Lists are handy ways to begin to arrange the disorderly and sprawling. There's much more to be said about each of the titles bulleted below.
- Books heard as somebody read them aloud can be just as significant as those read page by page. I started reading myself early enough that I don't have a lot of memories of being read to, though I surely was by both parents. When my sister Alice was around, or when I visited her in Minnesota, she certainly read me Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but pretty soon I was reading them on my own.
- A.A. Milne's books for children were an early presence, and I knew lots of bits 'by heart' from an early age. This was before Walt Disney got his grubby paws on the material, and Pooh was Americanized.
Winnie the Pooh read aloud (not very convincingly)
Dorothy Parker took an unforgettable approach to The House at Pooh Corner in the New Yorker, starting with a quote from the book.
'Well, you'll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom-' 'Tiddely what' said Piglet. (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent's mouth.) 'Pom,' said Pooh. 'I put that to make it more hummy.' And it is that word 'hummy', my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.
(Guardian's "Top 5 most scathing reviews") - Struwwelpeter provided essential training of the imagination, and probably started me on a lifetime of attention to the bizarre. The Wikipedia article is a good introduction if the book is new to you.
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James Thurber's The 13 Clocks still echoes.
Appreciations of The 13 Clocks keep appearing: Mari Ness
...If possible, I recommend either trying to read the book out loud, or listening to one of the recordings made of the text—including, the internet claims, one by Lauren Bacall that I was not able to track down. Partly because Thurber intended the story to be read out loud—it is, at least on the surface, a children's tale, though I would argue it is equally meant for adults—but mostly because reading the work aloud or hearing it allows the works careful, precise meter to shine through—showing what this work also is: a prose poem, if one with dialogue and paragraphs, and moments of rhyme, like this:
And Sonja Bolle's remembance:
For there's a thing that you must know, concerning jewels of laughter. They always turn again to tears a fortnight after. Even if you can't read it out loud, or hear it out loud, The 13 Clocks is well worth the short read, especially if you need a touch of magic in your life.
...The 13 Clocks is the first book I remember loving, and it is one of the few books I managed to wrest from my family's library and preserve through all the mundane disasters of my life. Everything about it is dear to me: The texture of the cover, the cloth spine now in shreds, the gorgeous endpapers with the Duke's shadowy castle on the hill overlooking the sunlit town. Marc Simont was perhaps the first illustrator whose accomplishments I, ever a word person, admired. Thurber was going blind when he wrote this book, so he did not illustrate it himself. In the story, the Golux has "an indescribable hat," and lo and behold, there on the page, Simont has drawn just such a hat! Complex, folded, twisted, buttoned — in a word, indescribable. It amazed me.
(the first Chapter read)Neil Gaiman's rendering of the first
(In his introduction to the new edition, Gaiman, himself a writer for impassioned followers of many stripes, calls it
"probably the best book in the world."See also Neil Gaiman on "3 books that have changed my life"
(1) The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and Narnia generally (2) Michael Moorcock Stormbringer (3) Alan Moore Swamp Thing - 50 Years of Popular Mechanics 1902-1952 riveted me from its first appearance as a Christmas present when it was first published. 50 years later I found the book in the Washington & Lee library stacks and was amazed at how clearly I remembered every illustration line for line and dot for dot, and most of the words. A lot of it was hey-wow stuff, short on technical details, but replete with news of new technological whizz-bang.
- under the eaves in the attic was the family trove of 50 years or so of National Geographic.
- At Blairhaven, summer vacation place in Duxbury MA, there was a set of maybe 6 volumes of Animals of the World, published around 1900 and profusely illustrated with fine line drawings (like this [toggle 'Plates only' to see just illustrations]). I probably started consulting it when I was 5 or so, mostly appreciating the graphics, not the explanatory text
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Other early reading (ages 8-10 or so) included the Hardy Boys series and quite a few in the Landmark Books series (still alive and well), both of which were an on-ramp into the sociopolitical Mythos of America.
- The Fireside Book of Folk Songs was on Alice's piano (and she would always be willing to play a tune so I could learn the song), and in use at Brown & Nichols School music classes, and was an early entrée into the shallow end of folk music.
- Alice's library included bird books (Roger Tory Peterson mostly), Belles on Their Toes (the second volume of the Gilbreth Family memoir which began with Cheaper By the Dozen) and for the adventurous, No Picnic on Mount Kenya, all of which I read multiple times. I still have a lot of bird-recognition information stored away...
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Among early 1950s books, Pogo was surely the entrée into 'comics' (though that term is much too confining for the medium), and I ventured happily in the imaginary Okefenokee Swamp for years (and I'm still accumulating volumes of weekly strips). As I've observed before, much character was built.
- Another watershed book was Abner Dean's What Am I Doing Here?, which seems a surprising collection to find in a clergyman's home. It posed some puzzling questions, in a mode that I could appreciate from an early age, and I considered it was so important in childrens' education that I applied it to my own young, with predictable results.
- My interest in the world of graphic exposition was further whetted by the New Yorker's 25th Anniversary collection of cartoons (1925-1950), which my sister had and I must have spent hundreds of hours perusing when I stayed with them in Minnesota (several weeks, several summers). That activity surely prepared me for Edward Gorey (an early 1960s discovery) and classics like Krazy Kat and Archy and Mehitabel... which in turn prepared me for Daumier, Hogath, and Grandville when I eventually found them in the 1960s, and for the graphic excesses of 'head comix' in late-60s and early 70s (R. Crumb, many others).
- My memories of school textbooks are pretty scanty, but I remember portentious information brought into the 4th grade classroom: Piltdown Man revealed as a hoax, and the discovery of the 'living fossil' Coelocanth greatly impressed me. That was about the time I read Kon-Tiki
A couple of examples of books that I'm absolutely sure were watersheds in my understanding of the world around, and how their influence has ramified since I first encountered them in 1955 or so:
- The Family of Man fed forward into both photography and anthropology (delightfully convoluted stories for another time)
- The Lord of the Rings, which I fell completely into when my mother brought them home (1955): for me LotR was a significant first long-form read, and I think it was the anchor point for subsequent forays into in fantasy and sci-fi. Our set of LotR was a wedding present (1964) from Marjanna's mother Alice Jansen, which I reread as escapist adventure in the late 1960s (when the trilogy achieved generational recognition and became iconic, just as Harry Potter did in the 1990s). LotR fed pretty directly into science fiction (Heinlein, Vonnegut, etc.; I knew the genre via my brothers, both of whom read a lot of sci-fi) and then eventually to cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling, Rucker...), with a sidestep to Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Gaiman's Sandman
- In 8th grade I was introduced to Peyton Place and Auntie Mame and Giant, novels somewhat beyond what my parents would have endorsed for my use. Auntie Mame is still fascinating 65 years later.
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