photo courtesy of Spencer Greet
My husband recently gave me a beautiful wooden plaque that reads: "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." It is a quote from Louisa May Alcott.
I have always been a reader. I started reading early, and was fairly indiscriminate in my choice of written materials - I read everything from soup cans, to cereal boxes, to instruction manuals, old National Geographics, all of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books, Cherry Ames, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Stetson, the Walton Boys, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Bulletin, Sports Illustrated, Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern comic books (also a great comic book version of David Copperfield, whose characters resembled the actors in the 1935 movie version) and that was before I turned nine.
By the time I was ten I had added Oliver Twist, The Lord of the Flies, Mary Poppins, Black Beauty, At the Back of the North Wind, Bambi, Heidi, East of the Sun and West of the Moon (a folktale collection) the Supernatural Omnibus (a collection of classic horror stories) Death of a President (about John F. Kennedy's assassination) and pretty much anything else that came into my hands.
At eleven I discovered Gone With The Wind, and my life has never been the same.
All of the Sherlock Holmes stories. All of the P.G. Woodhouse stories. Edgar Allen Poe. James Thurber.
More Dickens. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. The swashbucklers of Rafael Sabatini.
All of the Ellery Queen stories, going back to the twenties.
The Agony and the Ecstasy. Beau Geste. Ben Hur.
That medical encyclopedia that my dad had, with all of the pictures of the skin diseases (at the time he was a pharmaceutical sales rep). My brother Jim and I took turns showing each other the most disgusting photos.
Jim, who read many of the same novels I did but was also very athletic (unlike head-on-a-tripod here) couldn't believe some of the things he found me perusing. Like, for instance, the book he deems the most boring ever written - Age Cannot Wither by Bertita Harding, about the romance between Eleanora Duse, the great stage actress, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet laureate of Italy.
Jim used to say that just looking at the cover made him feel faint. Apparently, my threshold of ennui was so high, it was unreachable in this universe, and could only be measured by theoretical mathematics.
But we had at least three copies of this tome, so I read it one really dull week in June of 1968.
My face was always in a book.
Books were very important in our household. My dad is a serious bibliophile, and he bought an entire lot from Leary's, the legendary old book store in Philadelphia, when it closed its doors in the mid-60's. Since the books were sold in batches, we got duplicates of some.
We had about six copies of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Yes, I read that too.
Every summer from early childhood, Jim and I would scour the used book wagon at the Tinicum Art Festival in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for choice finds, like the old Hardy Boy books with the red covers, or old Ellery Queens. But we didn't always know what we had. One day we picked up Boccaccio's The Decameron (aka "Dirty Stories from the Middle Ages"), and were about to purchase it when my dad saw it and took it away, appalled.
And so it came that, one sunny July festival day, Jim and I were sitting quietly, looking at our finds, when a freckled older woman wearing a large hat came up and sat next to us. It must have been the unusual sight of two children aged approximately nine and eleven at an outdoor party with their heads down, totally absorbed, that called to her.
She asked us what we were reading and we showed her - one of our purchases was the Hardy Boys story The Mystery of the Chinese Junk. She told us that she had spent many years in China, and that she had a model of a Chinese junk in her home.
Then she got up and left. My mom and my grandmother, who were nearby, rushed over to us and exclaimed,"Do you know who that was?"
We did not.
"That was Pearl Buck!"
A few years later, this name meant a little more to me after I read The Good Earth.
I don't read quite as much now as I did then. There are many more forms of media competing for attention these days, and I admit to being a Netflix junkie. Or, perhaps it is what virtual sister Leslie said recently about her own reading habits, that I reread the same books because I am afraid of being disappointed by a new one. It would be hard at this age to recapture the rapture of discovery that my childhood reading brought me.
Every now and then, however, I am beckoned by the lure of the written page, and I once again find worlds within words.
I have always been a reader. I started reading early, and was fairly indiscriminate in my choice of written materials - I read everything from soup cans, to cereal boxes, to instruction manuals, old National Geographics, all of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy books, Cherry Ames, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Stetson, the Walton Boys, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Bulletin, Sports Illustrated, Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, and Green Lantern comic books (also a great comic book version of David Copperfield, whose characters resembled the actors in the 1935 movie version) and that was before I turned nine.
By the time I was ten I had added Oliver Twist, The Lord of the Flies, Mary Poppins, Black Beauty, At the Back of the North Wind, Bambi, Heidi, East of the Sun and West of the Moon (a folktale collection) the Supernatural Omnibus (a collection of classic horror stories) Death of a President (about John F. Kennedy's assassination) and pretty much anything else that came into my hands.
At eleven I discovered Gone With The Wind, and my life has never been the same.
All of the Sherlock Holmes stories. All of the P.G. Woodhouse stories. Edgar Allen Poe. James Thurber.
More Dickens. Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. The swashbucklers of Rafael Sabatini.
All of the Ellery Queen stories, going back to the twenties.
The Agony and the Ecstasy. Beau Geste. Ben Hur.
That medical encyclopedia that my dad had, with all of the pictures of the skin diseases (at the time he was a pharmaceutical sales rep). My brother Jim and I took turns showing each other the most disgusting photos.
Jim, who read many of the same novels I did but was also very athletic (unlike head-on-a-tripod here) couldn't believe some of the things he found me perusing. Like, for instance, the book he deems the most boring ever written - Age Cannot Wither by Bertita Harding, about the romance between Eleanora Duse, the great stage actress, and Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet laureate of Italy.
Jim used to say that just looking at the cover made him feel faint. Apparently, my threshold of ennui was so high, it was unreachable in this universe, and could only be measured by theoretical mathematics.
But we had at least three copies of this tome, so I read it one really dull week in June of 1968.
My face was always in a book.
Books were very important in our household. My dad is a serious bibliophile, and he bought an entire lot from Leary's, the legendary old book store in Philadelphia, when it closed its doors in the mid-60's. Since the books were sold in batches, we got duplicates of some.
We had about six copies of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Yes, I read that too.
Every summer from early childhood, Jim and I would scour the used book wagon at the Tinicum Art Festival in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for choice finds, like the old Hardy Boy books with the red covers, or old Ellery Queens. But we didn't always know what we had. One day we picked up Boccaccio's The Decameron (aka "Dirty Stories from the Middle Ages"), and were about to purchase it when my dad saw it and took it away, appalled.
And so it came that, one sunny July festival day, Jim and I were sitting quietly, looking at our finds, when a freckled older woman wearing a large hat came up and sat next to us. It must have been the unusual sight of two children aged approximately nine and eleven at an outdoor party with their heads down, totally absorbed, that called to her.
She asked us what we were reading and we showed her - one of our purchases was the Hardy Boys story The Mystery of the Chinese Junk. She told us that she had spent many years in China, and that she had a model of a Chinese junk in her home.
Then she got up and left. My mom and my grandmother, who were nearby, rushed over to us and exclaimed,"Do you know who that was?"
We did not.
"That was Pearl Buck!"
A few years later, this name meant a little more to me after I read The Good Earth.
I don't read quite as much now as I did then. There are many more forms of media competing for attention these days, and I admit to being a Netflix junkie. Or, perhaps it is what virtual sister Leslie said recently about her own reading habits, that I reread the same books because I am afraid of being disappointed by a new one. It would be hard at this age to recapture the rapture of discovery that my childhood reading brought me.
Every now and then, however, I am beckoned by the lure of the written page, and I once again find worlds within words.
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