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)

 

Sunday dinner…and some trivia

 

Spatchcocked chicken

When my kids were growing up, Sunday dinner was an event. My brother and his kids and assorted friends came for dinner, and sometimes I cooked for fifteen or twenty. Those were always joyous occasions. My brother would go around the table, and each person had to tell about their week. Lots of laughter. And always a special meal—I remember even doing turkey Wellington, a recipe I wish I had now. Once, when I tried an old country recipe for hamburger/cornbread casserole, my brother fixed me with a long look and asked, “Sis, is the budget the problem?”

These days, Sunday dinner is sort of special but get glossed over by other events, etc. Sometimes Jordan even suggests that our fridges and freezers are full, and we should have leftovers—that seems to me a violation of the social order, but I try to go along. Tonight, though I fixed a real Sunday dinner. Jordan was gone to an afternoon cookie party, and I had been warned that Christian had a major event last night, and I should not ask him for anything. But I talked to him on the side, and he agreed that we could spatchcock a chicken.

A friend asked me, via email, what my day held, and when I said I was hoping Christian and I could spatchcock a chicken, she replied she had no idea what that was. So in case you don’t know: you use kitchen shears to cut along the backbone of the roasting hen (not a fryer) and spread it open—that was the part I thought I could have done, but when I watched Christian do it, I realized it took more strength than I have in my hands. Then you open the chicken up, turn it breast side up, and press with both hands on the chest bone until you hear it crack. We had a five-pound hen, and it cooked in an hour. I slathered it with herb butter before baking, and it was moist and flavorful. Maybe the herb butter was a bit too salty, but that’s my only hesitation.

My dinner plate
with an enormous piece of chicken
but it was so good

I sided it with corn pudding, an old-fashioned dish that I’ve been longing for—and no, I don’t think my mom ever cooked it. It’s not something I remember from childhood. Tonight I used a “quick” recipe that includes a box of Jiffy cornbread mix. With corn kernels and creamed corn, it was quick and easy to put together, and delicious, albeit pretty rich and not good for the diet. Heavy with butter, eggs, and sour cream. My only problem was I underestimated the quantity—it wouldn’t fit in the largest casserole I have, which is not very big. I had to call into the house for a larger one. We also had lightly sauteed asparagus, a family favorite.

To me, this was what Sunday dinner should be. I enjoyed fixing it and eating it. Never mind that I got chicken grease down the front of my favorite pink T-shirt.

And on to the trivia of the day: I love reading book lists, bestseller lists of titles, two-sentence reviews. In other words, I like knowing the wide array of books out there in our wonderful book world. My Austin son-in-law is a real honest book collector, and I love finding titles for him. He will be deluged this Christmas, and I think I have enough ideas for two or three years of birthdays and Christmases. Today though I found a gem of a children’s book. I often find books that make me wish my children or grandchildren were little and would read this book. Today’s find as A Christmas Mitzvah, by Jeff Gottesfeld and Michelle Laurentia Agatha. If the cover is an indication, the illustrations in this book are delightful. It tells the story, based on a real person, of a Jewish man who each year at Christmas did the job of a Christian who wanted to spend the day with family. Over thirty years, the man pumped gas, waited tables, emptied bed pans, and did countless other daily jobs. Truly inspiring. And charming.

Books spinning off the Jane Austen canon are everywhere these days, though Stephanie Barron seems to dominate. She has a new novel entitled Jane Austen and the Year Without Summer. I hooted because I titled my first published novel A Year with No Summer. The marketing department at the NY publisher objected, saying “year” and “summer” were intangibles and kids wouldn’t identify The book came out as After Pa Was Shot, which led my mom to snort and say, “More violence!” And that was back in 1978. Apparently there really was a year without summer—1816—when severe cold swept across the northern hemisphere, causing food shortages. It was thought to be the after-effect of a catastrophic volcano explosion in Indonesia. Yes, even then we lived In one big world together. So much for isolationism.

Not to end on a sour note, but my latest pet peeve is magazines that insert perfurmed advertising pages. I do not want to be assailed to overly heavy or sweet aromas when I’m reading a food magazine. Yep, the offender was Bon Appetit.

