This week, Long & Short Reviews asks reviewers about books we read on someone else's recommendation. I will exclude teachers and school librarians from this list...not a Top Ten List, but a list of books someone else, either in real life or in a non-school book, recommended and I was glad I listened...another First Ten That Come to Mind List.
1. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Recommendations remind me of how manipulative even my favorite adults were. When I was four years old, my mother loved the idea that I was reading a Chapter Book recommended by the neighborhood librarian. (Which neighborhood was that? Might have been Folsom, California; I'm not certain.) When I was eight years old and delighted to have a teacher who didn't think imagination was a bad thing, my mother thought reading Charlotte's Web again was regressive. Bah. The character Fern is a "little girl," presumably eight or ten or so, so people assume that that's the best age to read the book, but plenty of adults enjoy Charlotte's Web.
2. Rascal by Sterling North
Already discussed here...Dad read it because North was a fellow polio survivor; this story is based on his memories of the last couple of summers before polio. When I was ten or eleven or so Dad found a copy in a secondhand store and assured my brother and me that we'd like it. We did. It's another book where the main character may be pre-teen but adults usually enjoy the story too. I think it's probably better read as an adult, actually. Adult readers will remember, even as they laugh at Rascal's adventures, that those adventures consist mostly of property damage and were enjoyed as comedy because the character Sterling is both rich and a bit spoiled. You do not actually want a raccoon as an indoor pet.
3. My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
My mother had seen the movie and thought I might enjoy the book. I did...at seven, and for some years afterward. At sixteen I found Wyoming Summer, the still somewhat fictionalized selection from the author's diaries that explains how My Friend Flicka was written, and I've liked it much better ever since. But at seven I didn't mind that the novel falsified important facts.
4. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
I've discussed this one before too. I disliked my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Ed. --, enough that his constant reminiscences about having fought the Germans made me think there might have been something to be said for the Germans. My parents did not directly say anything. Dad found a copy of Anne Frank's diary and left it where I'd find it. Mother said it was depressing and I probably shouldn't read it--which might have been a deft use of reverse psychology. I smuggled it to school, read it there, and liked it. I think what I liked might have been that Anne started out as the sort of well-off, talkative, thoughtless girl who reminded me of what were called my friends, at home, but who were not friends at that school in that superficially nice neighborhood in California. She got what they might have needed and deserved; she had to hide in a storage room for four years. And it forced her to focus on learning, reading, doing exercises, and writing her little book. She knew at the time that she was living through an adventure that would make a marketable book. It was not the usual tedious mess of childish "secrets" about childish social drama. Anne read her diary entries aloud to her parents and revised and edited them for eventual publication. I don't think she was much more intelligent than the average teenager; I think the adventures narrated in her diary would make a writer of any young girl, or boy, if they didn't destroy person altogether.
5. Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons
Recommended to Mother and me at the health food store in Sacramento. Stalking the Good Life, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop were sequels. All are useful. All were fun to read, and reread, all the way through middle school. I don't cook the wild plants I use in many of the ways Gibbons did, now, but most of his discussions of wild plants have a recipe for everyone.
Caveat: The properties of wild foods vary, as do the properties of cultivated foods, depending on where and when the plants grew. A species that one person finds delicious as it grows in this particular field may taste nasty or even contain toxins when it grows somewhere else. Gibbons didn't recommend anything that's likely to kill you but he liked some things you may hate and was unenthusiastic about some things you may love.
6. The Seventh Day by Booton Herndon
Recommended by someone at the Seventh-Day Adventist church we visited regularly when I was nine or ten years old. Writing a biography of Desmond Doss, a war hero, led Herndon to write about the church to which Doss belonged. Herndon didn't join the Seventh-Day Adventists but he learned about the church's teachings and the state of its ministries in the 1960s. He was given many good stories to tell. He told them well.
7. Downright Dencey by Caroline Dale Snedeker
Recommended by a committee that made up lists of good books for children of various ages, in the 1950s and 1960s. I don't think many people would recommend it now. I wouldn't recommend it to children, generally, now. Snedeker made a novel-length version of a family story about how the daughter of a rich family married the son of a drunken "Indian." There are cringe moments and quaint phrasings and quite a lot about the spirituality of Quakers in the early 1800s. I think the spirituality always was what I liked best. The childhood friendship that grew up with the characters became more interesting after the first reading, at age twelve.
8. The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
One of those books that appealed to real adults that Dad was always trying to get me to read. (He would have been even better pleased if my brother had read those books; did not happen.) Packard wrote about the Advertising Age at its height in the 1950s but he wrote well and wittily enough that I think, and recently a publisher also thought, people would enjoy revisiting his world and thinking about how much it's like ours.
9. Jubilee by Margaret Walker
In my twenties I read lots of literary essays--long-form book reviews really. They steered me to read a lot of books. Many of those books, like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and L.P. Hartley's Facial Justice, were well enough written that I could see why they became other writers' favorites, but they didn't become mine. Jubilee, recommended by Alice Walker, did become a favorite. It contains some material that is as raw and horrible as the most off-putting contents of Toni Morrison's books, but the character Elvira--who may seem impossibly nice because she was based on Walker's memories of her grandmother--transcends the awfulness that surrounds her, and so does the reader. Elvira survives being a slave in the house of a woman who hates her, loves and is loved, achieves reasonable success after the end of slavery, gets her choice of two men, and finds inner peace.
Jubilee has been called "the Black Gone with the Wind." Both are longish novels set in the Civil War period; both focus on young women who, at a time when the supply of young men was so depleted that many women had no chance to marry, had a choice between two attractive men. Both books took more than ten years to write. But that's one of the major differences. Margaret Mitchell spent those years working out details of plot and characterization because she was writing a metaphoric study of the Southern States; she had all the historical documentation she needed. Margaret Walker spent those years digging for her historical documentation.
10. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
I grew up in between the waves of this series' popularity. It wasn't recommended to me as a child; it was recommended in my late twenties by a cousin. (Who was a teacher, but not one of mine.) Everybody likes the whole series.
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