A Childhood in Book Genres

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34- 030827-D

One of the few benefits of springing forward was that it set just the right atmosphere in the living room last Sunday morning when I sat down to read a stack of articles. The daylight was dim enough that the gas fireplace could still cast a cozy glow, I had fresh coffee, and I was about to get to spend an hour learning about things that interested me. I thought, “This is as good as it gets.” Delighting in reading above most other activities has its roots in my earliest years. Reflecting on my childhood reading life suggests that family played a critical role in developing a taste for books, that childhood reading is in tension with screens but does not have to lose to them, and that kids can benefit from a range of genres.

The Genre that Started It All

Around age five my mom used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons – the version with a very 1980s-looking father on the cover, not the spiffy new edition – to do just that. (Well, I’m not sure the lessons were always “easy,” but they worked.) I remember the adventure of encountering longer words and smaller letters the deeper we got into the book.

Picture Books

Before Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons had done its work – and for a good while after – I read dozens of picture books. Often, these were books my parents read aloud. One of the first books I loved was Big Joe’s Trailer Truck. According to family lore, I memorized it. Another favorite was the works of Virginia Lee Burton, who wrote stories about a locomotive, a steam shovel, a heroic snowplow, and a house that got swallowed up by the city. (Books featuring pictures of trucks, trains, construction equipment, and airplanes were sure to catch my interest when I was a boy.) Bill Peet wrote books that were rhyming without being cloying and achieved a vibrant, weathered look with his illustrations. Our dog is partly named after Peet’s creation of Buford, the bighorn sheep with antlers so long he used them for skis, and whenever we go by a house that somehow resembles a face I still call it a “Bill Peet house.” I pored over the sprawling, hilarious illustrations of Richard Scarry. One series of children’s books that I probably spent too much time with was the Bernstein Bears. Talking bears are appealing, but the stories were didactic and made Papa Bear out to be an overgrown kid, barely more mature than his children.

Dad books

My parents also read chapter books to me, and I benefitted from exposure to two different tastes. Dad liked outdoor adventure stories like Big Red. They seemed to feature dogs, hunting, or boats and to be set in the Upper Midwest or Canada. It might have been Dad who introduced me to Rascal. He also liked fantasy stories. He was the first person to read me The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I did not quite understand what was happening in either story during that first reading – what most stood out to me in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was Father Christmas’s brief appearance – but hearing these stories created an initial interest in them.

Mom books

Mom had no taste for fantasy, but she read me things Dad didn’t. Mom and I read Number the Stars, a gripping story about the Holocaust, something my dad would never have wanted to read. Mom read me all nine books in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series. When we read The Long Winter, it seemed like the blizzards would never end. We also read Across Five Aprils, which is the story of a family divided by the Civil War, and Snow Treasure, the story of how children helped Norwegians to smuggle the nation’s gold reserves out of the country when Germany invaded in 1940.

History

I had narrow historical interests, but I pursued the matters I did care about with great passion and an insatiable appetite for minutiae. I was mostly interested in warfare. I learned that 940 was the call number for books on World War II. I went like a wood chipper through serial books for kids on subjects from the daily lives of British redcoats to Sherman’s March to the Sea. I was also enthralled by Jean Fritz’s children’s biography, Stonewall. And I enjoyed Usborne Books’s volume on the ancient and medieval world, which used detailed highly captioned illustrations to show how ancient Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, and medieval Europeans lived and fought. (Kids probably saw more than they should have from this book. If the illustrator’s wild imagination is correct, Pharaoh and his friends were served at parties by topless women in bikini bottoms.) I also got out a few adult books, but I only read parts of them. I mostly wanted them for the maps and the tables of who commanded what unit. I particularly enjoyed the Time-Life books on the Civil War because of their colorful maps and scads of pictures. My most ambitious history reading was going cover-to-cover at age eleven through The Warrior Generals by Thomas B. Buell, a weighty tome presented to me by one of my dad’s co-workers. All these books made me very knowledgeable about a very small sliver of the past.

