Reading Freely

The Broke and the Bookish are curious: are there any books you wish you’d read as a child?

1. The Redwall Series, Brian Jacques

I did read a few of these books as a kid, but not very many. They’re…fantasy novels which star woodland creatures. In the first book, Redwall, a mean rat named Cluny (Cluny! Cluny! CLUNY THE SCOURGE!) decided to attack a pleasant little abby-sanctuary called Redwall and use its high walls as a fortress. He spurs his horde of vermin onward while, a plucky little mouse named Matthias seeks a magic sword to help save his home.  There are over twenty books in the series in all now.

The books were charming and the dialogue fun (a friend of mine and I used to entertain each other by imitating the rabbits of the Long Patrol), but the older I got the more embarrassed I felt about sneaking into the children’s section to read books about mice with longbows.

2. The Nancy Drew Series and 3. Hardy Boys Mysteries (Various Authors)

While I enjoyed mystery novels as a kid, I mostly read from the Boxchar Children stories. I may have read from one Hardy Boys mystery, but aside from that both series were untouched. (The actual title of Hardy Boys #3 is The Secret of the Old Mill, but the above image came up in a google search and amused me, so there you are.)

4. Matt Christopher’s Works

I was never into competitive sports as a kid: while I liked playing them, I liked PLAYING them. I wasn’t interested in keeping score, which was why I tended to spend recess going on unsanctioned nature walks in the woods with friends,  and Saturday mornings riding bikes and building stunt ramps.  Christopher wrote a series of books about kids and sports, and while I read a couple of them (The Year Mom Won the Pennant, and a book about a kid who gets into biking as a way to get in shape),  I ignored most of the series.

5. Sweet Valley High and 6. The Babysitters’ Club (Francine Pascal, Ann M. Martin)

I realize these are girls’ books, but so were the California Diaries books and I enjoyed them just fine, thank you very much. (I was introduced to that series by a male character, though…Ducky.)  I read one or two in the SVH series from my  older sister’s collection back in the day, though all I remember is that Elizabeth fell asleep with her headphones on once, and there was a third twin who was evil and…may have burned down a house?  I am too old to empathize with the characters now, though. As for the other: California Diaries was a spinoff of Babysitters’ Club, — and one character, Dawn Schaefer, carried over. That’s the main reason that in high school I tried to find the books to read them before realizing they were meant for preteen girls. While Dawn wasn’t my favorite character,  she was the second-nicest person in the series and sort of a hippie, which I liked.

7. More of Ghosts of Fear Street and 8. Goosebumps 2000.  (R.L. Stine)

I was a kid during the Goosebumps heyday, and owned all of the books in the original collection. Ghosts of Fear Street was a kid’s version of his Fear Street books (with less  axe-murder and more psychotic sea monkeys), while Goosebumps 2000 was more or less an attempt to remarket Goosebumps for the new millennium. I disapproved of this for some reason and would not read the books, and by the time I’d gotten over my knee-jerk reaction,they’d  vanished from the shelves. D’oh.  Fear Street Adventures was a different story:  the only place in town that sold books offered them only sporadically.

9. More of Starfleet Academy. (Various authors)

My library had two of these (Starfall and Capture the Flag) and I loved `em both, but Selma doesn’t have a bookstore beyond the supermarkets (which tend to sell romances, westerns, and Christian fiction exclusively), so I couldn’t read more. I would’ve liked to read the adventures of young Worf and young — err,…Cadet — Data.

10. More of Great Illustrated Classics. (Various authors).

As a child I read quite a few “classics” in a shorter, illustrated form — The Call of the Wild, Robinson Caruso,  Black Beauty, War of the Worlds, etc. There are many more, but I only read a fraction of them. Now I read the ‘real’ version of those books, but I still would’ve liked to have read more of the series in this fashion.

Bonus:
11. Harry Potter – — ? Maybe?
While I couldn’t have truly grown up with Harry (being older than him when the first book was released), I wonder how I would have enjoyed the experience of waiting anxiously for every new release and reading through it with great anticipation at what would happen. Instead, I read all of the books in Autumn – October 2007…but I don’t think I was so much disadvantaged.  While Harry was leaving behind a world that disliked him and finding new friends at Hogwarts, I left an unpleasant, past and found my own home and friends in at the University of Montevallo, which I began attending that very fall. So I related rather powerfully to Harry in those first two books. Now, when I watch the movies, I’m reminded of my first week and semester on campus, and I like the connection. (When I investigated my dorm for the first time, I said: “It’s not Gryffindor Tower, but it’ll do.”)  So maybe it was best I only discovered the series in my adult days, eh?

From Booking through Thursday:

Even I read things other than books from time to time … like, Magazines! What magazines/journals do you read?

Back in 2000, when getting excited about the release of The Sims, I bought a magazine called PC Gamer and enjoyed it enough that I subscribed for years thereafter, until after I’d graduated high school. My machine could no longer play modern games, and since the magazine had gotten thinner and less attractive visually, I let the subscription lapse. I keep them in a box in my closet, which baffles anyone who asks about  it. I maintain that one day I am going to want to read those old editorials and staff pieces. It’s mostly a sentimental value, though. Because I now have a not-yet obsolete gaming rig, I have entertained notions of resuming my subscription.

I also bought Disney Adventures magazine faithfully as a kid, since it was my only way to stay hip about pop culture.

At the library, I browse National Geographic, The Smithsonian, and other random science/history magazines that catch my eye. I sometimes read Newsweek or Times, but this only rarely.

