Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Books I read as a youth

I have been wondering, trying to recall what I read when I was young.
Reading kicked in for me late, around 10 or 11. I had been a poor reader, I am dyslexic. But someone took some time and helped me then. And I could read! The first I was started on were the Little House Books. Oh how I loved them all, and dug right in to them. I was kept out of school that year a few weeks after the New Year. My parents and I went to my Fathers hunting cabin in the UP of MI. A 1 ½ hour snowmobile ride from a back road into DEEP woods... No electric or water. Just a outside water pump and an outhouse. I brought one or two Little House books with me. I was reading Little House in the Big Woods... What a found memory!
I was hooked on reading from then on. I took home books from the library at school and the Public Library. Some how I discovered Science Fiction. My mother did not look fondly on it. But my life would never be the same again after I found Science Fiction!
I also discovered my Fathers small library of old fiction one summer. Mom did not want to bring me into town I guess to take me to the library. Oh I knew if the old wood case at the top of the stares that had been there all my life. But I had been younger and had been told not to go into it. It was about 5 feet high of dark walnut, with glass sides and doors with an old pretty little key. It is still in my parents house. Most was cowboys and some history books. Most I did not care for at the time at all. The books were Dads childhood gifts from his family members. One though my mother thought I might like was Gone with the Wind.
I sat in the heat of the summer in the old farm house basement on a lawn chair or out on the big front porch on the summer beds reading. Drinking cold pop from old take- back glass bottles of pop dad would pick up by the wooden case.
Gone with the Wind was my first re-read book. Every summer I would read it...
In High School I had to read The Hobbit or There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien for Lit class. I think the year was 1974. I was a freshman. Well after that, well life again was never the same for me. And of corse after the Hobbit I HAD to read the Lord of the Rings books... So the Tolkien books became my re-read books that took me into my 20s. Sorry to say I stopped reading them after the movies came out...
Of corse I have read many more books then that, but this are the books that stand out for me from my youth. And the fact that I have always done re-reads.
It just happens to be the Outlander books right now I am doing re-reads with.
Maybe I should look to some of my old friends to read, till Book 8 comes out.

1 comment:

  1. Yay for The Lord of the Rings! That must have been an interesting experience, though, reading it for school?

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