Books

                                       

Gin

The story of my family is thick with books.  Because of books, my parents met. Books were a way I bonded with my mother and father.  Books became part of my family’s connection with the Unitarian Church in Pittsfield.  Attitudes towards books helped me see the differences between my family and the families of my friends.  I didn’t just fill up my time with books.  For me reading was all encompassing.

School Books

I’ve always loved books.  All books. The excitement of a new school year included a new set of books for that grade level.   Sometimes they were actually new.  As you opened them, the binding made a lovely crackling noise.  The pages had that fresh new book smell. Is that a thing? Your name would be the first name in the school-stamped book plate on the inside front cover.  If the book wasn’t new, you looked to see if you recognized any of the names of kids from previous years.

I was part of the Dick and Jane generation for early readers in first and second grade. Bill wrote about his experience with Dick and Jane in the blog entry, School Days.  I recall several of the stories he mentioned including the time their pet cat Puff walked through flour and amid whispers of  “A ghost must be up here,”  the children followed the white prints up the stairs, peeked under the bed and discovered their kitty, not a ghost.  Several grades later we were reading books with topical names, like Friends and Neighbors or City and Country.  

City and Country included tales of living in these two different environments.  I learned about threshing day in great detail.  It seemed like so much fun.  All the men were riding high up on big machines.  They were always pictured laughing as they wiped the sweat from their faces.  The children were running along side the big machine, laughing and waving.  The women were seen cooking food, then setting up an enormous table right in the middle of the field.  The pictures in the book showed bowls of mashed potatoes, plates of fried chicken, baskets of biscuits; every plate piled high and every bowl overflowing. I don’t know if I really believed country life was so idyllic, but I did know it wasn’t much like my daily life.  Same with the city stories. They described children who lived in apartment buildings.  Imagine taking an elevator to see if a friend could come out to play?  I don’t think I learned much about how real kids lived from these books.

My favorite reading was in fourth grade when we read Tall Tales.  Paul Bunyan and his Mighty Blue Ox, Babe.  Johnny Appleseed.  John Henry.

The fantastical nature of these tales appealed to me.   Clearly not quite true but not exactly fiction either, more like whimsical exaggerations of reality.  I did think of these figures as historical. Sometimes these characters seemed more real to me than the presidents and explorers whose names and deeds I was expected to memorize. How could you not  be impressed by a person like Paul Bunyan who ate 25 flapjacks in one forkful?

All my school books made a neat pile when stacked up on my desk.  Except for one, my spelling book.  The spelling books were of a different shape from the others. They were the usual height of ten or eleven inches, but only about five or six inches across.  They were also thin, maybe fifty pages.  Charming as their shape may have been, they were still about spelling.  The lessons they contained were structured based on a Monday through Friday routine.

On Monday we read the list of words for that week and copied out their definitions. Homework Monday was to write each word ten times.  On Tuesday we looked up synonyms and antonyms for each word.  I thought it comical to learn a word by learning the opposite of that word.  On Wednesday, we wrote sentences using the word. There were rules.  You couldn’t write, “One of my spelling words is thief.”  The sentence was supposed to be an example of how this word would be used in some reasonable context.  “The thief was arrested for taking the golden vase,” was acceptable; “Thief means someone who steals,” was not.  On Thursday we were told to “study” the words so we would be ready for a spelling test on Friday.  None of us really knew what “study” meant, but I do recall staring at the words for a while and then asking my mother to test me as a way to practice.

Every week new words. Every week the same pattern.  Sometimes I’d get bored printing the words ten times, so I’d experiment with different ways to do it.    One time I’d write all the first letters first, then all the second letters, and so on.  Even more challenging, I’d write the words diagonally.  First letter of the first word, second letter of the second, third letter of the third, leaving space to fill in the missing letters.  Of course approaching the task with this playful attitude completely spoiled the purpose of the homework which was to remember the letters in the proper order, the very definition of spelling!  