Chapter books

I plowed through a huge number of chapter books. I went through the Boxcar Children, both the originals and the knockoffs, the Moffats, and the works of Gary Paulsen and Beverly Cleary. By the time I started reading, the Cold War had just ended, but I was still riveted by Myrna Grant’s stories of Ivan, a Christian boy in the Soviet Union.

Genre books

I read some books just because I liked a particular genre. I enjoyed John White’s fantasy stories because they resembled C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I read a lot of historical fiction because of my interest in the past. In my teen years, I enjoyed Jeff Shaara’s novels about the Civil War, American Revolution, and Mexican-American War. But they are derivatives from his father’s classic work of historical fiction, and I could tell that the dialogue was less believable and the plots less focused than in the father’s great book. I will admit that because they dealt with history I even read the American Girl books – though I never owned any of the dolls. Felicity the Revolutionary War girl, Addy the enslaved girl, Kirsten the Upper Midwest pioneer girl, Molly the World War II girl: I read them all.

Trashy books

Some of my reading was completely ephemeral. Many stories are far better in their original medium than when they are transferred to a new form. The Adventures in Odyssey radio drama, huge chunks of which I still have memorized, far surpasses the quality of any Christian children’s entertainment made in my lifetime, but it does not quite have the same magic in book form. The contribution Star Wars has made to American culture is limited to the original three movies, yet I went beyond that, reading book versions of the original three movies plus a story called Shadows of the Empire. My parents tried to limit my ephemeral reading. I enjoyed comic books – not the kind featuring superheroes but the kind featuring collections of the humorous strips from the Sunday papers. Garfield books probably were a waste of time, but the books of Charles Schultz’s work, including a rare volume of strips all about tennis in which Snoopy plays Wimbledon, at least exposed me to an American classic. My parents rightly thought I had better things to do than read chapter-book versions of the Bernstein Bears.

Horrifying books

I suspect that exposure to things that are terrifying or macabre is part of the way childhood reading helps us grow up. I was disturbed by even the children’s version of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, which features a scene in which Captain Nemo’s submarine rams and destroys a warship. The children’s version featured an illustration of the creepy-looking vessel bashing its prey. I soon tracked down the adult version of the book to see how it described this scene. A book on Napoleon claimed that the steel blade of the guillotine caused the victim to feel a moment of coolness in the throat at the moment of death. (How would anyone know that?) In the movie version of Swiss Family Robinson, people are attacked by a constrictor snake, but they survive. In the book, an unfortunate donkey owned by the family is attacked – and its fate is not so happy. The author says the poor creature’s bones crackled as the snake digested it. We had a book of Bible stories illustrated with lush oil paintings. I was shocked by the stories in which God called Abraham to sacrifice his son only to intervene and provide a substitute at the last minute and the story of God’s killing of the Egyptian firstborn – Dad would have been all right, I thought, but I would be in the line of fire.

The books that cast a long shadow

When I was in sixth grade, I read the Redwall series by Brian Jacques for the first time. Few books ever had such a hold on me. These books had everything I was looking for: talking animals in a fantasy world, epic battles, suspense, and lavish descriptions of food. I have never read so fast. I would read a four-hundred-page book in a day or two. The only problem was that when I finished these books a profound emptiness followed. I had no idea what to read next. For years, nothing could compare. I tried Watership Down. After all, it, too, was about animals. Unfortunately, they weren’t anthropomorphic, did not fight battles, and did not live in a fantasy world, so the story just depressed me. Redwall has not aged well. I have read a few of these books as an adult and found the plot and dialogue childish, but they will always loom large in my memory because of how significant they were in my early adolescent years, when I read the series multiple times.

The right book at the wrong time

Sometimes, one is just not ready for a particular great book. Mom tried to get me to read G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories when I was about thirteen. Meh, I said after sampling them. I tried them again as an adult and loved them. My dad tried to get me to read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings after enjoying them himself. At the time, I thought Redwall was much better. Redwall characters spoke colloquially, while the characters in The Lord of the Rings were so formal. I had to reach a more enlightened age to appreciate Tolkien’s masterwork.

