This is a repost from August 6, 2009, from an old long-closed blog I had.
I really haven't changed in all these years. Even the writing style is the same. And I still like those books and feel the same way about reading and believe I have transmitted that feeling to my children. I had the habit of writing down favorite passages from the novels that most impressed me and I see that my mini-me has developed the same habit. I didn't teach her; she did it on her own.
Oh, the book in the photo below is Wanda by the 19th century English authoress Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), also one of my favorite books from my childhood. The novel popularized the name "Wanda" in the English-speaking world. The novel spawned a stage play and an opera by Antonín Dvořák. The protagonist is Countess Wanda von Szalras. When I was reading the book and talking about it with my grandmother, she told me that I was descended from the Countess. I believed it. For a while. Then it dawned on me that the countess was a fictional character. Grandma! Haha.
Here's a quote from the novel that would get it banned today and Ouida canceled. It's about a lowlife bum who pretended to be a prince/boulevardier who charmed Wanda into falling in love with, marrying and bearing him children. When she found out what he really was, she was devastated.
Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this?
The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race.
It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for ever my blood flows with yours!'
The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.
So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust."
Anyway, on with the old post --
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Rules: In no more than 15 minutes list 15 books that will always stick with you that you had read by the time you were 15 years old.
And don't go for the pretentious or have an eye to impress. The truth!
Hmm.
Okay. This is harder than it seems, mainly because a lot of books I
really liked I have forgotten about until someone mentions them and then
I am all like, "Oh, yeah!" And, um, my picks are mostly stuff I read
as a kid; books I've read later haven't had as much impact on me.
Well,
the summer I was 11 I really read a lot, undirected and unsupervised. I
spent most of it with my aunt and she had a shed behind the house that
was absolutely filled with books. The shed was painted yellow, neat and
clean, with a window opposite the door through which sunlight flooded
the rows and rows of books in a bright light dancing with dust motes.
Many of the books had been published around the turn of the 20th
century, quite a few before, as well as stacks of paperbacks from
decades later.
Anyway, mostly I remember books from that summer, for
a lot of reasons. It was a unique time in my life, a kind of pause, an
end of one era of my life, but not yet the beginning of the next, and
all those books I read, read desperately, intently, trying to escape
into them to avoid the reality I sensed coming, infused it with an aura
of other-worldliness that remains in my memory still.
Okay, the books, those I remember the titles to, anyway, only in the order they pop into my mind.
*My Antonia by Willa Cather
*Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson
*Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
*Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Turgenev
*Why Gone Those Times? by James Willard Shultz
*Lost Island by James Norman Hall
*Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clark
*The Dog Who Wouldn't Be by Farley Mowat
*Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
*Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
*The October Country by Ray Bradbury
*A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
*Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton
*A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
*The Outermost House by Henry Beston
Oh,
and two that I totally loved that I read when I was like 7 or 8 or
something: "Dangerous Island," and, especially, "No Children, No Pets."
No idea who the authors were or really what the plot lines were. But
the ambiance, the feeling of them, remains with me to this day.
Then
there was The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. That little
book may very well have made me who I am. It is a precious and dear to
me as anything in the world. It is my private treasure.
I could go
all day listing books from my childhood that I totally loved or that
deeply impressed me--The Wind in the Willows, Bend Sinister, The Big
Sky, Coronado's Children.... Then there was poetry, history and
nonfiction of all sorts....
Sigh.
The happiest I may ever have
been--may ever be--was when I was nine or 10 years old, curled up
outside on the grass under a tree on a summer day reading--reading
raptly, intently, obliviously, joyously.
I really feel sorry for
people who didn't become readers when they were young. Reading is far
better than watching TV or movies. The experience you have when reading
is total, because your mind is immersed in the story and you create the
images from your own imagination, so they are much more real and stay
with you as something you almost experienced yourself. The only thing
that comes close to it is radio plays, because you do the same thing
with them, visualizing what is happening with your mind.
August 6, 2009