Once junior and senior high came along, my appreciation for schoolbooks lessened. For one thing, you needed to cover them.  I wasn’t very good at that.  Teachers hassled us to have our books covered. This was a big deal.  Sometimes points were added to or deducted from your grade, sometimes detention was threatened, all because your book wasn’t covered.  It seems the month of September was devoted to book covering rather than learning what was inside.   By winter the covers were tattered, dirty, and falling apart.  You’d think there would be another round of book covering, but by then the teachers’ zeal to monitor whose books were covered was spent.

I had friends who came to school with great covers folded from grocery store brown paper bags, decorated with their own writing:  book titles printed neatly all on a line in one color, their names in another color, the year and the school clearly marked.  I was not good at this.  I rarely was able to fold the paper bags the proper way, my handwriting was not neat and regularly sized, and my coloring was childish.    Innovations such as plastic coated book covers with ruled insides that helped you fit the cover to the book became common by the time I was in high school.  I was happy for these.  Even though they were covered with ads for some insurance company, they were so much better than those brown paper bag covers.  Today kids can simply buy stretchy book covers with nice graphics.  They don’t know what they are missing.  I do wonder what kind of book covers they could make from the plastic bags now used in stores.

One thing I became aware of as I worked from my schoolbooks was the consistency I first noticed in the spelling book assignments was evident in many of my textbooks.  Obviously finding a format and sticking to it was a big selling point in school texts.  Sometimes this regularity resulted in what I would now call foolish decisions.  For instance, the assignments in my eighth grade general science book always had the same structure, the first five questions were calculations, the next 20 were multiple choice and the final five were short answer. 

Each chapter in the science book was devoted to a certain topic.  One topic I recall was the five simple machines.  The lever, the inclined plane, the pulley.  Ok, to be honest, that is as far as I got without consulting Wikipedia.  Turns out there are six simple machines.  The other three are wheel and axle, wedge, and screw.   How is a wedge different from an inclined plane?  I don’t know. Maybe the 1950s innovation was to drop the wedge from the list.  That’s why I recall just five simple machines.

Another chapter was devoted to categories for natural life forms explaining the system for naming flora and fauna.  Lots of Latin references in that one with charts showing the ways different animals and plants were linked.  My science book struck me as the science you might have studied in the 1800s.  No mention of atoms, magnets, radiation, or electronics.  All very classical.

The topics in my science book drew from biology, physics, and chemistry, subjects I would later study individually. However, sticking to the format won out over common sense when it came to the way homework was assigned. After reading the chapter, we were to answer the study questions. It didn’t matter if the chapter was primarily narrative in nature, like the flora and fauna chapter,  or contained many formulas that would lend themselves to arithmetic problems, like the simple machines chapter. There were always 5 calculations, 20 multiple-choice questions, and 5 short answer questions to turn in for grading.

In ninth grade, I took biology.  That book was thick and more modern, the three authors’ names prominent on the spine.  Obviously someone had a sense of humor because the book was printed with Moon Mann Otto stacked on the binding.   We pointed to the names, likely thinking we were the first to notice this as funny. Sometimes my friends and I would draw pictures of what Moon Man Otto might look like. We were unaware that some adults must have been complicit in this joke.  After all, if the book had listed its authors as Otto, Mann and Moon we would have had nothing to laugh about. 

The main feature of this book was a special section in the middle.  It contained a set of colored film pages illustrating what you would see if you dissected a frog.   Parts of these pages were transparent, so aligned as to fit over each other. In this way by overlaying the various pages, you could see the frog intact, or its muscles, or its internal organs.  It was fascinating.

My memories of my schoolbooks are enhanced by an odd coincidence.  I happen to have the book I used in ninth grade history.  Not a copy of the book.  The actual book.  It has my name in my small cramped handwriting and the date I first used it.   I happened upon this book many years after it was assigned to me.  Bill and I, now married and with children, were traveling from our home to spend a day with my parents in Pittsfield.  On the way, we stopped at a local tag sale at a church in Dalton, a town just east of Pittsfield.  While I was perusing the books, I recognized a history book as the one I had in ninth grade.  When I picked it up, I was surprised, a bit shaken actually, to see my name in it.  Calling over to Bill, I said, “Look. This is the history book I used in ninth grade.”  He replied, “Mmm, that’s interesting.  It will be fun to see how history was explained to us back then.”  “No,” I insisted, “You don’t get what I mean.  This is the book I used in ninth grade.  It has my name in it.”  

