usually printed on different, thicker paper and referred to in the front of the book as 'color' plates', often with handy page numbers so you could look them up. Neat-o! There was also usually one color plate in the front of the book, called importantly, and sensibly enough, the 'FRONSTIPIECE'. Wow. I had hit the book bigtime.

The Jungle Book is filled with wonderful stories, songs and poems. The main part of the book is about Mowgli the little Indian boy who is brought up by the Wolf Pack in the jungle with the giant Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther as his teachers. If you have only seen the Disney cartoon or stop action movie, don't kid yourself, you don't know the Jungle Book. They are insipid and leave so much out.

I remember my mother reading this book aloud to me and then reading it for myself, much as I had done with Charlotte's Web. But this book was bigger, denser, older. You had the feeling these stories were written for anyone, not just kids. But when Mowgli learned the Jungle Law and how to let other residents of the Jungle know his kinship with them, I felt it too. I would sit in my room, looking at my flowered wallpaper and say the words to myself over and over. I practiced hissing, barking, meowing and speaking, "We be of one blood, ye and I!" in every animal tongue I could think of, just on the off case that it would one day save me from a hawk or a wolf or maybe just a stray dog.

But as much as I loved the Mowgli stories and others in the Jungle Book, like the White Seal, it was the tale of the mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi that won my heart over and over again. There is a Ranklin-Bass cartoon version of this story that actually isn't too bad and I remember seeing it on TV at some point and being amazed that other people shared my favorite story and had made a cartoon of it.

The plucky mongoose who is rescued from a flood by a little boy and saves the family from the wrath of the cobras living in their garden both terrified and thrilled me. To this day I have a hatred of snakes and it may very well have started with the wicked Nag and Nagina. But even more so, this story took me to another place and time without me quite realizing how it was done.

 I did not know why the Boy and his Mother and Father were living in India. They lived in a bungalow, which after some reading I realized was a kind of house- it had a bathroom with a tiled floor and a dining room and so on. The garden had something in it called a gazebo, which my mother explained was like an outdoor room for sitting in, with a roof and railings but no walls. The family ate breakfast there and was menaced by the cobra and saved by Rikki Tikki Tavi. There was so much to learn and love in these stories about loyalty and strength and helping your friends and family. Also about greed and selfish acts and going your own way. I will always love this book and love my mother for sharing it with me. It meant something special to her as a child and then to me, and to my son, and so on it goes.


For my seventh birthday I remember getting three things: My Dorothy Hamill skating doll, who stood on a pedestal in her skating outfit with her gold medal and could be posed into different skating positions ( I could not skate, but I did have Ms. Hamill's haircut, a round bowl cut which provoked my father, seeing me only from the back when coming home from work one day to ask "Who is that little boy watching TV out there?"), a white clock with a flowered face that GLOWED IN THE DARK (a faint orange glow, whose light I would fall to sleep by well through high school) and a book of fairy tales.

This was not your average little kid book either. I don't know whether my mother was consciously challenging me to stretch my reading abilities, which were already well above the regular level,

(Note- I'm not trying to brag here, I just really liked to read and happened to pick it up really fast. I am still a very speedy reader and able to retain almost everything I read that is WRITTEN, as compared to things I hear in a lecture. That's just always been how I am.)

Or my mom may have just been trying to keep up and give me things that would interest me. Or maybe she just picked books that she thought were beautiful, as they so often were, and she wanted to give me that exposure to beauty early in my life. For whatever reason, I can honestly say that as a child, I loved every book my mother ever got me. The Fairy Book by 'The Author of John Halifax, Gentleman' and illustrated by Warwick Goble, was no exception.

These were complicated, old-fashioned stories and fairy tales with beautiful watercolor painting (and a frontispiece!) throughout.The weird title and authorship was fascinating. It contained some stories I had heard before, such as Beauty in the Beast (see the illustration above), The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, and The Frog Prince, but they were more complicated and a little scarier than I had remembered them. But this book was also filled with strange fairy tales I had never heard of: The Iron Stove, Prince Cherry, The White Cat and The Fair One With The Golden Locks, just to name a few.

