Tuesday on Twitter, Timmy, Steve B, and I talked about library cards and bookmobiles. I know I always had library cards, but I don’t remember getting them (except the last one I got for Houston’s library downtown). But those steps up into the bookmobile, the smell of the books, even the way the air conditioner felt–those memories are as vivid as if they happened only weeks ago. It was SO EXCITING the day the bookmobile came.
I filled out the first few lines of my “books read” myself, then my mother took over, probably because I kept messing up the authors’ names. I may eventually look up all of these books and see if any of them seem familiar. For example, I don’t remember reading H.A. Rey’s Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys, in which Curious George makes his very first appearance.
And clearly my appreciation of things that sparkle must have begun with Paul Brown’s Sparkle and Puff Ball.
Does anyone remember any of these books?
My mother must have, because many years later, when The Boyfriend brought us a dog to rehome when her family moved out of the country, my mother renamed her Ling Toy (No. 18, Glen Dines’s The Useful Dragon of Sam Ling Toy).
Back cover:
I adore this post. I know lots of these titles (surprise, surprise), but I don’t think I read any of them as a kid. I like the Will & Nicolas books, but I’ve never seen the two on your list. Clearly your love of animals started at a very young age 🙂
I wondered if you’d recognize any of them or might have even sold them through E.M. Maurice Books.
I loved the summer reading clubs! They were the only times that I got away with spending so much time reading. Otherwise, my parents chased me outside into that strange place beyond my windows with the really bright light. I swear that I must have been a changeling that was dropped in a house full of non-readers.
I, on the other hand, was born into a family of readers. Still, I took it to almost vampire-level. (My eyes, my eyes!)
I didn’t get my first library card until I was in high school. Books were always gifts in the family. I also inherited all the books (and toys) that had been given to my seven uncles as they grew up … Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, Twain, Stevenson and more.
I’m pretty sure I’d never have read The Hardy Boys if I hadn’t had a big brother.
Trivia fact — all the books were ghost written under the author’s name Franklin W. Dixon, and for a number of years the ghost writers were actually a teenage boy as well as several women.
Lucky teenage boy!
I suspect childhood reading was/is very different in the States to what it is here.
I suspect you are right! I know it’s very different here now from when I was young.