Surprised, Bill came over. I opened the book to the inside cover.  The Pittsfield Public Schools’ book stamp was clearly visible. The first name was mine.  The date was January 9, 1959.  There were seven other names written as the book condition changed from new, my entry, to poor in what must have been the mid 60s.   Looking at the book I recalled how unusual it was to get a new book in the middle of the school year. I also remember sitting at my kitchen table on Sunday nights writing out answers to the questions at the end of the chapters.  Yeah, I know. More study questions. I bought the book for a quarter.  It is interesting to see how American History was presented to teenagers in the late fifties. I remember the book stated we didn't get off on the right foot with our neighbors to the north. What they were actually referring to was our invasion of Canada in 1775.

One day in senior high English, Miss Hendrickson excitedly announced that something new and unusual was happening. She made a big deal out of it.   “For the first time we will use a paperback book.  It’s going to change the way we teach English.  This is just the beginning.  The book will be yours to keep forever.” She clearly thought this was going to revolutionize English class.  I didn’t see the excitement reflected on the faces of my senior English classmates. Owning a paperback book, especially a title your English teacher picked out, just didn’t seem all that amazing to most of them. I liked the idea. I liked to read.  The book would be easy to carry.  Also because it was ours, we didn’t need to cover it!

The book she passed out was Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  She cheerfully announced our first assignment, happy to adapt her teaching strategies to this new media.  “Read the first chapter for Monday.  Underline the descriptive phrases you notice as you read.“ She paused.  “Because the book is yours to keep, you can write in it.  So for each chapter we will have some aspect of the writing to discuss.” 

Well, while this may have been an innovation for Miss Hendrickson, it spoiled the whole enterprise of reading for me.  First, I don’t like writing in books.  All through college I never used a highlighter or underlined.  It never felt right to mark up a book.  Second, instead of getting into the characters and living the story, I would be distracted by scanning the text for descriptive words to underline.  As we read chapter two, in reaction to her next assignment, I underlined examples of foreshadowing.  As far as I was concerned, this took all the fun out of reading.

At one point, I told my mother I didn’t like the book. She was surprised.  “This was one of my favorites.  What don’t you like about it?”   It was my turn to be surprised.  My mother and I often talked about the books I was reading.  We usually agreed.  I realized my focus on noting the specifics of how the book was written had taken away the pleasure of simply reading first before dissecting the writing.  I was looking at the trees and missing the forest.

Personal Reading

Since my parents did not keep most books once they had read them, and because hard cover books were expensive, the library was the main source of books for my family. Sometimes a special hard cover book would show up as a birthday or Christmas gift. I might receive a Nancy Drew mystery book this way, but in general we went to the library to stock up on reading material.

In the main Pittsfield library, the children’s room was upstairs. When I was in elementary school, I sought out titles like Aesop’s Fables and the Mary Poppins stories. Maybe my mother recommended those books to me. Other books I just stumbled upon as I looked at whatever was on the shelves.  For some reason a collection of stories with characters named Flicka, Ricka and Dicka are strong in my memory as I write this.  I was drawn to these books by the unusual names.  They were girl triplets who lived in Sweden.  These stories were slight, each one based on some everyday adventure, like baking a birthday cake for their mom or babysitting a relative’s pet cat only to have it hide and reappear with a litter of three kittens. There was a similar set of stories about boy triplets, Snip, Snap and Snurr written by the same author.  Perhaps these were Sweden’s answer to Dick and Jane. 

I loved the idea of a collection.  Unlike a single book which once you finished it you were done, with a collection as soon as you finished one book you could get another in the series and re-enter that world.  I found the idea appealing.  Sometimes it was a series.  Sometimes it was searching out books by an author I liked.  The tales of Oz, stories by Hans Christen Anderson and the books about Heidi are all ones I enjoyed.