 I poured over these stories. They required real concentration to read, although once I got the hang of them. I could see similarities in them and also see how the versions I had previously been told seemed watered-down, weaker, not as intense or exciting. J.R.R. Tolkien once likened fairy tales to old furniture, put away and relegated as only fit for the nursery once the adults had tired of them. I think he was right about this and I do think that not all little children would like or even be able to handle some of these older, darker versions of common fairy tales. But I ate them up as a child and thrilled to the thought of evil stepmothers who shut up princesses in iron stoves or princes who were kidnapped and girls who had to use their wits and wander the world to rescue them.

My mother also gave me another book of tales, The Moon Ribbon and other Stories by Jane Yolen, illustrated by David Pallidini.

I mention this book because it opened up my understanding that fairy tales, or stories like them were still being written. I thought of them as ancient things, and this was a modern book with strange, eerie drawings that was filled with totally new stories written by a modern looking woman with glasses (her photo was on the back) and yet, they echoed, they reinforced, they enhanced and added to all the fairy tales and fables I had read before. They moved me into another dimension of reading, began what was later to become a life-long love affair with fantasy and science fiction and all of their ilk. But these were the gifts, the wonderful magical book gifts that began this great love for me.

The Libraries, Part 2: Reading All The Time

“Because I'm the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight.” - Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!" - Russel T. Davis, Doctor Who, Tooth and Claw

The year I was seven my family moved from the small town of New Philadelphia, Ohio, across the Tuscarawas River to the small town of Dover, Ohio. We moved from a little yellow starter-type house to a brick ranch house with a big standstone fireplace in the living room and I got a canopy bed and white princess-style furniture with yellow roses on it. That fall I went to Dover Avenue Elementary school and made friends that I am still close to and know to this day.

But one of the biggest shocks of the move was the Dover Public Library. I must admit to a certain youthful prejudice about libraries: they were supposed to be big. And old. And have lots of columns out front. And heavy stone steps.

The Dover Public Library was across the street from the high school (a large brick edifice that was very sturdy and old and pleasingly comforting to my eye. I originally thought that it was the library, and our destination, until my mother informed me that she, herself, had gone to high school there and that our path lay across the street). The Library was modern and low to the ground, built of light, sandy colored brick and glass. Shallow concrete stairs led up to the big windows and shining glass doors. This was totally alien country to me.

But I could see the books inside. Stacks and shelves and rows of books. My mother took me in, and we obtained the library card that would be one of my most prized possessions for years to come. The children's section was to the back of the building, and this was where I started out. I wandered the shelves and was weirdly startled to find many well-known picture books and other favorites at THIS library, but in different places. I began to roam the 'young readers' in their taller shelves and was excited by the interspersion of strange new titles and covers and familiar old friends.

I don't remember what I took out originally at the Dover Library. I do remember that I would often take out a book I had liked before to re-read along with other titles that were new to me. I am still a tremendous re-reader and seem to find something new  and fresh enjoyment even in books that I've read over and over. I think that this habit began in me with our move to Dover. In taking out books that I knew I liked, along with riskier new titles, I began my pattern of re-reading that would be with me all of my life.

What did I read from the Dover Library? There were a series of 'biographies for young people' that my mother and I both remember as having orange covers and a sort of seventies-style design on the covers. (does anyone know or recall these books? There were a LOT of them, but I haven't been able to find any pictures of them). I burned through a couple of these when I couldn't find any fiction to read, and particularly remember Annie Oakley, Helen Keller and Marie Curie.

I never really got into either Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. I'm not sure why - there were certainly a lot of those books and I know a lot of people who grew up loving them. But I did read a similar series, recommended to me by my mother, who had read them herself as a child: The Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope. 

Ok, so I did choose the cover of this particular title for its maximum weirdness value. I do remember reading it, just because it did have that strange cover. But these two sets of twins- Bert and Nan, aged 12, and Freddie and Flossie, aged 6- really got around. The Bobbsey Twins solve mysteries, travel the world, make a television show, live on a houseboat, and basically find Secrets and Mysteries everywhere.

The first 72 books were published between 1904 and 1979 and another 30 books were published between 1987 to 1992. You could read them in no particular order, but the changes over the years in styles and the uses of things like cars, telephones and hundreds of other things meant that mixing the stories up meant that they were sort of pleasantly odd and confusing. Also, it turns out that the actual stories were written by more than a dozen people over the years. (Thanks, Wikopedia!)
Because two sets of fraternal twin brothers and sisters who travel the world and solve mysteries wasn't weird at all, right?

