Books and childhood memories

A post by The Phantom Scribbler left me feeling nostalgic about books. Like The Phantom, my sisters and I would read constantly--in the car and everywhere else, to the point that we often missed what was going on around us. In fact, when it came time to learn how to drive we didn't even know our way around town because we'd always been too busy reading in the car to pay attention to where we were going.

My mother instilled a great love for quality books in us as I was growing up, and I was raised on classics like Little Women, The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, Elsie Dinsmore, and so many more. Mom collects vintage books, so many of them I read in the older, sometimes original, printings. There's something solid and real about those older hardback books with the old-fashioned illustrations and thick pages--those books have a tangibility and a soul that modern paperbacks just can't match.

If you haven't read them, you really need to check out Little Women and Louisa May Alcott's other books--some of my favorites are Jack and Jill, Little Men, and Eight Cousins.

Also, if you like Alcott's work, you'd probably also enjoy Johanna Spyri. Most people know her as the author of Heidi, but few know that she wrote a large number of other children's books as well--some of which in my opinion are even better than Heidi, but most of which are out of print. You can probably find some of them at your local library.

I just made a most marvelous discovery, in Googling to remind myself of the names of some of Spyri's books. Several of them are online in their full texts, so you can read them and even see the illustrations for some of them. Here they are: http://www.geocities.com/johannaspyri/spyrionline.html

We used the old brown McGuffey Readers, too, as well as a lot of quality modern literature. As we got older we moved on to books like The Count of Monte Cristo and the works of authors like Dickens, Jane Austen, and everything from Chaucer and the Bible forward.

There was a series of books about boys that we had, and I can't remember the name of them at the moment. They were about boys who started out in poor and often deperate circumstances and through honesty and hard work they grew up to better themselves and their circumstances.

I also remember reading and loving the Betsy and Tacey books, the Little House on the Prairie series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Black Stallion and all the sequels, Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (brilliant literature disguised as charming children's stories, but are actually biting satire with great insight into life and society), and too many more to list. We would go to the library and come home with as many bags of books as we could carry, and devour them all within a few days. I must confess that I often got into trouble as a child for reading when I was supposed to be doing something else such as math homework, chores, or sleeping. :)

My girls, A (4) and M (almost 3) already share that love of books . . . they will sit and look at books for hours on end, and when I sit down to read to them they would love to fill my lap with a pile of books so high I can't get my chin above them--and then they'll sit there and want "just one more" until my voice gives out. I can't remember a time in the recent past where either of them has gotten tired of reading books before the adult reading to them has. :)

What are some of your best-loved books from childhood?

A few of my kids' favorites right now are Goodnight Moon, The Very Quiet Cricket, The classic Winnie the Pooh series, the Dr. Seuss books, and the Bible. I tend to like the shorter, more poetic books--but the girls think the longer the story, the better. I'm thinking it's time to start reading Little House in the Big Woods and Paddington Bear to them next.