15 Book Facts About Me
Fri., December 23, 08:44 AM
One little mention, and it comes around to bite me in the back. I alluded to the books meme I saw on Golfwidow’s and Bardsbitch’s pages. And tag, tag, tag – it comes to me from the U.D. This will probably end up as facts about reading; books – wonderful as they be – are just the means to an end. Don’t know how many I’ll come up with…
- I’ve loved books for more than sixty years. Like many children who learn to read at home, I started with half-memorized books that had been read to me. I feel as if I always knew my letters, but I can’t remember precisely when I really learned to read.
- In a sixth grade essay, my teacher reworded a statement: “…reading is the most important factor to me…” Yeah. Before the internet, before television, books brought me the world.
- One of my proudest accomplishments is not only making sure that my kids could read, but that they enjoy it.
- I own two sets of encyclopedias. I bought the World Book around 1975. My son helped me put it away; he couldn’t read yet, but he knew his numbers. "Let's look it up" was a staple at our house.
As a young man, my dad bought the other encyclopedia, a 1910 set of the Dodd Mead International Encyclopedia. It was probably outdated when he bought it, which was why he could afford it at all. Those books were a mainstay of my early education. I even learned about Roman numerals from the spines (I have very little patience with people who don’t know how they work). By the time I was eight or nine, I read them just for information. And I absolutely loved looking at maps. - Everything I read led to something else. I read the cereal boxes while I ate my breakfast, and that led me to learn about nutrition. The information on a can of Band-Aids led me to learn about first aid, and I followed up by reading an old Girl Scout handbook.
- Once I was known as a reader, I received books as presents all the time. The ones I owned were devoured and digested again and again; I later read them to my kids. The Grosset & Dunlop Illustrated Junior Classics included Heidi, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Black Beauty, Little Women, among others. And let us not forget one of my favorites, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – far better than any movie they tried to make about it.
- My favorite kind of book was and is a well-crafted mystery. I loved Sherlock Holmes. There was a series of books by Ellery Queen, Jr., which was appropriate for young readers. No Nancy Drew, however, since libraries don’t carry them. I read a couple as an adult, and I wasn’t impressed much.
- I was deeply interested in science, though there weren’t a lot of science books available for kids. (We didn’t have science books in school till junior high; in third grade our teacher read to us every day from the only science book.) Possibly the best book I ever read at that time was Crucibles by Bernard Jaffe. I had a hard time finding the date for the original (1948) because it has been updated several times. It is a collection of biographies and, basically, a history of the beginnings of chemistry.
- It was because I loved science that I first looked at science fiction. SF and mysteries are built upon the kind of “what if” that I first encountered in Grimm’s fairy tales.
- When I first started working in the public library, I often drew the task of shelf-reading the mystery and science fiction collections. I got the job because no one else wanted to do it. And in doing so, I discovered more authors in the genres I liked.
- Biographies are wonderful – a good story is a good story – but I never cared much for history until I was an adult. (A course in ancient history in college was the first such class I ever enjoyed; I had elected it under protest.) Somewhere along the way, all the biographies I read began to click together. I began to look at time lines to see what happened when. I went back to my histories of science; just when was that invented? Did it affect the events here?
- I read Stephen King’s The Stand with a road atlas for reference. I just have to know where someone is in relation to everything else.
- I’m beginning to think that teaching history to youngsters just throws too much at them for starters. There’s a lot to cover, so they’re given the “big picture.” But it’s really difficult to absorb the big picture first; it’s easier to see a few “little pictures” first.
- Learning about the Dewey Decimal System connected with something else in my brain: arranging things into categories. We played some games of that type in our neighborhood, but everyone else lost interest long before I did. Of all the jobs I ever had in a library – including acquisitions, which is fun – I loved cataloguing the most.
- My dad always loved to read. He had some really great stuff when I was little – 100 best mysteries, biographies – but my mother decided they were junk and tossed them before I could read them all. (Maybe some of them were.) When I started working, I found books for Dad. I might bring one I thought he’d like; he’d read it and ask for something he’d read about. After that, I shared books with him till the day he died.
