I have been reading so very much lately. Re-reading books I've read probably hundreds of times and thinking back on the important ones.
Fuzzy Rabbit is the same age as I am, first published the day I was born. I don't know if my parents knew that or not when they bought it, but I discovered this while Googling around for it a few years ago. The book is now out of print, sadly. It also stands out as the book my mother was reading to me when she realised I knew how to read. I got the sequel, Fuzzy Rabbit in the Park, a few years later.
I remember Outside Over There from right about the time my brother was born. The Sign on Rosie's Door is probably my favourite of his work, but I was enchanted by Outside Over There when I was little. My mother said it gave her the creeps, and I know that the book is one that a lot of people don't like for just that reason, but I liked it. Maybe since I associate it with my little brother I was firmly in Big Sister territory and Ida, who wasn't afraid.
When I was five, my father started reading The Hobbit to me before bed. We had just finished reading Winnie the Pooh, which has a map at the beginning. Instead of the traditional NEWS on the compass rose, it has POOH. Well, there's a map at the beginning of The Hobbit too, but the compass rose is indicated with Runes, and, reading the map, we discovered that, curiously, East is in the position North usually takes. From there, I started reading the rest of the Runes, and scared my father. You don't find out what the Runes mean for several chapters, and I'd never heard it or read it, but there I was calmly reading off the runes to him presumably based only from knowing the four letters of the directions. I remember reading it, but I don't know how I knew, especially since this was a time when letters in a different font could confuse me. A letter g with a looptail was, as far as I was convinced, a letter of the alphabet they hadn't bothered to teach me. From The Hobbit we went straight into LOTR, and finally finished the trilogy when I was in second grade, when I started all over again by myself.
In first grade, I moved up to the third grade classroom for part of the day just for reading. I was more or less miserable. I sat on the floor at the back of the class for the entire year, and one of the third grade girls hated me on sight for reasons that are still unknown to me. Her name was Fawna. The teacher of that class was my ally and my reading and English teacher for the next three years, and still one of my favourites. The first book I read in that class was The Mouse and the Motorcycle, a book that I don't personally like very much now. It's stayed with me simply because it takes me right back to being six years old in a class of eight year olds and for the first time in my life, out of my depth.
Actually, I've always had a love/hate relationship with Beverly Cleary's books. I like them when I read them, but I never want to read them, or feel that I really had a good time after I read them.
In second grade, I was amazing my teacher by blowing through the Book It reading requirements- ten books a month, or so, and I was turning them in in a week. After re-reading The Hobbit and starting in on the Narnia Chronicles, she loaned me her copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, a book she told me she read when she was thirteen years old. I liked it mostly for the provenance of being a book my teacher loaned me that she didn't read until she was almost twice my age, but there weren't too many things in it that went over my head. Subsequent readings have paled it's educational brilliance over the years, but at the time I thought that it was a book full of wonderful secrets that were being revealed to me alone.
I was given The Secret Garden in second grade for my birthday, but I didn't really read it until forth grade (this is the Google version with the illustrations of my copy- only about the first 40 pages are there, but the illustrations are beautiful). It's probably my desert island book, one that I could read over and over and over again and never get bored of. Sometime I acquired a paperback copy as well that has fallen all to pieces from my carrying it around with me in high school and college.
Middle school was a horrible time. We were assigned a lot of "realistic fiction" or, as I've come to think of it, Harry Potter if you cut out all the magic and left in all the whining. Stories about abused and neglected children getting involved in things they have no business in and triumphing. It was a very dark time in my education, but my father, as always, was there for me. He got me The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide, the first omnibus. My brother in his turn got the blue one with Mostly Harmless added in. One by one, my friends began reading it and we quoted Hitchhiker, Star Wars, and Monty Python to each other. We were nerds, but we were happy nerds.
I also read The Little Prince at about the same time. I can remember scribbling my book covers over with 101010 (42 in binary) and pictures of boa constrictors from the outside in a vain attempt to attract my teachers' attentions. I always felt that if just one of them would look down and see, and understand, life would somehow be more bearable. Years later, my high school French teacher saw me sketching a boa constrictor from the outside and said, "Ce n'est pas un chapeau," but I was a little disappointed it had taken that long, and, of course, she was the French teacher; if she hadn't known, there would have been something wrong with her.
Freshman year of high school was the first time I would read Hermann Hesse's Siddharthafor an English class. I have read it at least once a year every year since. It has been a nice book to grow up with, and one of the first books that I noticed changing with me. Most of my books are children's books that I read with nostalgia, or books like Douglas Adam's which can only be read with wider intelligence, Siddhartha reads with experience, and as mine changes, so does his. It's a book that I look forward to reading every year to see what I have to find out about myself.
My senior year of high school I was in an AP English class with a bunch of rich snotty kids who had no love for literature. They were taking the class to pad their applications. I didn't care for any book we read in class except Crime and Punishment, but it was the first time I had ever come across a book that I hated: Grendel. We were reading it in order that we didn't have to read Beowulf. Well, I had read Beowulf back in 6th grade, and the one is not a substitute for the other. I might have been OK with it, except that in the middle of nowhere and for no reason at all, Gardner throws in the term Middle Earth. It's to no real purpose, it's never used again, and it's not explained why it's there.
I remember asking in class whether this was just a washed up college professor who thought that he could hang on the coat-tails of the 1960s popularity of Lord of the Rings by producing a The True Story of the Three Little Pigs look-alike in the form of an epic poem adaptation, and if so, why should we be taking this seriously? The whole class stared at me for a long while, because this was fall of 2001 and Fellowship of the Ring was not due to open for another two months. The teacher shrugged and said, "Would you rather read Beowulf?" "I did. When I was 11." "Oh, well..." and changed the subject. I was a pain in the ass, I know that now, but it was the first time I had ever hated a book, and it was a new experience for me. I probably ought to read it again, but I'd have to find a copy.
My freshman year of college I read the script for the musical Pippin. I haven't read it since, but I have the soundtrack, and would dearly love to direct it someday. It feels spectacular while still being a decent piece of theatre, a feat that few musicals really do well- a lot of them are either bad plays with songs thrown in, or songs that had a shaky story built around them. Pippin feels like vaudeville, like a magic show, it's a really wonderful little piece of work and I think there's a lot to be done with it.
Last year I dove headfirst into the works of Neil Gaiman and am completely in love with him. But I also read the very first comic book series I had ever read outside the newspapers, the Sandman series. I used to be of the "comics are a waste of time" school, but now I've begun reading some of the good stuff out there I wish this is what we'd been assigned to read in middle school instead of the stuff we did read.
I've been checking the Sandmans out of the library, but had to come to a crashing halt halfway through because the library doesn't have the sixth installment. The card catalog shows that they do, the shelves show that they don't, the librarians keep getting snippy with me because I'm asking about a comic so they lump me in with the high schoolers. I keep meaning to just reserve a copy and see what happens.
Twelve books. I could put more, especially if I were making a favourites list, or a most read, which it isn't either. The Secret Garden would be on both lists, and I think that it's the only one that would. There's other Douglas Adams I prefer to Hitchhiker, there are plenty of books I've read more than Siddhartha. But, for whatever reason, these are some of the milestones books, books that mean something in the timeline even if they don't mean any more than that.
It's sort of a strange list.