I saw a Facebook post from the SF and fantasy writer C.J. Cherryh, soliciting ideas from readers for books to give a hypothetical 8-year-old, and she leads off with the books she herself got drawn into at that age. Lucky Bucky in Oz – I had to look it up – a later book in the Baum series, but written by their longtime illustrator, John Rea Neill. Disney’s duck comics. Pyle’s Robin Hood, illustrated. Edgar Rice Burroughs, not Tarzan, but the Mars books. Then she throws the nominations open.
Reading
the responses, there’s a lot of overlap, which is interesting because it
suggests not a lack of material, but that
certain writers hit our sweet spot. C.S.
Lewis and Narnia get high-fives - but it turns out I’m not the only one who
thinks The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe is terrific, and the rest kind of sag. Same with Walter Farley. The
Black Stallion is aces; the sequels, not so much. Everybody’s head-over-heels for E.B. White, Stuart and Charlotte. Laura Ingalls
Wilder. Tolkien. Nancy Drew.
Andre Norton. Madeleine
L’Engle. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider
novels. Robert Louis Stevenson. Heinlein.
T.H. White. Kipling. Twain.
Lewis Carroll. Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks. The
Wind in the Willows. Anything with
N.C. Wyeth illustrations. Ursula Le
Guin’s Earthsea. The
Call of the Wild. Sherlock
Holmes. Jules Verne. The
Scrolling through, I recognized stuff I hadn’t thought of in ages, the Doctor Dolittle series, for one. I was crazy about the books, at the time, but I’d be reluctant to go back. Maybe it was my imagination that made them so good. Burroughs is another one, the Tarzan books are ghastly, utter racist claptrap, but the Barsoom books are fabulous. Kipling is one of my favorites, still. I think the Carl Barks duck comics are genius. Somebody mentioned My Father’s Dragon, a book of such complete charm I can’t even fathom it’s having slipped my mind, all these years later.
The coolest thing about this is seeing other people open themselves up to a larger world, and how it happened. In some respects, it’s not the book itself, but the place and time we discovered it. C.J. herself says that she read her first actual fantasy, Jirel of Joiry, when she was sick in bed, once, and she still remembers the room, the bed, the window, the curtains, everything, the experience being that vivid. I know what she means.
There’s
a great moment in How Green Was My Valley,
the John Ford movie, when the boy Huw is recovering from pneumonia, and the
minister, Gruffydd, loans him a copy of
I’m not sure, but I think this is what C.J. Cherryh is trying to conjure up, and I think that’s what she gets, in the responses. What drew you in, and didn’t let you go? Or more accurately, that you couldn’t let go of? I clearly remember the room, the window, the curtains, the summer I fell under the spell of Renault’s The King Must Die. I was under an enchantment I couldn’t break.
We think back and say, what was the magic, how did they cast the spell? And we brought a lot of the energy ourselves, our hunger to be transported, but these are the writers who gave us the lamp to rub, the genie to call, the carpet to fly on. I’m enormously grateful.
I hesitate to play along because I am not sure what I read at that age. I think Treasure Island is about right. Tom Sawyer? And as for Cherryh's experience - I remember EVERYTHING about when and where I first read the words "They were the footprints of a gigantic hound."
ReplyDeleteAs I read your article, David, I wondered if I could think of any stories beyond Stevenson, and then the gates opened.
ReplyDeleteStevenson (Treasure Island and poetry), Barrie (various versions of Peter Pan), Verne, Doyle, Burroughs, and Haggard, this last read aloud by my father. Without his voice, Quatermain seems to drag. Dad also favored James Oliver Curwood and Jack London.
My mother loved C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower stories. I have early memories of her reading stories about fairies and toadstools, but I can't name titles or authors.
Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories… I ate them like peanuts. Fourth grade girls got me reading Farley's Black Stallion. Loved Twain's Tom Sawyer stories and Huckleberry Finn.
I craved mysteries, especially British classics. Jacques Futrelle's Thinking Machine appealed to me. By the 4th grade, I was quite prepared to wed Nancy Drew.
Looking back, a surprising amount of horror filled my list– Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, etc, which included a sickbed experience. I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper when I was confined to bed with measles or mumps… in a century old room… with ancient crawling yellow wallpaper.