Spiritual crisis books

The year I turned twelve I started questioning whether Christianity was true. I tried to deal with the problem by reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. My parents also gave me the arrestingly titled How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig and Other Ways You’ve Been Brainwashed by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, daughter of Francis Schaeffer, who ran a Christian community in Switzerland called L’Abri. Neither of these books were the reason I eventually came back to faith, which took until I went to college, but they did help me to feel less alone and reassured me that there were good reasons to believe.

The all-time classics

Three works that I read growing up were my favorites and shaped the rest of my life. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, is the book that Jeff Shaara could never quite imitate. It fueled my interest in history by showing how moving and dramatic it can be. I found The Chronicles of Narnia not only thrilling but spiritually profound. No fictional story has ever given me more of a grasp of what God is like or made heaven such an enticing place to be. The right time for me to read The Lord of the Rings was my freshman year of high school. It made me forget the Redwall books. I have read The Lord of the Rings several times since then. In addition to the adventure, I love the elevated tone I once saw as stiff, the various Christ figures in the story, and the way Tolkien resolved the dilemma faced by the characters.

The book everyone read that I didn’t read

The Harry Potter books started coming out when I was in junior high. My parents never said I couldn’t read them, but I grew up in a milieu in which they were suspect, so I steered clear of them – but not entirely. When Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, I read the opening excerpt carried in one of the major weekly newsmagazines several times with much admiration, but not until my college years did I read the whole series. I would not prevent my kids from reading them. I don’t think they cause witchcraft. But, not having a cliquish group of friends or much girl drama during my school years, I did not relate to the characters much.

The unambitious adolescent years

After Redwall, reading became much less significant to me for several years. I did not stop reading for pleasure, but I read less. I regret how much prime reading time I wasted watching television and playing video games. Like a lot of adolescent boys, I lacked drive to do something constructive.

Homeschool books

I did not always appreciate it, but Calvert School introduced me to a lot of classic works. I loved Greek mythology, Arabian Nights (though I learned later that these stories were quite different from the originals), a collection of King Arthur stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Kidnapped, and Johnny Tremain. I was not keen on having to read David Copperfield, but I warmed up to it. I read it a second time in 2012 and stole Barkis’s laconic marriage proposal – “Barkis is willing.”

Public high school books

I complained about the books I was assigned in public school, but usually they were not bad. I am sure the freshman curriculum has been gutted since the cultural revolution. We read Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. I am sure that teachers since my time have quailed at the thought of trying to discuss those works with their classes, but I enjoyed both of them, especially the latter. The Old Man and the Sea made me wonder if it inspired the dialogue in The Killer Angels. Childhood’s End was weird but interesting, and the positive blurb on the back from C. S. Lewis made me think I should treat the book with respect. My imagination reeled at the fate of the victim of “The Cask of Amontillado,” but I still enjoyed the story. I whined a lot about reading Shakespeare, but it was a case of the right book at the wrong time. Now, I want to give Shakespeare another try and have not been able to find the time. I complained more about A Separate Peace than any other reading assignment – Finny died in a way that was completely unbelievable, I protested – but now I wonder if it was really so bad and would like to give this story of a World War II-era boarding school a second try someday.

The reading renaissance

The interest in reading that my parents gave me eventually won out. The hold television and video games had on me began to decline in high school. It took until well after high school to stop watching so much television, but I got video games out of my system sooner. The summer I got my first job, the summer I turned seventeen, I got tired of video games and rarely played again. Reading filled the vacuum, especially historical fiction. I particularly enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s series about Richard Sharpe, a British soldier who serves in India during the 1790s and then fights the French in Spain and Belgium during the Napoleonic Wars. I can’t say that this series was very edifying – if a beautiful woman appeared in the story, I could be sure that Sharpe would seduce her at some point – but at least it helped me to head off to college as a dedicated reader.