As I grew older, I was disappointed the library didn’t carry the Bobbsey Twins or the Nancy Drew stories.  Those were only available through stores. I was unaware that librarians at the time didn’t consider them “literary enough” to be library material.  I would get one or two a year as gifts.  Once I had read them, I’d trade with friends who had other titles.

I mentioned in the blog entry “Teachers” that I began reading my personal books in seventh grade during school time. This continued all through high school. I always had a book in hand.  As soon as I was done with an assignment, I would just open a book and read until the class was over. I didn’t read during the times the teacher was talking, partly because I didn’t want to get yelled at but also because I really couldn’t get immersed in the reading with the distraction of the teacher’s voice.  Even though I limited my reading to times the class was quiet, my classmates working problems or reading their texts, there was always time for me to read every day.  It was worth carrying my current book with me to every class.

One day, arriving at physics class, my current book, On the Beach, under my arm, we found we had a substitute teacher. Written on the board: “Read chapter five and answer questions 1 through15 at the end.”  That was physics class for the day.  I was nearly done reading my book so before opening up the physics book, I figured I’d finish On the Beach.  After all this was a substitute. The usual rules didn’t apply. On the Beach is about a group of people in Australia awaiting the approach of a radiation cloud that has devastated the rest of the world.  Each character has his or her own way to face the end of their lives.

The ending was romantic, a bit sad and it brought tears to my eyes.  Putting the book away, I slowly opened my physics book.  The effort of focusing on the text made a few tears run down my face.  The substitute looked at me quizzically.  He seemed to be wondering, “Are you okay?”   As I looked up to meet his gaze, I answered his unspoken thought. “They just smashed this little atom,” I said trying to be funny. Staring back at me, he pointed to the assignment on the board and turned away.  I returned to my physics assignment vowing not to try to make jokes with teachers.

At the end of ninth grade, our English teacher passed out a list entitled, “One Hundred Books You Should Read Before Going to College.”  That was all a compulsive person like me needed.  Since this was 1959, it was a collection of English language classics mainly written well before I was born. The Grapes of Wrath, Quo Vadis, Main Street, Wuthering Heights, The Old Man and the Sea, and so on.  Nothing really modern like 1984 or Catcher in the Rye.  Those were considered too daring for teenagers to read in the context of a school approved list.  In any case, for a while I took this list very seriously.  Each time I went to the library that summer, I would get a couple of books on the list and, whether I liked them or not, read them.  Mostly this felt like a chore although every now and then one of the books would captivate me.  I particularly liked the Poe stories, The Tell Tale Heart and The Pit and Pendulum. I would wonder how they got to be on this list. They were so interesting when most of the other books from the list were not. I doubt I actually read all hundred books.

Looking back I realize no teacher gave much guidance as to book reports, letting us choose our own books.   I could have used some help junior year in making reasonable decisions.  My history teacher gave us a list of books to choose for a book report.  From its description, I chose The Forsyte Saga.  At the same time I was reading a book for a report in English class.  I had chosen Hawaii.   Both books were long and involved. They each followed several generations of a family, one in England and one, obviously, in Hawaii. While not quite as hefty as a phone book, each one was a sizable tome that I carried around for a few weeks.  In both of them it was difficult to keep track of the characters as the names recurred with sons, grandsons and great grandsons sharing minor variations.  I worried about finishing both books as the reports were due within days of each other. Still I enjoyed the complexity of these tales and the sense they gave me of living in different times and places.

Another source of books were the ones at home.  Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Count of Monte Crisco, and The Three Musketeers. Likely these were books  intended for my older brother. My mother also particularly enjoyed these adventure stories. Other titles I recall were From the Terrace by John O’Hara, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and From Here to Eternity by James Jones. These were kept in my parents’ bedroom.  As a teenager I did not read these books.  Once I saw a paper book edition of Dr. No in our kitchen. I picked it up, began to leaf through it, thinking I would read it when my mother was done. She took it away from me, saying it was too adult.  I was 14.  I eventually read all the James Bond books. I never felt my parents censored what I read, but they did offer guidance.

