What books did you read as a child?

 

Author Susan Witting Albert, writing on her post, “Place & Thyme” in Substack, recalled how she got to be Carolyn Keene, author the Nancy Drew books, for a while. Carolyn Keene was a house name—an imaginary author created by a publisher who then hired various authors to write books anonymously. For Susan, being Carolyn Keene was a dream come true. She recalled a childhood devoted to reading which prepared her for that opportunity, and 143 readers in turn commented on their memories of the books they read as children. Nancy Drew was the clear winner as to be expected.

For me, talking about a reading childhood was a real trip back in time. The summer when I was—oh, probably ten or eleven, around there—I would ride my bike every morning to the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Pubic Library and come home with a stack of six or eight books. It was probably a bike ride of about six blocks, and when I think of it now, I am amazed my parents let me go alone. But that was then, a totally different time.

Once home with my books, I spent the day on the screened-in front porch reading, ignoring the cries of neighbor children who wanted me to come out and play. I was too busy in my fantasy worlds. It was about then that I wrote my first short story, but that’s a tale to be told another day.

But I remember books long before I was able to ride to the library, a few even before I could read. I know my mom read The Wind in the Willows to me, and I remember the Lil Colonel Stories by Annie Fellows Johnson, written around the turn of the century (not this one, the last one). And then there were the tales of Uncle Remus, African American folk tales written by Joel Chandler Harris during Reconstruction. And, of course, there were the Bobbsey Twins, a series of seventy-two books published from 1904 through 1979. These, like the Nancy Drew books, were published by the Stratemeyer syndicate under the house name of Laura Lee Hope.

Another book I loved was Little Black Sambo, also written at the turn of the century, this by a Scottish woman. Sambo was an Indian boy living in the jungle, and the story revolves around his encounter with tigers in the jungle. At first, author Helen Bannerman was hailed for presenting the first black hero, but by the 1950s the books was considered racist. Poet Langston Hughes judged that the illustrations were offensive, done in a “pickaninny style.” Today, many versions of the book, all sanitized I’m sure, are available. Little Black Sambo was so popular at my house that my mom hooked a rug with a tiger on it for one of my children.

My reading tastes moved on, of course, to the Nancy Drew books, although unlike many of Nancy’s fans, I never was equally interested in the Hardy Boys books. But I devoured the tales of Cherry Ames, nurse, and Sue Barton, another nurse. Trixie Belden wasn’t nearly as fascinating as Nancy Drew, but I still read her adventures. And I have fond memories of Alfred Payson Terhune’s books about collies—I desperately wanted a collie, and somewhere in my high school years my parents got me a collie puppy. They did not, however, get me a horse despite my equal fascination with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty books.

The last series I remember from my school years were the New Orleans novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes. After that, there is a great gap in my memory, due no doubt to years of undergraduate and college work with heavy required reading lists. The wonders of literature that I discovered during those years are too numerous to mention, except I can’t omit Emily Dickinson who was the subject of my master’s thesis. By the time I wrote a dissertation, I was hooked on literature of the American West—the writers and the artists. Those loves have stayed with me through a long lifetime of writing, often about the American West. But I do remember that when I first felt the urge to write a mystery, I sketched out one so baldly derived from Nancy Drew that it was an embarrassment. And it’s no accident that today I write, or have most recently written, cozy mysteries.

As I look back at my reading history, I realize what a rich heritage is available to our children, and then I am angry, sad, you name it, that petty minds are keeping so many American classics from the school and libraries. Classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and so many more. If children are kept from these books through twelfth grade, they will never again pick them up, and they will miss the wonderful world that waits for them in those pages. They are not likely to be truly educated adults with good reasoning skills, and they surely will miss a lot of cultural references. In some cocktail conversations, they’ll be hopelessly lost.

What is being done to reading curricula is a travesty, and to make it worse, it is done by a few determined, bigoted, narrow-minded people. If they censor their own children, that’s sad but their privilege. But nobody, from the extreme evangelist next door to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, has the right to tell me what my grands can read.

So what books shaped your childhood?

For a list of banned classics, go here: What American classic books have been banned fromschools - Search (bing.com)