Most of the books were re-written in the 1960s and updated, particularly in the way that the Bobbsey family cook Dinah and her husband Sam the handyman, both of whom were black, are treated as characters. And yes, in some of the older books the dialog and behavior is as cringe-worthy and racist as you might think. But- it was also strange enough to me to make me question it and wonder why Sam and Dinah would speak so differently and were treated  so differently by the writers and other characters. So, weirdly enough again, thanks Bobbsey Twins for opening my mind at a young age and making me actually question Race in America in a seven year old way. Again, who would have thought?

As a final take-away, this series was not my go-to weekly reading. They were fill-ins, books to take out when I couldn't find enough to fill up my allotted five (yes FIVE!) books per visit. But they were sort of endearingly cheesey, even at a young age. To quote Wikopedia:

'The stories' unwavering wholesomeness lends itself to malicious parody. Perhaps the nastiest put-down came in a Gunsmoke episode (7.16 radio, 5.36 television) in which two mentally ill brothers decide to clean up the West by killing as many Indians as possible. (They also wipe out a family that refuses to feed them.) It's titled "The Bobsy Twins".'

That pretty much sums them up.

I went to the Dover Public Library once a week or more from the age of about 8 until I moved to Chicago at age 18. That library and the Park Middle School Library and the Dover High School Library would be my homes away from home for all those years. I read a lot of books through these places that I am going to talk to you about in upcoming posts and I cannot stress their importance in my life and formulating the thinking, reasoning person that I am today. They were a place of   imagination and real life, history, myth, science and story that opened up the world to me.

When looking for a quote to begin this post, it was almost impossible to choose one. So many great thinkers, writers and geniuses have written about their love of libraries that you could have an entire blog just of their quotes.

 But having to choose in today's climate of slashing budgets and lack of essential support of public libraries, of librarians valiantly attempting to keep their resources up to date and available to a public that increasingly cannot always afford either reading materials or vital internet access, I want to end with a quote that really rang true for me:

“My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid.” 
― Joan Bauer, Rules of the Road

The Libraries- Opening a Reading World, Part 1

“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better”- Barack Obama

I know that I owned picture books as a young child. I remember my parents reading Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go and also his Book of Manners with Pig Will and Pig Won't. There are a few specific picture books I remember being given as gifts that I will talk about later. 

But the majority of the books I read or had read to me between the ages of about 2 and 8 came from the library. 

The Library. Just saying the word can immediately conjure up for me the many libraries I have known with a kind of shimmering, wistful calm. I can smell the slightly dusty scent of old pages, the sharper tang of cellophane wrappers around the book jackets, the wood polish smell of tables and chairs. The quiet of hush of the libraries of my childhood seemed more important to me than the hush of a church. Holier, I suppose, although I didn't really grasp that concept at the time. Libraries were my chapel and books became a kind of religion for me. 

Until I was almost 8 years old we lived in the small town of New Philadelphia, Ohio. I don't remember when my mother began to take me to the library there, but I do remember how pleasing and official the building seemed to me as a child. Its solid red brick and towering white columns, and wrought iron railings flanking wide, shallow stairs all seemed a fitting monument of grandeur to encase the magic and wonders within. 

There was the main floor of the library, which held many deep chairs, a long, wide counter for checking out books and lots of adults, many of whom seemed to sit reading newspapers that hung like towels over long wooden rods in racks on one side of the room. Wide windows let in the sunlight, but the library was always cool, even on the warmest day.

Going up the wide staircase would lead you down an open sort of hallway with what seemed like a hundred rooms leading off of it, each one filled with no-nonsense metal shelves of book after book after book. Fiction, Non-Fiction. Travel. History, Cooking, How-To... they went on and on and I thought that there could not possibly be any knowlege that wasn't contained in these stacks and shelves that went on and on forever. I did not go into those rooms without my mother when I was little. I think that even though I already loved books and felt like they looked upon me with a kind of loving tolerance as well, that if I dared the rooms alone, I would be swallowed up forever by an endless jungle of ink and paper and library-smell and never be found again. 

Down a smaller stairway from the main hall, through a yellow painted corridor with a funny old-fashioned ceramic drinking fountain and through wooden glass paned doors was my place: the Children's Library. 