My father had eclectic tastes including science fiction.  On occasion he would bring home a Galaxy or Astounding Tales.  These were small, five by eight inch, paperback magazines with short stories and sometimes a novella.  The covers were usually colorful drawings of planets with two stars or rings and a shapely partly-dressed woman.  The cover art rarely had anything to do with the contents of the stories. 

My son recently gave me a set of these older magazines dated from the late 50s and early 60s.  It is fun to read the stories, the editorial comments, and the letters from fans.  It is clear the fan base, while small, felt connected to the editors of the magazines, offering them feedback and suggestions for future issues. Though long before social media, there’s a fan website feel as you read the comments.

Science fiction became a passion for me as a teenager.  I moved from the magazines to the collections the library had to offer.  It was my way to make sense of the world.  I found science fiction stories helped me develop a world view.  When I read stories about future space explorers encountering alien races, it solidified my sense of how we should treat people who are different from ourselves.  When I read stories about interplanetary wars, it made me reexamine the validity of war on our planet.  When I read stories about our future selves encountering  primitive cultures only to find out the so-called primitive cultures had mental abilities well beyond our own, it made me want to avoid judgments about what made a society advanced.

I never liked what is called space opera or fantasy.  My sense of realism or credulity would be stretched too thin.  I preferred the short stories.  An author could create a world or a situation in a few pages.  The impact of the story would be over before my reasoning brain objected to the set up.  Many of the best stories had an ironic twist at the end making you rethink who was the hero and who was the villain or what was real and unreal. 

A great example is a story by Arthur C. Clarke, the Nine Billion Names of God.  In this story two modern engineers are hired by Tibetan monks to create a machine to write out all the names of God.  The monks believed once all the names were written, the universe would come to an end.  As the engineers worked together they mocked the monk’s beliefs as a way to express their own superiority.  As they were unsure how the monks would behave once the machine completed the task and the world did not end, the engineers had decided to leave the monastery just before the final name would be written  We are with the two engineers at the end of the story.  Away from the monastery, they stop to rest for the  night. As they lay on their backs looking up into the sky they are shocked to discover the monks were right.  In the final words of the story, “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”  This kind of story gave me goose-bumps.  It also opened up my mind to consider new possibilities.   

My mother introduced me to a different genre of reading, mysteries.  She loved the English classics, the kind of book that became popular through Public Television’s Mystery series.  Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers were among her favorites.  Usually set in England, these mystery stories were individualized by the different personalities of the detectives.  Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, Roderick Alleyn among them.  The character of the detective was an important component of the story.  The murders were rarely gruesome, frequently taking place off stage as it were, merely an excuse to set the plot into action.

These plots were usually about some upper class family with skeletons in the closet.  In the course of the investigation, these came to light with disastrous implications for those holding onto the secrets.   While often rowdy and a bit uncouth, the villagers, the lower classes, always seemed more honest and real than the upper-class folks.  To a teenaged American, it seemed like being upper class in Britain was synonymous with cheating, lying, boasting, and murder!

These British mysteries led me to Sherlock Holmes.  What fun those were, especially reading them that first time. I could imagine what he looked like for myself without any interfering images of Sherlock that movies or TV would bring later.  The mysteries were delicious, even if a bit convoluted.  If you didn’t have a knowledge of the varieties of cigarette ash or the other arcane facts that Holmes had, it was unlikely you could predict who the killer was or how he did it.  It was so much fun being completely puzzled by one of Holmes’ many-sentenced descriptions of someone he had just met.  How does he know all this? Then to keep reading to see how obvious the description fit because of Holmes’ astounding skills as an observer of minute detail.  “Didn’t you notice the green-ish ink-stained crease on the right thumb?  It’s obvious he had been a printer in East London but retired five years ago.”  Yeah, right!

Family and Books

There was another source of books my father took advantage of, the lending library at England Brothers’ department store.  In the 1950s I remember it as a small section of the first floor book store.  Unlike the library where current books were few and far between, at England Brothers you could borrow the newest books for a daily fee. In a 1943 newspaper ad for England Brothers, the rate was 3 cents a day.  I imagine by the late 1950s it was 10 or 15 cents a day.  Still, cheaper than buying the book. 

