Reading as a Child
So many writers I know state that their love of writing came from their childhood favorite pastime of going to the library and of reading.
How does this get fostered? Parents help with this by reading to their children. This is such a well-known fact that I’m not going to bother giving you a cite for it. While my father was often out late at night, busy with political activities to make Evanston and the region better, there were nights that he was home. And it is him who I recall reading to my brother and me. I’m sure my mother did too, but it’s my father’s reading to us that stands out.
We would gather together on my brother’s bed and my father would read from “Kidnapped” or “Treasure Island” and I would be transported to another world. These were obviously books he’d had as a child because they looked very old and he appeared to relish reading them to us. Those books did not have paper book covers. They had a graphic on the front cover and often beautifully drawn illustrations drawn by N. C. Wyeth and Arthur Rackham that had been inserted into the book.
He also read Winne the Pooh and Alfred Hitchcock ghost stories. He had a wonderful tenor reading voice that would bring the characters alive. It felt safe to press my small body against him as I fell under the spell of the story. Perhaps I remember his reading to us more than my mother because he often wasn’t home when we went to bed so to have him read to us was special.
My mother made her own contributions to fostering my lifelong love of reading. It was she who took us to the library or bought us books. One of my favorite Christmas traditions was the book on the bed. On Christmas Eve Santa would leave a book on our beds. The theory was that it would keep us in bed until the arrival of our grandparents at 8 am. It was hard to contain a child’s exuberance on Christmas day. My mother had a knack for picking a book that would occupy me for an hour, even on Christmas. My brother, not so much.
She picked books that were Caldecott or Newberry award winners or just books that had female protagonists amazingly around the same age as me. I remember the Katie John series written by Mary C. Calhoun in the 1960s. The Borrowers series by the English author Mary Norton (1959), Stuart Little, The Wind in the Willows, A Witch on Blackbird Pond, A Wrinkle in Time, Johnny Tremaine, and even a historical fiction novel written by the Mayor of Evanston’s wife, Anne D Emery in 1959 called A Spy in Old Philadelphia. The Emerys lived up the street from us. All of these books were hardbacks as Scholastic Books did not start their bookfair business in the schools until 1981. The trade paperback business started to change the publishing industry in 1960 but the books that found their way into our house were primarily hardbacks, books that would stand up to the passage of time not only in physical durability but durability in time.
I’d be thrilled to know what books you remember from your childhood.