The Books of My Youth
Over the weekend I posted about a few of the books I’ve read lately. Since then I’ve been thinking about what I used to read and thought I’d make a list of books that I thought were great that I read between the ages of 0 and 15.
1. Shel Silverstein: Where the Sidewalk Ends / A Light in the Attic / Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back — Lafcadio may have been my first favorite novel. I somehow coerced my third grade teacher into reading it aloud to the whole class over the course of a week. It’s not as well known as his poetry books, but it features a lion who shoots rifles and wears a suit a tailor makes for him out of marshmallows. If I get a tattoo related to anyone on this list, it’ll be a Shel Silverstein tatt.
2. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — I read this at least 5 times when I was 13 and 14. Funny stuff for nerds everywhere.
3. Stephen King: The Gunslinger — Even when I was young I had some sort of literary snobbery and one of its first targets was Stephen King. Sure I was a young person and shouldn’t have known any better, but when I saw his books sold on the television with “free skeleton keychains” thrown into the bargain (ala the Stephen King Book Club) I sensed a ruse. I still don’t like half of his books, but when I was in middle school and I stood in front of the Stephen King section at the public library, scoffing at his terrible books, I discovered The Dark Tower series and I haven’t held the skeleton keychains against Mr. King since.
4. Michael Crichton: Sphere — I don’t remember any of the characters in this book or much of the plot, but I do remember it was heavy on computers and technology. Crichton seemed pretty damn smart to me when I was young and I devoured this book and Jurassic Park. They were at the time my ideal novels and I wanted every book to be like them.
5. Timothy Zahn: Star Wars: Heir to the Empire — I’m going to leave off the 30 or so Star Trek novels I used to own to save some of my dignity intact. I’ll offer up this sequel to the classic Star Wars trilogy, though. It was pretty exciting when it came out since it offered the first glimpse of what was happening to Luke and Leia and gang after Return of the Jedi. Ridiculously satisfying at the time and how much fun to tell people that you knew that Leia and Han tied the knot.
6: Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows — I have my copy of this around here somewhere. I wrote on the inside cover, in a 9 year old’s scrawl, “Saddest book ever.” Damn thing got to me. It’s a boy and his dog(s) book, which people have enjoyed forever considering The Book of Tobit from the Catholic Bible falls in that genre. I remember the boy drinks soda pop for the first time, there’s a silver brush and comb set, and the dogs die (spoiler! sorry!), but not much else. Probably not the saddest book ever, but what did I know?
Oh, there’s too many to name. I liked The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis but I thought most of the Narnia sequels were bullshit. Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great brought me a lot of joy but I can’t remember anything about it, except maybe they make a newspaper and maybe there’s jelly beans. The school library in fifth grade had all of these really old Mushroom Planet books about a curious old man who takes a kid to a planet where mushroom people live—I loved those. And Flowers for Algernon, perhaps a tie for “saddest book in the world.” I’m sure part of the reason I read so much about the brain today is because of that book.
