Books I Wish I'd Discovered Sooner

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about books we wish we'd discovered sooner.

There are books I remember discovering. The discovery of some books is a memorable experience. I remember the first time I read The Sneetches, Yertle the Turtle, Hop on Pop, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, all of which I was supposed to have been too old to like, but I read them with my younger siblings and loved them. I remember the delight of getting to know, all in one winter, My Friend Flicka, Caddie Woodlawn, and A Little Princess, all of which I was supposed to have been too young to like, the winter between Hop on Pop and The Sneetches. That was grade two. I don't remember any discoveries or learning experiences at school, but what a lot of them I had at home.

It's easy to remember when I first read books during school terms, because I remember what we were doing at school, which was never as interesting as a good book. Grade three: Louisa May Alcott's Little Men. Grade four: The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein (recently reprinted as Irma's Big Lie), Gone-Away Lake, A Story of the Stone Age, and I spent a lot of time with Spanish for Beginners. Grade five: The House of Dies Drear. Grade six: the year my brother and I really got into the Little House books, at which I'd glanced, but which I'd not really read, before; A Wrinkle in Time, So Dear to My Heart. And so on.

I remember which year I read some books for the first time as an adult, too, though as an adult, doing more of what I chose to do, I did the same things for several years in a row, and the memories run together. Nevertheless. 1987 was the year Margaret Mahy's award-winning young adult novels were printed in the United States. 1988 was the year I discovered Crescent Dragonwagon's Year It Rained and Joan Aiken's If I Were You (Deception in the UK). 1989 was the year I began knitting; Kaori O'Connor's Creative Dressing, Annette Mitchell's Country Diary Book of Knitting, Sue Bradley's Stitches in Time, Erica Wilson's Knitting Book, stand out in memory. 1990: Chellie Pingree's and Helene Rush's Maine-theme knitting pattern books, and Christian de Falbe's Designs in Hand Knitting. And so on.

I don't remember thinking "I wish I'd discovered this book sooner." There've been other pleasures I've wished I'd discovered in time to share them with departed friends. Books haven't been on that list; friends who like books have tended to find their own. I remember being glad I found Langston Hughes' "Jess B. Semple" stories in time to share them with my husband and our students; everyone laughed over them. Glad, too, to share Cleveland Amory's Ranch of Dreams with my parents, and Hop on Pop with The Nephews, and so on. But generally the discovery of a new book has seemed to be what it is. I might not have liked it so much if I'd read it before reading other things, anyway. With historical literature, the more you've read, I find, the better it all gets. 

I do remember a time when I thought, "I'm glad I gave this one a second look!" That was in grade three, with Elizabeth Enright's Then There Were Five. Mother had found it while we were thriftshopping and asked if I wanted it. I opened the book; my eyes fell on a longish paragraph in which a character was preaching on, in dialect, "Erosion they call that...that's where my scrap metal goes." I thought, Oh ick, another book about things like soil erosion for children, told as a story; better say I'll read it and hope nobody asks whether I ever did; so I agreed to the purchase of it. Some months passed, and one evening I sat down and picked up the book with soil erosion in it. (I knew a fair bit about soil erosion from riding the school bus along Route 23, where red clay earth and sometimes rocks were still bleeding down into the road.) I was surprised, and delighted. I enjoyed all four Melendy Family books, all the way through school.

Later on I remember some books that I wish had been written sooner. The work hadn't been done to allow them to be, but it would have been nice to have known that my whole family were Elaine Aron's Highly Sensitive Person (s). Would I have felt motivated to go to university to do the research that went into Kathleen Desmaisons' Potatoes not Prozac, if that book had been written earlier, and how would my life have been different if it hadn't started with chronic mononucleosis? How different would Mother's life have been if Maximum Metabolism had been available in 1970? It's all idle speculation but it is possible to wish that knowledge had progressed a little faster than it did.