In my youngest days, aunts contributed H.R. Garis's Uncle Wiggily and Gruelle's Raggedy Ann and Andy books with mixed results. (Even in toddlerhood, I had fierce notions. My mother tried to name my panda bear Mary Esther after the aunt who gave him to me, but I wasn't having it, calling it Clint instead.)
I consumed a fair amount of adult literature; Orwell and Bradbury come to mind. I read Fritz Lieber about the 3rd grade, which sealed my love for science fiction.
Leigh: I noticed, just now, that I left Fritz Lieber off the list - and quite a few of the people responding to C.J. specifically mention Fritz, and the Gray Mouser stories in particular, as a gateway to SF&F.
DeleteDavid, my first adult novel was Lieber's Gather Darkness. I've promised myself to reread it to see how it holds up.
DeleteRudyard Kipling's Jungle Books and Kim - I've loved and craved India ever since. I could see every single moment, hear every single sound... Bagheera was my warrior.
ReplyDeleteTwain; James Thurber (I tried to get our teacher - who read aloud a story every Friday - to read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" but he wouldn't he said the kids wouldn't understand it. But all children do is daydream, and those daydreams are so real that we don't even know the outside world exists). Bradbury, Heinlein (I wept at "The Green, Green Hills of Earth"), All of the Mary Poppins books (which are much spookier than that saccharine movie they made of the first one); Peter Pan; I know Laura Ingalls Wilder books practically by heart; T. H. White indeed, I practically know that one by heart, too, and it led me on to every Arthurian book I could find; Stevenson's "Kidnapped", and then Treasure Island; and everything else I could get my hands on.
So many books you've mentioned that I read over and over. I don't remember Bucky, but I must have. I read the the second and third (The Land of Oz, with Jack Pumpkinhead, and Ozma of Oz) in my third grade best friend's bedroom—she had asthma and air conditioning, and a high school friend had 40 of them, which he wheeled over to my house on loan in a little red wagon. The book I first read at 7 or 8 that I always say made me a writer and have reread countless times (there's a photo of me in front of my house with it tucked under my arm) is L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon. At that age, I wasn't ready for Little Women, although I read the chapter on Meg's children as toddlers repeatedly. (Weird?) Books I've found and bought online to have the pleasure of rereading now: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield, who also wrote as Dorothy Canfield Fisher. (I was nicknamed Betsy at home and camp in her honor as a kid, didn't become Liz till seventh grade.) The White Horse by Elizabeth Coatsworth. The Lion's Paw by Robb White. And I just detected the title of and bought Judy's Journey by Lois Lenski. Judy's family are migrant workers, and I still remember the last two lines of the little poem Judy composes at the end. What wonderful children's authors there were in the 1940s and 1950s when I was a kid. In Judy's Journey there was a floating island in Florida, and in The Lion's Paw, Sanibel Island was completely deserted, and you might find a rare and valuable seashell on the beach. I also loved (and just found online!) Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer, about a girl in New York in the 1890s who, among other things, falls in love with Shakespeare, especially The Tempest—both the language and Ariel. And another girl role model (both of these were Newbery Medal winners in the 1930s), Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink. Thanks for this topic! Today I'd give girls, much more grown-up by 8 now if they're good readers, Naomi Novik's Scholomance trilogy.
ReplyDeleteA writer who didn't make the cut, and you just reminded me of, is Robert Lawson. Maybe most famous for illustrating FERDINAND, which he himself didn't write, but I remember being completely taken with BEN AND ME (Ben Franklin) and MR. REVERE AND I (Paul Revere), which he did. I didn't mean to slight Lucy Maud Montgomery, either; the Anne of Green Gables books are terrifically vivid and influential - and I was crazy about the Megan Follows adapations.
ReplyDeleteOh yes!! I love Robert Lawson!!!
DeleteYes, I read all the Anne of Green Gables books too. My grandmother had an attic full of them, Agatha Christie, 1st edition Wizard of Oz, & my uncle's collection of James Bond books. One wonderful book for ages 8 & up is Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh & its sequel, The Long Secret, not quite as good.
ReplyDelete"The learned men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed ..." 🙃
I couldn't say it any better!
ReplyDeleteAnd I must have been eight when I read Louis Slobodkin's "Spaceship Under the Apple Tree." And Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," after seeing the Mr. Magoo cartoon.
ReplyDelete