15 Books -- Part 2

[hrj]

Continuing my own peculiar version of the 15 books meme (i.e., the books that made enough of an impression on me at the time that I remember taking special note of them) ... since I'm lying here unable to sleep, I might as well post something.

4. The year that would have been 5th grade for me, we spent in Czechoslovakia. My primary source for reading that year was the children's library at the U.S. embassy (in Prague), but one book that we had brought with us was a thick volume titled something along the lines of "Anthology of Children's Literature". (I'm sure it's still in the family somewhere, so I could track down the specifics if necessary.) This was a collection of various genres: poetry, folk tales, excerpts from novels, etc. etc. I read it from end to end many times that year. In fact, I knew the book so thoroughly that on one occasion I challenged my brothers to pick any one sentence from the volume and I'd tell them which story it came from. cryptocosm took up the challenge by selecting the line, "No, she wouldn't." (Or maybe it was "No, she wasn't.") Unfortunately for the success of the challenge, the very laconicness of the line immediately pegged it as coming from East of the Sun and West of the Moon. I clearly remember the occasion of the challenge: we were on a ski trip -- it must have been the first of our two ski trips, the one to Pec pod Sněžkou (since it wasn't the one when I sprained my knee, which was at Jansky Lazne). The cabin we were renting had those wonderfully old-fashioned single-paned windows that would get crazed with frost designs when you got the right combination of external cold and internal humidity.

5. & 6. There were a lot of memorable books that year -- I think I worked my way through almost the entire embassy children's library. I recall two authors in particular whose works I continued to track down later on the basis of that year. One was Rosemary Sutcliff, whose historic novels meshed very well with my awakening love of European history that year. The other was Alice Mary Norton's Borrowers series. I half convinced myself that there really was a parallel world of tiny people living behind the walls.

7. Other than school libraries, during my grade school years my major library access came through the bookmobile -- a library in a bus that would park by the local shopping center on certain days. When I visualize myself in that bus, the book I see in my hands is Maybe Monsters a non-fiction book on crypto-zoology that managed to make skepticism seem much more fun than credulity.

8. The actual permanent library we used was quite a bit further away, requiring parental transportation and a careful selection of sufficient books to last until the next trip. As soon as bureaucratically possible I got an "adult privileges" library card, not so much for the access to the adult shelves, but for the unrestricted number of books it allowed me to take out. I can still visualize certain spots on the shelves: the fiction was along the righthand side of the main room, with a long wide U of shelves along the walls embracing a series of parallel shelves set out from the long wall. If you went to the far corner of the wall shelves, in the last case against the outer wall, third shelf (I think) from the bottom, you found Hope Campbell's Meanwhile Back at the Castle the story of an American family who buys an island in the St. Laurence River that, by some quirk of history and surveying, is claimed by neither the US or Canada. There ensues a wild and crazy summer of staking out their own independent country and the (fairly realistic) repercussions therefrom. I think the story particularly struck me because my mother's family had a summer cabin in Thousand Island Park on the St. Laurence and I could seriously visualize the possibility of such an unclaimed island existing. But -- much like what I enjoyed about the Borrowers series -- I've always like the idea of interstitial spaces that fall outside everyday reality in some fashion.

9. Although I'd always had leanings towards sf and historic fiction, it was in junior high that I embarked on a serious program of tracking down these genres. I feel no shame in confessing that my basic grounding in the skeleton of British history comes from devouring the works of authors like Jean Plaidy. I didn't for a moment trust the details of the individual lives depicted in the novels, but the way they personalized the people and their relationships made the whole names-and-dates stuff stick in my head permanently. I don't recall any specific titles that stand out (although, by definition, the ones I was reading in that period would need to have been published before 1973).

10. The Lord of the Rings. I still recall spending about a week wandering around the campus of my junior high school in a complete daze because every spare moment was being spent devouring LOTR. (I was literally walking around with my nose in the book between classes.) And then spending at least a week after I'd completed it still in a daze processing the experience of having been sucked into an alternate world so thoroughly and completely.

Ok, still wide awake, but I need to at least try to close my eyes again.

Comments

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

I recall it being on Crystal Cove. Judging by Google Maps, it would have been one of the houses about where Prospect splits off Park. The family name would have been Maxson.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Aha, the other end of the village from us. I don't recognize the name but my mother might. Bob (Arnebeck) and Leslie (Kuter, she kept her maiden name) probably would too. (As might their kid, who is the same age as killernurd.)