This room had a small stage at one end with musty velvet curtains that were always shut. The librarians worked behind desks set in front of it and looked out onto a room filled with light from the fixtures above as well as window wells set along the top of the walls. 

There were some small low tables and chairs for the littlest kids and then heavier wooden tables, longer and more serious, in the center of the room for more serious readers. Even as a small child I preferred these tables to the 'baby' section, with its miniature chairs with spindly metal legs and pastel molded plastic. 

A double row of low wooden shelves housed all the picture books for the youngest children and taller wooden shelves stood in impressive rows (although I think there were only four or five of them) filled with more difficult picture books and novels for young readers. 

I had learned to read when I was around four years old, following along as my parents read to me and sort of absorbing the words through osmosis and churning them back out with delight in my own ability, Going to the library and being considered responsible enough to be left alone with the children's librarian occurred when I was five or six and was awarded my own orange cardboard library card with an official metal bar with my number embedded in the card. I remember that you were only permitted to take out 3 books on a children's card and I often had to wait for my mother to come downstairs to retrieve me and take the remainder of my stack out on her adult library card. 

I cannot recall the name of the children's librarian at the New Philia Public Library. (I just called my mother and she was sorry to say that she couldn't remember the name either). But I do remember her vividly. She wore glasses and had soft looking, white curled hair. She was infinitely patient with the little kids in her domain- much more so than I was. 

I was always very involved at the library, and never would have dreamed of raising my voice or misbehaving or doing anything that might have gotten me ejected out of the kingdom. I had very little tolerance for other kids who made noise or ran around the shelves or whose parents had to be located in the adult library and then thumped downstairs to drag their offending offspring away with them. 

The main thing I remember the children's librarian doing was teaching me how to make pussy willow cats. She always had a vase of pussy willows on her desk and if you were careful, she would allow you to stroke the soft pods of grey fur. If you were VERY good, she would let you pluck one off of the branch and then glue it carefully to a blank card from the card catalog. Then she would draw a fence beneath the pod, and pointed ears and a tail (or help you to draw it) and you would have a pussy willow kitty sitting on a fence. 

Once we got accustomed to one another, the librarian seldom bothered me. I would spend a lot of time choosing my books and usually end up with a pile, sitting at a long wooden bench at one of the tables in the center of the room. Fortunately, my mother liked to spend time choosing her books too, and I can only remember a few occasions where she had to hurry me into making a choice or was ready to go before me. 

When I was around five or six there are two books that immediately come to mind when I think of this library, both picture books and both from England. I have no idea how they ended up at the New Philia Public Library, but they were different and immediately intrigued me. I was fortunate enough to find them years later for my own son when he was small. 

The first is The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord. This story of a quaint English village that is suddenly attacked by wasps (somewhat scary illustrations of wasps, maybe this is why I still hate them so much today?) and comes up with the idea of baking a giant loaf of bread and making a huge sandwich (helicopters must lift the top slice into place) and trapping all the wasps in it stirred my imagination. The details of the colorful drawings invited a lot of re-reading and the words were just odd enough for me to understand that this book came from somewhere else. This is a book I still love today and give as a gift. 

The second book or set of books I remember first reading at this library was the Church Mice series by Graham Oakley.  There are a lot of these charming books, illustrated with beautiful watercolors, all about a large family of church mice whose church is going to be torn down and the marmalade tabby cat who becomes their friend and helps them. The language in these books was much harder, the stories more involved, but the pictures and the urgency of the church mice' plights and adventures kept me at them, taking them out more than once. The series begins with a singular Church Mouse, but in later books the mice and cat Go Abroad, Spread Their Wings, find a Ring, keep a Diary, are At Bay, celebrate Christmas and Go To the Moon. In short, these mice and their friends got around to amazing adventures and I will always be grateful to whatever librarian had the opportunity to order them all so that they were there for me to find.

I also remember reading the entire series of Billy and Blaze books by C.W. Anderson. These are easy reader books with detailed and realistic pencil drawings and began my life-long love affair with horses and horse books. I'm going to talk about horse books later in more detail, but I remember reading and taking these books out here for the first time. Billy and his faithful pony Blaze rescue a hurt German Shepard dog, make friends with a Spotted Pony, help fight a Forest Fire and have a dozen adventures. These sweet books are such classics- I wonder if kids still read them? I hope that they do.

