Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The books you read when you were young...

Hi,
I thought it might be fun to ask if you remember the first couple of books you read when you were really really young that changed how you saw or felt about the world. Now that you look back, do you think you were too young to read it? What impact do you think it had on you?

So, I think I'm asking for when you're old enough to understand what you read and the deeper meaning, etc. Or you can interpret my question any way you would like to answer it.

I'll go first:

I remember being just wow'd reading the first book of the Narnia series "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and loving it. I also recall reading "The Last Battle" and realizing they had died. I remember feeling breathe-less about the whole thing and feeling wonderful, fanciful, it would be to go to such a place.

The other one is "Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell. I think I read this too young. Even now, when I think of how I felt at the time, I still feel the "great expanse", smallness, the extreme isolation, the bravery, an emptiness, the silence, the sounds of the wild/ocean waves. Not sure if the book "made me" think about existence or perhaps I was already at the stage of thinking those thoughts. I think this one kept me dreaming and re-thinking about the story for a long time. It was haunting.

How about you?

I can remember two books that changed things for me:

"Max: The dog that refused to die": I think I was 6 when I read it for the first time and I cried through the whole book. My mom tried to take it from me, but I could not stop reading it. I then reread it at least 10 more times and sobbed through it every time. It was about a dog who became lost and suffered unbearable tragedies as he tried to stay alive. It fostered my love of dogs and instilled in me that anything is possible if you a)believe and b) never give up. I remember using the book to give myself a pep talk when I was upset. 'You can DO this. Think of poor Max falling off the cliff. If he could survive that, then you can give this speech.'

"On the Origin of Species" (Charles Darwin). I remember getting this book and a copy of Gray's Anatomy for Christmas when I was 9. They both cemented my love of biology. I spent hours and hours laying in bed and thinking about the things I read in that book. It made church unbearable for a few years. I had a hard time melding the two 'theories' together and it caused me a pile of Catholic guilt. I was almost into my 20's before I found a way to believe elements of both and feel peace with my own ideas about creation. If I would ever be lucky enough to meet one person from history, I would pick Charles Darwin hands down! God, I would love to pick his brain...

Good game! The two that come, linked, to my mind right now - probably because both are linked with this board's topic for me - are

Jenny, by Paul Gallico which I read at perhaps 7. Yes, it was too young, but I'm probably still too young to read this. It is sadder than almost anything else I've ever read. (To me, perhaps not to you or your kids.)

A philosophy of solitude, by John Cowper Powys which I read at perhaps 14. Very strange book.

The first explained to me why being attached is painful; the second taught me that it's optional. Perhaps fortunately, in between I was also strongly influenced by Tolkien and Heinlein :-)

Easy. A Wrinkle in Time.

I am not even sure when I first read it as I read it so many times over the years.

The value of intelligence, the meeting of science and fantasy, the wonder at what exists that might be beyond our comprehension.

It was lifechanging for me.

Mary

Aww-- she took my answer. LOVED those books.

When I was about 8, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Gosh, how I wanted to live close enough to NYC to run away and live in the museum-- but I recall feeling that Claudia had no idea what real motivation was. LOL.
I also loved Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence when I was about that same age. I loved all of Andre Norton's 'magic' books and read those obsessively when I was around 6-7.

The first book I recall assuming proportions of being "much more than a book" was The Velveteen Rabbit. I remember reading that one before kindergarten and just feeling so heartbroken for the boy's loss. It was years before I could feel "happy" for the rabbit.

I loved Nancy Drew beginning when I was around five, I recall; she seemed so confident and in control of things-- I really liked that.

The most meaningful of all of my childhood reading experiences was probably George MacDonald's classic The Princess and the Goblin. I loved the deeper themes in that book, and I re-read it time and time again, getting something new out of it each time. I don't remember when I first read it, but it was before third grade, so I must have been six or seven. Even as an adult, I've enjoyed reading it aloud to DD (but she prefers the similar Tale of Desperaeux).

I had a real need for escapist literature, and for anything that could show me protagonists that were strong and self-sufficient... and not very social, for that matter.

Oh!! I know!

Great Expectations. I first read it when I was way too young for the book (I'm thinking about 9?), and it moved me to tears. I sobbed and sobbed-- both with sadness and (a first) with happiness for Pip. It gave me such a sense of hope-- tempered by reality. It was gritty and messy, which tallied with what I knew of real life and how it teases us and takes away as it gives. I've not met anyone else for whom that book means what it means to me-- it was like The Velveteen Rabbit in a way. Definitely the right book at the right time.

I recall reading Dandelion Wine when I was WAY too young for that book-- I was terrified to come into a darkened house until I was well into my 20s. I think I was about 8 or 9.

When I was twelve, I discovered the recently published The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it was like a revelation. Finally, I had proof that there were other people like me. At least one of them, anyway-- because if Douglas Adams existed, as he must, then it meant that I was not a perfect singularity. I had been having these bizarre existential thoughts in my head since I was three or four-- when I didn't have good words to describe things like 'theory of mind' even.

