They were "suggestions" or "recommendations" at least up to grade nine, and I didn't read all of them at school. Beginning at the beginning of memory makes this a list of books I liked as a child. I liked some of these books later in life, but I read them for the first time in or before grade four. (That's where I reached number ten.) So this blog post doesn't get into high school and college lists, and even recommendations from John Holt, who was a family pen friend and recommended some delightful books.
1. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
I read English prose translations for children. I think that's an acceptable way to read these stories. They are more the sort of action-adventure stories six-year-olds enjoy than the sort of poems adults write or read now. Pre-literary oral tradition and all that. Homer may have been a real individual, and as he was blind someone may have written down lines of poetry he dictated. Still, these stories were written to be read aloud, probably chanted, memorized, recited, by the town book collector, to a crowd of little gigglers and wigglers clustered around him.
2. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
First I read the Little Golden Book Encyclopedia article that explained about Chaucer's spelling. Then I read, at relatives' home, somebody's old literature book that had a revised-and-simplified version of the Nun's Priest's Tale (Chauntecler and Pertelote) in it. A poem about chickens! My pets were chickens, at age six, so I liked that. So then in high school and college I worked my way slowly through the rest of the book, being old enough by then to appreciate the other Tales, which are not about chickens.
3. Louisa May Alcott's Little Men
And then, through it, her other children's books. Little Men was one of a very few chapter books we were allowed to read in the classroom in grade three.
4. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
Robert Lawson had just illustrated a beautiful kiddie version that all the libraries had when I entered grade four. Some time that year I read and liked that book. In grade nine I spent my own money on a paperback copy of the original book. I liked it even better than the picture-book version, and that's saying a lot because Lawson did excellent illustrations.
So then in college I read Bunyan's other books. Well, he was writing to Christians only and I don't blame the non-Christians who don't like Bunyan, but a good case can be made that they ought to have to read him anyway because he was a good writer.
5. Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth
At the school where I did grade four, homeroom teachers taught all the other subjects but reading classes were divided by ability and rotated among teachers, so each student got to work with each teacher for part of the year. One of the teachers used The Phantom Tollbooth as the textbook, and had the whole classroom decorated with references to that book. I appreciated her more than some kids did. I reported to Mother at home, "The Phantom Tollbooth is like The Pilgrim's Progress, only about school stuff instead of religious ideas."
6. Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote
In English of course. What does it say for US culture that most public libraries don't have the original Spanish text of this book? I read a twentieth century translation but it's worth mentioning that an earlier translation, widely circulated in England and colonies, was the origin of dozens of phrases that sound as if they came from the Bible or Shakespeare but didn't. Anyway, I read the story with the windmills in it in another old high school literature book, when I was in primary school, and read the whole book as an adult. It should have been required in college, but wasn't.
7. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, et seq.
The complete set with Garth Williams' illustrations was still new. Every library wanted it. One of my teachers read the first chapter aloud to the class. There was a new TV series based on the books. Then Rose Wilder Lane died, and her heirs turned the TV series into something different. In the books, as in real life, Laura grew up and married Almanzo in South Dakota and she admired him because he made the difficult trip to bring the wheat to his hungry townsfolk during The Long Winter. The books Laura actually wrote don't even mention the family's moving back to Missouri after The First Four Years. Rose was born in South Dakota. In the TV show, Missouri looks more like California, so it was easier to do shows set in Missouri, so the Ingalls and Wilder family were moved back to Missouri before Laura and Almanzo were married. And even though some of the TV episodes were based on family memories from Missouri, others were clearly fiction about 1970s issues spliced into the Ingalls family's history. So my parents weren't really keen on the TV show, though they did let us watch it when we were near a TV set. But when my grandmother, Texas Ruby, read On the Banks of Plum Creek she said to me, "This is a good book; it's about the real Wild West."
8. Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind (and dozens more)
Marguerite Henry was an industry in the mid-twentieth century. She wanted to learn about horses, so she wrote a first book about horses from research. It sold. She wrote a book about horses, or donkeys, or dogs, for children, I think every year after that for the rest of her life. The one that won the Newbery and was recommended by a third grade textbook was King of the Wind, the story about the smaller Arabian horse who showed English horse breeders that slightly smaller horses could run faster than the huge ones they'd been breeding. If there was a book Henry wrote about publishers started printing her stories as coffee-table books, with illustrations, some in color, by Wesley Dennis, my brother and I had to read it and competed to find it first. I think we may have succeeded in reading them all. All of them deserve reprinting, with all the original illustrations, please. My brother credited his ability to draw recognizable pet portraits to his diligent copying of illustrations by Wesley Dennis.
9. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
I saw a kiddie version of this and was underwhelmed, in primary school. In grade six or seven I found a copy of the original book and liked it much better.
10. Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl
Mr. Ed., who taught everyone in my fourth grade class all the arithmetic we'd ever need, also taught us about the World War. He'd been in it. Anything he didn't like reminded him of Germany though he seemed to have served in the Pacific. I didn't like Mr. Ed. and thought there might have been something to be said for the Germans. My parents didn't say anything about this directly, but Dad brought home a copy of Anne Frank's Diary, translated into English. It gave me an understanding that Dad and Mr. Ed. had enlisted in the same army to fight the same war, and if I'd been alive at the time I would have been on their side too.
Of course there always was some controversy whether Anne really wrote it or her bereft father did, but the Diary itself describes how Anne started keeping it as a war memoir, how her parents helped her edit her handwritten diaries in hope of eventual publication. It reads like something a teenager would write with lots of adult help; compare with Helen Keller's Story of My Life, Ellen White's Early Writings, Rahul Alvares' Free from School. I believe it's mostly Anne's.
No comments:
Post a Comment