The final books that I most remember reading from the New Phila library were the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Although I didn't notice it then, these were also illustrated by my old friend from Charlotte's Web, Gareth Williams. 

I remember reading Little House in the Big Woods and being entranced by it. The maple sugar candy they made in the snow, the dance with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, Pa playing his fiddle and Ma's waist, still as tiny as when she was a girl. When my own mother presented me with Little House on the Prairie, I was truly torn. On one hand, the story would go on! I could spend more time with Laura and Ma and Pa and Mary and baby Carrie. On the other hand, I could never quite understand or forgive Pa for taking them AWAY from the Big Woods. Everything was so great there!  Everyone was there! Why would you go?!? Seriously. Through all those other books in the series I still never quite got over Pa being such a rolling stone and hauling the rest of the family along with them. 

One more point about Little House in the Big Woods: years later I would pick up this book to read to my own son when he was about six or seven. Interestingly enough, when asked about it later, literally the only things he could remember about the book- and describe in vivid detail- are the bear and panther attacks and the take-away that the Big Woods was filled with deadly animals and you needed to avoid, kill or move away from them. So maybe not wanting to leave the Big Woods was just me?

Our librarian, seeing me immersed in the Little House series recommended another book of frontier life: Caddy Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink, which won the Newbery Award for 1936. It is literally the only time I can ever recall the librarian steering me wrong. It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion- an award winner, another story of a brave pioneer lass. But for some reason I found it incredibly dull. To this day the only thing I remember about it is that I believe Caddie hides from marauding Indians in an old tree stump at one point. It just didn't resonate with me, and I only remember the book because it was and has been so rare in my life that a librarian recommended something to me that I didn't like. 

We moved to Dover, Ohio, the town across the Tuscarawas River when I was seven. Although the two towns, Dover and New Phila are very close to one another, we didn't really go back to the New Phila library after that. But although I would miss my first library, there would be another new one waiting to be discovered. 

Starting Out:Reading and Being Read To

"The first thing I can well remember..." Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

Why do some books stay with us long past their first reading? Especially books from childhood- books many people assume we outgrow, and becoming older readers, move on from.I mark time by what I was reading. I can't remember a time when I didn't do this, or when the name of a book didn't evoke a strong related image or memory.

One of my earliest vivid memories is of reading 'Charlotte's Web' by E.B. White with my mother. I am about 4 years old. This is the first book I will remember both having read TO me and then picking up and reading for myself.

I see the pale blue paint of my bedroom and the pastel colored flowers on the wallpaper. I can see Gareth William's simple, but detailed line drawings which somehow convey so perfectly the messy ribbon in Fran's ponytail, the bristly hairs on a pig's back, the cunning eye of a clever rat.

When I look at these pictures now, I marvel at how I can see them in the same way as I did then- with an absolute certainty and clarity that is also part of the that first early memory of reading.There are very good reasons why this is the first book that many people remember reading or having read to them.

My mother gave me all three of E.B White's wonderful children's books: Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. I remember having each one read aloud to me and then pouring over the pages on my own and then one day, I was just reading them. All on my own.

 Each of these books tells a story about a misfit : a lonely pig who is loved by both a girl and a spider, a mouse who lives like a small person within a caring family (one of the best things about this book is how the fact that Stuart is a mouse is taken so perfectly in stride by his family), but who longs for adventure, and a swan whose story is an updated version of the Ugly Duckling, a swan looking for his voice and to fit into his world.

These are perfect examples of a subtle and superbly skilled writer practicing his craft. I didn't know anything about E.B. White when I read these books. I'm not sure if I even realized at that point that actual people WROTE books. Later in life I would read many of E.B. White's literary essays and realize that my early children's books in no way talked down to my age or restricted this talented from writing at the top of his game.

And these books taught me so many lessons!

Even at such a young age, the sacrifice of Charlotte and her selflessness taught me that happy endings are not always completely happy and that sometimes we have to work harder to help someone else.

Stuart Little taught me that the love and perfect acceptance of a family is a great and valuable thing- but also a launching point to send you out into a world of adventures and a safe haven to welcome you back again.

