Boooooks

I spent a while this afternoon trying to pick out what books I would be bringing with me to school. Sadly enough, even though I own only enough books to fill one shelf, it took me quite some time to narrow it down to a manageable chunk, but... I managed.

I was in the third grade when I first read Where the Red Fern Grows. I found it awful in a wonderful way. Every time I read that last bit when the red fern grows over their graves... I turn into some sort of blubbering puddle of gloop. That book also started me on my depressing-childhood-books-about-tragically-dying-animal-companions series: Old Yeller, Sounder, and The Yearling. By the time I read that last one, I was just about done with the world. 

I got into Bradbury way too early. That's always been a problem with me - my appetite for reading was always exponentially greater than the number of age-appropriate books available to me. I read The Illustrated Man when I was in the first or second grade. It was so wonderfully written that I finished it in one afternoon - then promptly had nightmares for the rest of the week. There was something about Bradbury's writing that really drew me into  world of science fiction, though. I read Fahrenheit 451 around the same time my older brother was reading it for school. I'd always wanted to be just like him, and there was my chance. I didn't really understand it until I read 1984 a while later. Since then, it's become a bit more than the one book of Bradbury's that I actually own.

I have no idea why I read Rebecca. It wasn't required reading or anything, and I'd had (multiple) earlier false starts with other novels of the same genre ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of good fortune should be in want of a wife," anyone?) For some reason, the very first words of this particular book drew me in: "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me." The book was one long, wonderful dream, and the incredible climax chilled me to the bone the first time - and every time since.

Embarrassingly enough, Vonnegut was a recent discovery of mine. I'd never gotten into his writing until I found this book at the library's free book table. I thought I might as well read it. And I did. And I loved it. So it goes (not really).

I don't think I'll ever really know how much Lois Lowry shaped my childhood. The Giver was required reading one year - second or third grade? - and I found the story immensely sad and immensely interesting. I wondered if our memories could ever work like that - I dearly wished they would.

After my "success" with Rebecca, I found Wuthering Heights buried in an old box of donations from some family friends who knew of my love for reading. I decided to give it a try but eventually set it aside after about the first half, completely annoyed by Catherine's antics. Many years later (which goes to show how ridiculously young and idiotic I was when I first tried to read it), I dug it up again and sailed on through. It was amazing. Alternately downright creepy and wonderfully lush (sometimes, I still think I can see Catherine's face in the window on a dark night), this was another one of the classics that I absolutely enjoyed.

When I went to watch Finding Nemo with my mother, I told her that Pixar had plagiarized Jules Verne. A few years later, I ended up writing a very long, confusing story about being stuck on an alien spaceship that had many similar qualities to the Nautilus. I'm only just beginning to realize that perhaps my Star Trek obsession isn't completely unfounded.

Mick Harte was Here. But now he's gone. This book meant a lot to me when I first read it. That was before I'd even learned to bike. It was the book that introduced me to death. I still read it a lot, mostly to keep myself grounded.

Leo Lionni and Eric Carle were my favorite authors when I was picture-book-little. The Hungry Caterpillar. Swimmy. Frederick. That was the art of my childhood. Sadly enough, I've never owned an Eric Carle book, so I'm taking Swimmy with me.

Everything came down to a tough choice between my complete The Lord of the Rings trilogy with all the appendices and footnotes and a battered old Sherlock Holmes anthology filled with Sidney Paget's original illustrations from The Strand Magazine. I could only bribe my father into letting me lug one huge non-academic book off to school with me. The Lord of the Rings was my childhood. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis created amazing worlds for me that I would later find mirrored in the Redwall of Brian Jacques. One year, I even memorized The Tale of Tinuviel. If you know what that is, then you know how crazy I was. If not... just pretend that I never said anything about memorizing a poem about a fantasy land. Because of all this, I decided that I'd take my Holmes with me. Consider it a melodramatic, metaphorical discarding of childhood. 

But it's not as if I regret my decision. One summer, I went to the library and checked out this true monster of a book - it was well over a thousand pages strong, each page covered in tiny font. It contained anything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ever written about the man Sherlock Holmes. From A Study in Scarlet to The Hound of the Baskervilles, everything was in there - the Adventures, the Memoirs, the Return, His Last Bow, the Case-book, everything. And I devoured it. I fell in love more with John Watson than I did the aquiline, ratty-dressing-gowned hero. I loved the idea of living with a brilliant man making notes by day and clattering down cobblestone streets by night, to write all of it down and tell the wonderful stories that would come of our adventures. I envied John Watson. Sherlock Holmes could keep his intellect for all I cared. All I wanted were stories. 

And I've got them all.