Where literary taste gets started? Image courtesy of click, Morguefile.
Do you remember the books you read when you were younger?
I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t reading something, mostly for my personal entertainment. According to my parents, I started reading around age 3. At the time, there wasn’t a library in my hometown, so we had to travel quite a few miles to get to a public library.
The other option was checking out books from the library at my elementary school. I spent so much time there, I should’ve set up my own apartment in a corner somewhere. The head librarian, Mrs. H., was a kindly soul who made the library a fun place to hang out.
And the annual book fair at my elementary school? Heaven.
I can’t remember the titles of those childhood books now, but one book was a set of ghost stories and lost legends. The cover was creepy since it had a young ghost boy with blank eyes. One of the stories had to do with a ceramic cat; a thief on the run used the cat to hide a fortune in rubies after a robbery and scratched an X on the bottom for identification. The ceramic cat was one of several cats in a shop, it got sold and the thief never did find it again. True story? Maybe or maybe not.
Another story was about a painting of a castle at night, where a light in one of the windows would become visible now and then. The painting’s buyer saw this strange phenomenon and searched to find someone who knew the painting’s history. It turned out that the window in the painting was the window to a prison cell. When the prisoner died, the light in the painting went out permanently.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how some books stick in your mind and some don’t? Some books I remember because of the great art of classic illustrators such as Tasha Tudor, Garth Williams or Maurice Sendak. Others remain in my memory because of their great plots and character development.
With time, my literary taste in some ways has stayed the same (I still love good ghost stories, such as the stories of Virginia writer L.B. Taylor, Jr.) but it’s matured as the result of being exposed to various classic writers in my school classes (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, William Shakespeare and Dorothy Parker, to name a few). I’ve discovered some wonderful modern authors — mostly because somebody recommends them or I read a blurb about them, and I start reading everything they’ve written.
I wonder if anybody’s ever studied how people’s tastes in books ebbs and flows over their lifetimes? What a fascinating study that would be. (“I volunteer! I volunteer as tribute!”)
Blog readers, what are the books from the past that you remember the most and why?
Eagle-Eyed Editor 
hey there, as a child i liked running away type stories 😉 and my taste in books has definitely changed over time, it makes sense that it does, it means we are growing and changing as a person.
i was a born reader too, LOVED doing those scholastic book orders at school even though it took FOREVER to get your order 😉
Oh, the agonizing wait until the books came in!!!! 😉 But it was worth it.
My Mom read my first books to me. Ferdinand the Bull. My first book in grammar school was Susan and Arabella. Next can’t the Little House books, and many, many more. I too am a bookaholic.
Maybe we should form a club!
Paddington Bear, with those brilliant drawings by Peggy Fortnum. I loved the whole series because I could read them to myself, and they were the first books that made me laugh out loud. I still remember the scene where Paddington climbs on the table at the station and puts his foot in a cup of tea.
Whoops. Poor bear!
I don’t think it hurt him.
Oh, the wonderful times spent in libraries. Do hope kids now days get to wander and get lost in that wonderland as well as in ebooks! That would be in interesting idea for a study. I don’t read as many horse/dog novels now, kept up with SciFi and historical novels(tales/myths from long ago as a kid), and picked up mysteries as an adult where I avoided the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews (too easy to figure out!)
Were you, by any chance, a fan of the Misty of Chincoteague books?
Oh, yes! All of hers – and met the author as she signed books…to awed to say much though.
(Still follow the ponies during hurricane season)
Oh wow, I envy you. Actually meeting Marguerite Henry…lucky you!
if only I could have talked instead of shuffling. I remember she was very kind and had warm eyes
Not sure what my first book was. Maybe Winnie the Pooh or else the Trixie Belden series. I read all the books in the little library in my little Catholic school. Unfortunately they were all biographies of the saints. Lots of dying there for a young kid.
Hoo, boy. But I’ll bet you can reel off the names and details of a bunch of saints!
Yep — the various methods of torture used on them and then ultimately how they died. One thing for sure, there was no sex in those books! The nuns made sure of that.
And there went all the fun…… 😉
Mrs Piggle Wiggle. I so enjoyed how she took those problem children and turned them around in the right direction. Of course, all those children reminded me of other kids–I was never selfish or picky or stingy like THOSE kids in the story. Oh, and the Moomin books too!
Wouldn’t Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle have been a fun neighbor to have? I loved how one of the kids discovered that long-lost treasure in her home.
I can actually remember quite a few books from my childhood, probably because as my granddaughter was growing up, I wanted her to love at least a few of the same books. Most of my childhood reading involved animals, especially horses and dogs. Not much like my current taste, though I still love animals. My taste in literature has changed enormously through my life and continues to evolve. The only constant has been reading itself. I am always reading one or more books, though recently mostly in audio form as aging eyes have increasing difficulty focusing for long periods. Lovely article. Brings back wonderful memories.
Thanks, Marilyn. What a great compliment!
I didn’t read to myself when I was that young because I’m dyslexic and didn’t really get the hang of reading fluently until about the age of 12 or 13.
My Mum read The Lord of the Rings out loud to my brothers and I when I was about 4 though. I didn’t follow it very well at that age and got the orcs mixed up with the spying birds. When I saw the film years later I thought Peter Jackson was off his nut, I was thinking ‘aren’t the orcs meant to have feathers?!’
Gwen
I worked my way through “The Hobbit” at a young age and had difficulty keeping track of who was who. The movies have made it a bit easier, to be sure!
Ooh! Danger in Dinosaur Valley! It was perhaps the most perfect picture book for boys ever written, for it combined, dinosaurs, time travel, and baseball. The climax involved a family of diplodocus beating the living crap out of a T-Rex.
Oh, how I loved it.
Oh, how I still love it!
I even wrote about it on my blog, see? http://mikeallegra.com/2013/03/04/another-repost-now-thats-just-lazy-jurassic-pick/
Coming over to read it soon!
My childhood Books were of course all German. I feel that at the time we did not have so many books translated from English or other languages. One book that left a deep impression was “Treasure Island”.
Ausgezeichnet! Ich habe “Treasure Island” sehr gern.
My favorite book as a kid was “Harlequin and the Gift of Many Colors” by Remy Charlip. I borrowed it almost every time I visited the library. The children’s room librarian said that if it was ever discarded, they would save it for me. I bought it off amazon a few years ago. I also loved the Chronicles of Narnia and “Island of the Blue Dolphins”, and anything by E.B. White. The first book that I read all by myself was “Ten Apples Up on Top”, by “Theo LeSeig”…AKA Dr. Seuss.
I hadn’t heard of Remy Charlip. Must check that out!
I actually remember the first book I read (and owned). It was a Ladybird edition of Thumbelina. I remember it clearly because I always kept reading it, over and over again… I was only four, and English is not my first language, so I was very pleased about myself. 🙂
You were reading another language at 4? Wow. I’m seriously impressed.
I can’t remember much from early childhood at all. But, I do remember that in grade school, I cried when I had to return the whole Madeleine L’Engle book set I had borrowed at the beginning of the year. “A Wrinkle in Time” blew me away, but “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” and “Many Waters” saved my life and started my love affair with fantasy writing. Other books I remember as fond childhood playmates: The Chronicles of Narnia!
You can’t go wrong with a good lion, witch and wardrobe! 😉
I was so into Narnia that I used to try to make my cat admit she was a True Narnian, stop the act and just talk to me! It wasn’t until years later that I realized they were undercover Bible stories.
Any chance your cat was named Aslan? 😉
Sorry! I didn’t get to name her 🙂