Of those books, Douglas Adams is the only one thus far that has captured my DD in the same way. She clearly isn't drive by escapist themes in quite the same way I was.

I think that I mentioned reading The Bell Jar elsewhere. I was about 10-12 when I read it, and that was wayyy too young. It was scary, scary stuff, that book-- I had a schizoaffective family member, so it hit me VERY hard. On the other hand, I was perhaps 'scared straight' by some of it, I don't know. As an adult, reading A Beautiful Mind left me sobbing, and still brings tears to my eyes for the same reasons.

I read a number of books that I cannot recall titles/authors for, and therefore have no way of recapturing other than by happy accident. I recall plot extremely well, but not names.

Ooohh, good thread. I read a lot of Australian authors growing. Don't know if any of them will be particularly meaningful to a world wide audience:

-Praise, which came out when I was 13 and I was riveted. Certainly not age appropriate, but it had some parallels with my own life and I was/am always fascinated by stories of break down in all it's forms.

- Discovering Tim Winton when I was about 14. I loved his use of language and his descriptions of an Australia that I knew. Now I find him intensely irritating, but then I loved him!

- Outside my Australiana theme, a book that was very formative was Animal Farm, which I read when I was about 15. It gave me words for what I could see happening in the world around me and the institutions I was associated with, but hadn't been able to articulate. Still one of my favourite books of all time.



Me too!
(Don't usually do this quoting thing... no idea if it will have worked once I hit submit).

I read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit when I was in high school and from then on, I have been a fantasy fanatic! (Lucky for my son, I got him inculcated early, so he doesn't have to wait til high school.) Marion Zimmer Bradley and David Eddings are two other of my favorite fantasy authors.

Besides fantasy, I LOVED Russian authors when I was young, like Dostoyevsky (I don't even know how to spell his name now) and spent all summer long reading those giant epic novels in my backyard instead of playing kickball!

I like a lot of other books, but those are the main ones that "changed" me!

Nan

"

Well. You took mine. So there. Interestingly, I had the same thing with not identifying with the Rabit until years later. I think I had it read to me too early, to be honest, in a wierd not too early kinda way. It nearly killed me to think about it when I was 2 and 3, but I memorized it and would think through it a lot. When I learned to read at about 7, I read it for myself, and suddenly felt good for the rabit. Maybe I was ready for it then... but then what of the strong connection I had to it before that?

My other one is "The Witch who was afraid of Witches." I'd forgotten about it until my mother gave it back to me recently. It is in utter tatters. I think it was only read to me, and that I never read it to myself. I would probably have remembered it more consiously if it had been in circulation after I was about 3. But. Flipping through it I notice some interesting things. My favourite shoe-style is the one the main character uses. This has been stable all my life. My image of my young self is, I kid you not, the drawing of the main character at the bottom of page 5, and the image of myself that I've always turned to in difficult times is at the top of page 6. When she comforts herself, alone at home, she does the exact series of things I have always thought through or actually done, except one I consiously think of and don't do (!). It goes on, but I gotta go.

It's really very creepy. Take that people who talk about the deep importance of the first three years of life-- you don't know the half of it.

-Michaela

I used to sneak my mom's copy of Stephen King's "It" off the shelf and read it a few pages at a time, despite the fact that I was told not to. I was 9. It didn't necessarily change my view of the world, but it certainly scared the pants off me and gave me nightmares....which, of course, I couldn't mention to my mom, for obvious reasons.
Seriously, though, I think I was 7 or 8 when I read "Across Five Aprils." Cried through most of the book and it gave me a deeper understanding about the real impact of war on a society. I wonder if that was why I totally freaked out in sixth grade when the Gulf War began.
I also read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" at around ten. Made me rethink my habit of standing by and allowing certain kids at school to be picked on mercilessly.
I don't think I read either of these too early. (The Stephen King was probably a bit early - but that's another story). I think when my kids start asking to read these books, I'll probably let them read almost anything unless it has graphic sex scenes or something. If they're like I was, they'll back off from that type of book if it's too much for them.

What I find interesting as I recall books that I loved deeply as a child is that a single thread emerges-- I have an abiding sense of profound sadness that they were only stories... I wanted them to be REAL. More than that, I wanted to BE the character in the story of the most compelling of them.

I wanted desperately to be Sam or Frodo. I wanted to be Ford Prefect, Claudia, Nancy Drew, or Pip.

Michaela's post made me realize that inside me somewhere, there is still a heartbroken little girl that desperately wishes that she had a scruffy friend named Curdie, or that she could truly escape into a time-portal in the garden behind her house. (I can't remember the name of that book, but it was one of my very favorites.)

It made me unbearably sad that they weren't real. There is a part of me that still associates that sensation with some books, which is how that I know that I was under about twelve when I read them the first time; after that, I was more resigned to fiction being-- well, fiction.


The conversation has reminded me of an event that completely blindsided me with respect to DD, too. I won't take this one so far OT, though.