And so we begin a new week, with Christmas drawing ever closer. I hope you have lots of good things on your calendar.

 

Books, books, books, everywhere

In our ongoing sorting and downsizing process, my ever-efficient daughter Jordan has bought plastic bins to store some of my books in a climate-controlled storage unit. She started today with my children’s books, a frustrating chore because the more she sorted, the more she found scattered in among other books. And then there were some boxes—Jacob unearthed three boxes of A Ballad for Sallie, not intended as a children’s book but taken that way by the publisher. When Leisure Books went out of business, they sold or gave the rights to Amazon, which reprinted it with a new cover. When Jacob found the new edition, he was completely flabbergasted.

In spells in which my fiction didn’t seem welcome, I wrote on assignment for several publishing houses that specialized in books for school libraries. Some assignments were traditional, and those books still bring me tiny checks every once in a while. Others were done as work-for-hire, and I got a one-time payment.

Jordan was astounded at the number of books and the variety—she came across single copies of books on vaccines, surgery, and passenger ships—how’s that for diversity? She also found single copies of a number of histories of various states and worried whether she and her siblings had copies of those. On the other hand, I have so many copies of the book I did on Christopher Reeve that we are awash and uncertain what to do with them.

The good thing about writing those books (beside the rather uneven pay) was that they required quite a bit of research, and I learned a lot doing them. Some stretched my creativity—like one on mapping the Old West. A fact checker questioned me, and I had to explain that no, I didn’t plagiarize but there aren’t that many written sources on how Native Americans found their way around. A book on the international treatment of women presented another challenge—until I convinced the publisher to let me create a fictional camp where teens from various countries came together to share their stories. I rather thought the book a success, but I have no idea what the foundation behind it thought.

Jordan is advocating for a “Judy Alter Night” at the Old Neighborhood Grill where I hold all my signings. She envisions one display of each of these books, plus introducing my forthcoming historical novel, The Gilded Cage. I am uncertain, but I realized when I looked at the display of books on the couches (she’s organizing stacks by title) that those books represent a lot of long hours of research and writing. Makes me kind of proud.

Happy Birthday today to my big brother. He’s sixty. If you believe that, then I am fifty-four. And if you believe that, I have a lot of books to sell you cheap!

More happiness?

Not sure I can measure up to another happy post, though it was a great day. Beautiful weather in North Texas, a day when I mostly had the house to myself—no workmen. I could work, fix myself lunch, nap (except somebody came to measure just when I was about to nap). I got a lot of work done, had a happy day.

Neighbor Jay went to get Jacob for me, and Jacob and I sat outside with dogs for a bit. Then he came in and buried himself in his iPad, in spite of my suggestions that he do his homework. So now, at 8:30, he’s reading and we’ve already done spelling.

My back is much better since my brother worked on it, though I still have to overcome the hesitation. Was all geared up for a trip out of the house tonight—I’ve stayed home too long and needed to get out. But my car wouldn’t start. I’d like to believe it’s the battery which is an easy fix with my roadside service policy. But I fear it’s the starter. I will worry about that tomorrow.

Friend Subie picked Jacob and me up for supper at the Old Neighborhood Grill, which was pleasant and interesting—though Jacob got bored and wandered off to watch the baseball game. The crowning blow of the evening came when he dumped a half a big to-go cup of Sprite on the kitchen floor. I gave him towels to clean it up, but I fear my shoes will stick to the floor when I walk in there.

Nice thing about the evening: Jacob is to read 30 minutes every night. It’s happened more than once: “Juju, I don’t have a book in my backpack.” I gave him a y/a book I did about Audie Murphy, and he seems to be enjoying it, asks me questions, wants to talk about it. Thought just now he had found a typo, but I explained the sentence to him—the reference was to small game, and he thought game should be came (which wouldn’t have made any sense at all). One of life’s treasure moments.

Guess it was a good day after all but the car and spilled Sprite make me suspect there’s still a spot on the moon.