Booking Through Thursday: books and my family...

[fajrdrako]

From Booking Through Thursday:

When growing up did your family share your love of books? If so, did one person get you into reading? And, do you have any family-oriented memories with books and reading? (Family trips to bookstore, reading the same book as a sibling or parent, etc.)

My parents both read a lot, and loved books, so I had the example before me. They read to me when I was very young - I have many happy memories of being read to from favourite books at three or four or five. I particularly remember asking what 'education' meant, from the chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh where Eeyore learns to make an 'A'. This fascinated me. The whole mystique or reading and writing.

I had no siblings to influence my reading. Just parents.

After I learned to read, I was sick a lot, and my parents gave me books to keep me entertained on days when I was stuck in bed. I read the books they had kept from their own childhoods, like The Books of Knowledge and E. Nesbit. I never did read my mother's favourite book, Little Women. Still haven't read it, though thanks to her, I can quote many passages. Similarly, I didn't read what my father liked, which was science fiction. But I loved E. Nesbit, and they'd both read and loved her books. I remember enjoying The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, and L.M. Montgomery - my mother was enthusiastic over Emily of New Moon, and so was I. And The Blue Castle - was any book ever so romantic? (And what was the one where the hero was blind?) An aunt gave me a new L.M. Montgomery for Christmas every year. Silver Pennies belonged to my Aunt, but I fell totally in love with it, and eventually it was given to me.

At 11 or 12 or 13 I read my way through my parents' bookshelves, except for my father's science and science fiction. So to some extent I read what they read. All the Reader's Digest condensed books, all my mother's 'how to write' books, Grace Livingston Hill, all the biographies, all the Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dickens, Brontës, John Buchan, Ngaio Marsh, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Marjorie Allingham, and so on - yes, my mother liked mysteries. I found some one-off gems along the way, like Precious Bane by Mary Webb and Daddy Long-Legs by Jean Webster.

Occasionally, I read a book because my parents said I was too young for it - nothing made a book sound so intriguing! When I was eleven or so, my mother said she thought Oliver Twist was too dark for me. That set me off on a decade of reading and loving Dickens. I read Fanny Hill at 12 because I overheard my mother telling my father that my 15-year-old cousin was too young for it; ditto for a biography of Oscar Wilde a few years later. Occasionally I read something on my parents' recommendations: I read The Lord of the Rings because my father said he thought I'd like it, though he hadn't read it himself. I wonder if he'd have mentioned it, if he'd known how obsessive I'd then become about Tolkien and Anglo-Saxon literature.

I don't remember ever going to bookstores with my parents, though I must have done so - except once going to a wonderful old bookstore in Toronto with my mother because my mother had loved it long ago - but I don't recall its name. (Brentnall's?) I remember many trips to the library and a parent must have been with me sometimes, especially when I was very young, but my memories are of always going by myself.

I remember once... I was sick in bed and bored, and my parents said they'd get me a new book. I begged for a new E. Nesbit. My father came home with a book called The Island of Adventure by Enid Blyton. At first I was disappointed - it wasn't even fantasy - but there was nothing else to read, so I tried it, and fell in love with Jack and his parrot Kiki particularly, and adored the whole "Adventure" series.

I remember enjoying listening to my cousin read Finnegan's Wake aloud to her baby daughter at the cottage - I was probably fourteen. I remember reading Alistair Maclean's Ice Station Zebra and loving it - my cousin George had brought it to the cottage that same year. It wasn't just my immediate family who were book addicts. Must be genetic or something.

Comments

[filkferengi]

There's a group of siblings who go to cons together, since their spouses aren't too fannish. One of the sisters is named Phronsie & claims I'm the only fan they've ever met who knows where it's from. Now I can tell her there's another one. ;)

Great reading list! Mine was similar, although I'm just getting to Ngaio Marsh & Patricia Wentworth. You should so seek the Sayers; _Whose Body_ is the first one. Or, you might want to check out the collection of short stories first, to sample her prose [I found it at the library sale for .50].

When I was a kid, I'd read to my mom as she got dinner ready after work, spelling out words I didn't know [I won the school spelling bee in 7th grade, so we did something right]. I spent summers with my grandmother, who lived equidistant between two libraries, so I had cards at both. They were small and full of old, smelly, long OOP books. Hence the Nesbit, Hodgson Burnett, the more obscure Johanna Spyri, Jean Webster, et-delightful-cetera.

Thanks for bringing back some lovely memories!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

One of the sisters is named Phronsie & claims I'm the only fan they've ever met who knows where it's from. Now I can tell her there's another one. ;)

There is indeed! "Sophronia" is a great name and has always stuck with me. If I ran into a Phronsie I'd know exactly where it was from!

Hodgson Burnett - yes, I got to her late, probably indirectly via school - I think one of the other classes in my school read one of her books, and I made it a point to always read what the other classes were studying. Johanna Spyri is one of the exceptions - a butt I read because I had to, we studied it, and I liked it. Especially the illustrations.