Louis the swan finds friendship from Sam, who takes him to school and helps to pay his father's debt of a stolen trumpet and in the process taught me about the value of both belonging and having loyal friends- and at the same time the importance of valuing yourself and your uniqueness, something which each of these books celebrates.

These three books, they are the real beginning for me. I know there were board books and picture books that came before them and believe me there are many more that came after. But E.B. White was my first real love and Charlotte's Web was the first book I read aloud to my son.

This is just a short post. One, I hope, of many more to come. But we all have to start somewhere, and for me, that start is Charlotte's Web.

To Start With- I Owe It All To My Mom and Dad

"Books are an uniquely portable magic"- Stephen King

My love affair with the written word was the product of my parents who were each voracious readers in their own way and whose literary habits I absorbed through osmosis. Much modern research now tells us that to raise children who read, you must have reading material in the home- books, newspapers, magazines, anything. Anything that the child can see adults reading and pattern themselves after. Of course reading aloud is a key component as well. If anyone doubts that those two things will produce a lifelong reader, I can only hold myself up as an irrefutable example.

My mother read magazines and novels almost as constantly as I did. She made trips to the library and would buy books as gifts for my father, then secretly read them first, because she didn't want to wait until he had finished them. I woke up many times in the night as a child and would wander into the hallway and look into the living room to see my mother curled up under an afghan under the light of a table lamp, reading through the night.

Neither of my parents went to college. But they were both excellent examples of intelligent people who lived intellectual lives through reading. My father and mother both loved horror novels and were early supporters of Stephen King. They read both fiction and non-fiction, but always with an emphasis on discussion and imagination and reaching out of our everyday world in a small Ohio town to a bigger place that encompassed all of time and history and anything you could dream of, from vampires to vacation destinations.

 I remember my mother bringing home stacks of library books: history, like Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, popular bestsellers like Centennial by James A. Michener, romance novels, and magazines (I was not allowed to check out the copies of Cosmo she brought home, which led me to believe that they must be REALLY dirty).

My father read less frequently, but intently. He read the paper, like most dads I knew. He also had a deep love of science and history. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, I remember my father reading metaphysical science; books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by  Robert M. Pirsig and The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. There was a point in my childhood if my dad even mentioned the words 'quantum mechanics', my mother, brother and I would all groan and threaten to leave the table.

In my childhood, I feel that I can safely say that I read literally thousands of books. I read at the dinner table (until reprimanded), in the bathtub (I stopped taking showers when I realized that baths would provide me with an extra half hour of reading time before bed), under the covers with a flashlight, on vacations in the back seat of the car (I taught myself not to get carsick out of sheer willpower and the impending boredom of not being able to read on the highway) and in boring classes at school, hiding the book under the edge of the desk. (I now suspect that many of my teachers knew this, but they also knew I was bored and I wasn't causing any trouble, so they never stopped me). My mother, an avid and encouraging reader, was constantly telling me to "Put down that book and GO OUTSIDE AND DO SOMETHING!"

I taught myself to roller skate in our driveway while reading, tracing careful ellipses around the cement in retaliation. I would skate and read and skate and read and look up, startled, when my father's pickup truck halted, idling in the street, waiting for me to move out of the way so he could pull into the garage. Dinnertime already?!?

I recently listened to the audio version of The View From The Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman. He is an incredible writer and always a charming and interesting narrator, and this work comprised of many of his speeches, interviews of other writers and non-fiction spanning several years absolutely lived up to my expectations.

But one thing I found most fascinating was the many times he referred to books he had read as a child or a teenager and how that had influenced his thoughts and character and continued to do so even today. I found that we both had an early love of the books of Diana Wynn Jones (more on her later) and it got me thinking:

What books could I really remember? Vividly remember, as if I had just read them? Which books still influenced the way that I thought, spoke, wrote, interacted with others, even today?

I began searching out old titles on the internet and ordering them online, which is easier and faster to do now than ever before. I reread many of these books and found that I could still reread them with absolute enjoyment- now with the added bonus of nostalgia!

This is not a record of all the books I've ever read. I don't think I could even manage to recall them all. But the books I love. The books I have returned to over and over again throughout the years or that have rung true for me when other things have not. These are the books I want to talk to you about. My parents opened a door and introduced me to these life long friends. I am grateful and glad to return the favor.