Each weekend, my parents read the book section of the Sunday Herald Tribune and the Saturday Review of Literature.  In this way they kept up to date on books and book news.  The lending library was a way to read the most current books.  I wonder now if my father brought books to work, to read at odd times as I did at school?  He disliked wasting money.  If he was paying by the day, it’s likely he would have found a way to read during work.

Book stores and lending libraries were familiar to my parents.  The love of books had brought them together.  Before he married and moved to Pittsfield, my father owned a book store/lending library on Summer Street in North Adams.  (The spot is now part of the  parking lot for a discount store.)  How he ended up a bookseller is a bit of a mystery to me.  He never talked much about the store and I never asked him about it.   After graduating high school, my father held a variety of jobs, including reporting for a local paper and surveying for town projects.

Eventually he came to own the bookstore/lending library which was called, somewhat unimaginatively, The Corner Lending Library and Bookstore. I still have a couple of photos of him in front of the store. It’s interesting how he met my mother. I can picture it. One afternoon he is sitting in his store when a young woman comes in to inquire about some Russian novel. It may have been War and Peace. Somewhat patronizingly he tells her,  “Well, a sweet young thing like you wouldn’t want that.  Here, try this.”  He hands her Anne of Green Gables. Recognizing the book, my mother says, “I read that years ago. I saw a piece in the paper about this Russian novel. That’s what I want.”

My parents were smitten.  It was her love of books that created the opportunity for them to meet.  When they got married, my father closed the bookstore for a more reliable job, one at the General Electric Company in Pittsfield.

Years later, my father used his knowledge of and interest in book selling to set up a book table during the social hour held every week following the service at the Unitarian Church.  Each week, based on his own knowledge and from reading reviews in newspapers and magazines, he chose books he thought would appeal to his fellow churchgoers. He would make a list with a brief summary of various books so that people could order the books they wanted.  Each week he would also order a couple of copies of books he thought people might like, displaying them for purchase. 

During the social hour, the adults would mill about, much like a cocktail party, except instead of drinks they had coffee.  Even though the idea was to provide time for people to talk about the ideas in the sermon, mostly people chatted about their lives. Many gathered around the table my father had set up, leafing through the books on display or making suggestions about what they would like him to order next.  This wasn’t a money making proposition, just a service he did for the church.  It must have been satisfying for him to share his interest in books with others.

The idea of a social hour with coffee and books after church services was not the way most of the kids in our neighborhood viewed church.  Maybe that’s why there was confusion when my younger brother, six or seven, told his friends, “My father is the book man at our church.”  Somehow this got back to my mother.  She was embarrassed fearing some of her neighbors might think her husband was a bookie, placing bets for his church friends.  This might be a funny story now, but not to my mother back then. 

In our working class neighborhood, my parents’ love of books was not common. While not exactly a book snob, it would rile my father when a neighbor kid would call a magazine a book.  “A magazine is nothing like a book,” he would say.  Even worse in his lexicon were comic books.  “They’re not books at all!”  The comic books I did read all belonged to friends of mine. I knew enough not to bring any home!

While most of the books we read came from libraries, we did have a small bookcase with a variety of different genres of books. There could’ve been a few books leftover from my father’s store.  I still have the first edition copy of From Here to Eternity that I remember from that bookcase  The books in the bookcase were rather random. There was a book of Portuguese poetry (in English).  I can only guess this was an anniversary gift at some point, as it did not reflect any particular interest of my parents that I knew about. There was a slim book with the provocative title, Not For Children.  One day when I was alone in the house, I opened it, only to find it was a collection of short verses that made little sense to me. The title was meant to indicate that while it looked like a children’s book. It wasn’t.  Not because it contained so-called “adult” material, but because it wouldn’t be of interest to children. They were right. 

Considering my father’s taste in books it was surprising there were a couple of Readers’ Digest condensed books there as well.  Each had three complete novels shortened to fit in one novel-sized book. Many people read condensations to get a sense of the story. Given his respect for the written word and the effort that goes into any good book, editing someone’s else work to make it shorter must have offended my father’s sensibilities.  It’s likely these books were given to my parents as gifts by someone who knew they liked to read but who didn’t fully understand what that meant to them.