In bookstores, I sometimes buy copies of mental floss, Star Trek: the Magazine,  The Skeptical Inqurier, and the odd pop history magazine. I’d like to subscribe to magazines like Free Inquiry, UU World, and The Humanist, but as a student my mailing address tends to fluctuate and I do not like forwarding addresses. I’d also like to try Analog magazine, the modern form of the old Astounding Stories, but I have not read much real science fiction and find “hard SF” to be a bit intimidaitng. In the future I can see subscribing to Scientific American. I’ve read one issue and enjoyed it.

I also receive The Historian, a historical journal, as a benefit of being a member of Phi Alpha Theta. Even though I’ve not read any of them in full, I’m always happy to see them arrive in the mail — same goes for a science magazine(ish) the Howard Hughes Medical Institute used to put out.

This week the Broke and the Bookish want ten characters from fiction who’ve inspired us. I assumed they meant  from books when writing my list. And awaaaaaay we go. (Don’t take these too seriously: after a few entries I settled for ‘admirable characters I can remember.’)

1. Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Saxon Stories, Bernard Cornwell)

Uhtred is a surely Viking who lives outside the law, sneers at convention, and tends to solve problems with his swords. Despite this, he’s not a bad fellow. Though he’s no innocent,  he is a wolf preying on other wolves — not  a wolf amid the sheep, like a king or a priest. I like his forthright bluntness. He makes no excuses for himself — but what I most like about Uhtred is that he enjoys life, with gusto. Whenever I read Uhtred’s stories, I feel like slamming down goblets of drink with enthusiasm, whacking strangers on the back in friendship, and singing old songs loudly and without a care in the world as to if they’re off-key or not.

2. Ebeneezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens)

 I never knew how to swing a cane properly until I met ol’ Ebeneezer. 

He may be a crotechy old man, but when made to see the consequences of his actions, both for himself and for those around him,  Scrooge seeks to create his own redemption — and he does so even though those who knew him before mock him for it.

3. Harry Potter (Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling)

I know such a popular literary figure seems like an obvious choice, but (Azkaban spoilers!) when Harry decided to rise above easy vengeance and bring Peter Pettigrew to trial instead of letting Sirus and Remus feed him to Crookshanks, I was…impressed. Then, in Goblet of Fire, he goes out of his way to assist his rivals in the Second Task, because he believes without assistance,  Fleur’s sister and Hermione will be left to die. And then there’s the whole abandoning-oneself-to-death-to-defeat-the-dark-lord thing!

4. Sidney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens)

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”  Those words captivated me even when reading this book as a child (via Great Illustrated Classics). Carton epitomizes the heroic sacrifice to me.

…hey, I warned you.

5. Ducky (California Diaries, Ann M. Martin)

Ducky has shown up on one of these lists before, and that’s because he’s a great guy. He makes his introduction in the California Diaries series by coming to the rescue of three soaked, sicked, humiliated, and terrified freshmen who just escaped from a hazing trap. In the second book, he drives for several hours at night looking for a friend who has run away (one of the same girls), and later keeps a vigil outside of his friend Alex’s house, because Alex is depressed and suicidal.  So Ducky is serving as the big brother figure to a group of younger girls while at the same time trying to make sense of how he and his own childhood friends have grown apart. On top of all this, he’s doing it without a support system: his parents are research scientists working across the globe, his older brother is useless, and his best friend is the suicidal Alex mentioned prior.  But Ducky takes it all on his shoulders, and even when he is disheartened, manages to survive.

6. Sam Damon (Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer)

Sam joined the Army when the Great War started, not because he was bored or looking for glory, but because he thought it was the right thing to do. He survives and prospers in the Army not through wealth or family influence, by working hard,  learning all he can about the situation he’s in, making the best of every situation, and doing right by his men. From the trenches in Belgium to the jungles of Korea and Vietnam, that is Sam Damon:  he pursues the ‘right’ course of action and accepts the hard word simply because it’s the right thing to do and the work needs to be done. It’s a simple, and admirable, ethic.

7. Salvor Hardin (Foundation, Isaac Asimov)

Hardin appeared in two of Asimov’s foundation stories, and in both manages to save his city-planet Terminus from annexation and defeat at the hands of four great kingdoms through audacity and cleverness while uttering aphorisms like “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” and “It’s a poor blaster that doesn’t point both ways”.

8. Jake Berenson (Animorphs, K.A. Applegate)

9. Huck Finn (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain)

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:”All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.

For context, Huck has been faced with the choice of being a good Christian, which means following the law and returning his friend Jim to slavery, and doing what his natural empathy tells him. In deciding to keep hiding Jim, he choses to thwart the law and go to hell, instead of betraying his friend and damning his soul in a more real way. The irony of this is that I first heard the passage being read by an apologist  intent on mocking it, and I thought to myself — wow, I’ve gotta read this book.

10. Rudy Baylor (The Rainmaker, John Grisham)

Rudy Baylor was the first Grisham protagonist I ever read, and I found it easy to sympathize with the young man who took on an insurance company abusing its ‘clients’, refused to settle out of court rather than face their team of brilliant and experienced lawyers, and along the way rescued a friend from a case of domestic abuse.

Honorable mentions:

• Ernest Everhard (The Iron Heel, Jack London)
• Ellie Arroway (Contact, Carl Sagan)
• Violet Baudelaire — “There’s always something.” (The Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handle.)
• Elias Vaughn (Warpath, David Mack)