There were a couple of books based on TV shows.  One contained mostly photographs about a late night show, Broadway Open House, a precursor to the Tonight show.  It featured host Jerry Lester along with Dagmar, just the one name, a busty blonde who played dumb. Her role was just to sit presumably to attract the attention of male viewers.  The photographs captured a bunch of people in silly poses wearing funny hats, being comical. I never saw the show but the book made me wish I had been old enough to stay up to watch it.

Another was a paperback book containing several scripts from the Sergeant Bilko show which starred Phil Silvers as a smooth talking con artist in charge of the motor pool at a military base in Kansas.  Every plot centered on Bilko scheming his way to make fast money and put one over on his superiors. Again, a show I never saw but I thought the scripts were quite funny.

Other books from this bookcase came in handy one winter in eighth grade when I was home sick. I was well enough to read and wanting to get ahead on assigned book reports, I searched through the bookcase deciding upon two science fiction books.  One was called The Long Tomorrow about two teenagers in a post apocalyptic America.  The other was Baby Is Three in which six extraordinary individuals, including a three year-old baby, merge their mental powers creating a gestalt more powerful than any normal human. I recently had the chance to reread both of these books so the details of what they were about are now rich and clear for me.  However, as a thirteen year-old, some of the themes were over my head. Still the books fascinated me.  Clearly they connected on some level.  

What has stayed with me was overhearing my parents talking about these stories, discussing the ideas the books generated. This was long before I heard about book clubs and reading groups.  I realized my parents did not read passively.  They talked about the deeper meaning imbedded in these stories.  They showed me books weren’t just about plot and characters; they were about ways of thinking.  Mostly I came away with the realization of the value of sharing your ideas with others.

Another category of books I remember were those about jazz, another of my parents’ shared interests. There were several non-fiction books, one by Leonard Feathers which covered the history of jazz, a biography of Louis Armstrong, and several other titles.  It’s likely these were books my parents bought for each other. They loved jazz from the the 20s right through the 50s.  Some swing, some blues and a lot of Dixieland.

This collection was a lifesaver one winter’s weekend when I had been assigned to write a report for my ninth grade music class.  It was bitterly cold out and the thought of a day at the library to work from reference books for my report was so unappealing.  I realized if I wrote about jazz, I had available right in my own warm house six or seven books I could reference without having to make the cold trek to the library.

Even though the music class featured classical music, I knew my teacher would be open to this topic as he, himself, was a jazz musician.  In the summers he had a group that played regularly at a south country club, Jug End Barn. I rarely recall writing school reports with any pleasure.  However this one conjures up an image of me sitting on the floor in the dining room with all my parents’ books on jazz spread out around me.

The fifties was the era of home encyclopedia salesmen.  Many of my friends watched their collections of Britannica or World grow from Aardvark to Arithmetic, Arizona to Bolivia, and so on until the final volume  showed up, something like Watermark to Zeitgeist.  My family didn’t have a multi-volume encyclopedia collection.  We had the Columbia Encyclopedia, a single volume about fifteen inches thick.  I used it many times for papers and reports.  Italy.  The Nile River.  The Dead Sea Scrolls. It was well-thumbed.  Sometimes it served double duty as a booster seat for my younger brother. One more book I associate with growing up in my family.

Books may be paper and ink, or nowadays even digital images, but they are about worlds.  Worlds you can visit, imagine, or get lost in.  My mother used to tell a story about her own growing up years.  One day she was tending to a pudding on the stove, keeping it smooth so it would cook evenly, her mother out of the kitchen.  My mother stood, stirring aimlessly with one hand while her mind was in the book she held in the other.  My grandmother returned to the kitchen only to find the pudding boiling over, my mother oblivious to the near disaster,  her book more engaging than reality. I love this story.  My mother could get enthralled in a book and lose track of where she was the same way I did. What a gift my mother and father gave me, their love of reading.