Formative Books

Although it's off-topic and has little to do with the themes of this blog, I've been thinking a lot in recent years about the "formative books" that helped make me into the person I am today.  Do you have a few such books?  Books whose stories became your life's morality tales; books whose characters became your role models; books whose words became your vocabulary; books whose illustrations shaped your imagination...  I did not grow up in a house with a lot of books.  My parents wanted to be considered the kind of people who read books--but like many working class folks in those days, they secretly felt that reading was for the lazy and idle.  Free time was for mowing the lawn and washing the car.  They never once took any of their five children to the library.  If mom or dad were home, which wasn't altogether common, the TV was on.  The TV chattered away all day whether anyone was watching it or not.  It was only turned off at bedtime.  There were basically only three books in our home when I was small.  First, we had a big, formal King James Bible, which no one ever read, sitting in a prominent spot in the living room--holding court, presiding silently over everyone present.  No one was allowed to set anything on top of it, because it was deemed sacred, maybe even magical.  Second, we had an old book of fairly tales and nursery rhymes called "Young Years," published in 1971.  (I'm fortunate to have that very book in my possession still today.)  The third book was all mine.  Tucked away by my bunkbed, there was an old copy of Howard Pyle's "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood," which belonged to my uncle when he was a kid.  Technically, there were two other books in the house, both of which were strictly forbidden.  One was some medical book from my mother's days in nurse's training, and the other was a book of artistic masterpieces from my father's days at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.  Both were off limits because they had naked people in them.

# 1: YOUNG YEARS: Christmas, 1973, our parents gave us this book of nursery rhymes and fairytales to be shared by my brothers, sister, and me.  I don't remember that humble Christmas; I was only three years old.  But I was more attached to the book than the others were...maybe just because it was a book.  I loved books, and we had so few of them.  No one but my grandmother ever read to me as a child, but that was enough.  I learned to read, precociously, by sounding out the rhymes in this old book.  When my parents downsized, some years ago, I nabbed it.  I read "Young Years" to my own children when they were small, and now they're arguing over who should get it when they start to have kids of their own.  It's got all the old, brutal versions of the fairytales with borderline terrifying illustrations.  For example, in its early telling of the "Snow White" story, the evil queen is punished at the end by being fitted in red-hot iron boots and made to dance till she falls over dead.  

This is an illustration for "Puss in Boots."  Click on the photo to enlarge it.  See the dead rodents in little pouches dangling from the cat's belt...and the haunted-looking man bathing in a pond in the background?  Look at the wild glint in that cat's eyes.  The illustrations in this old book stay with me all these decades later, as they apparently do with my adult children.  Both of them remember with fondness sitting one on each knee while I read to them from my childhood book--I often skipped the grisly parts.  I never allowed them to read the book by themselves because I treasured it, I didn't want them to damage it, and the binding was so worn out.  I regret that now.  A child needs a book to herself sometimes, even if it contains questionable stories like "Jack the Giant Killer."  Since I can't give them both this single volume, I've ordered another used copy of "Young Years" online--same edition.   

# 2: THE MERRY ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD: As I started to outgrow nursery rhymes, I found this book in my grandma's attic.  It had belonged to my bachelor uncle, my mother's brother, who never lived anyplace but in the house where he was raised.  Grandma was happy to let me take it, and it set me on a lifelong quest to leave the world behind and to go off and live in the forest... The only caveat?  I didn't want a band of merry men.  I wanted to be Friar Tuck, living alone in a woodland hermitage, which Friar Tuck did until Robin came along and recruited him for his team.

My brothers ended up reading the book, too.  We tried to re-enact its scenes.  We'd shoot blunt-tipped arrows at each other with real bows---(stupid, stupid kids with no adult supervision, ever!)  We'd fight with long sticks that we called "staffs" or "staves" or "cudgels."  We used to mimic Pyle's intentionally archaic speech. "Hie thee hither, thou scurvy villain, and I'll crack thy nave's pate!"  

Admittedly, a few pates did get cracked...though we were mercifully bad with the bow and arrow.  When I turned 14 or so, I started spending my summers working for the carnivals, which meant that I had some income to buy more books.  Soon enough, Robin Hood was replaced with J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings Trilogy."  But if you're old enough to spend the summer sleeping on the floor of a greasy cotton candy trailer and bathing in Lake Erie, then you're probably past the "formative" stage.  So I don't count "The Lord of the Rings" among my early, formative books.

# 3: THE HOLY BIBLE (King James Version of 1611) was displayed prominently in our home, even if we never read it together as a family.  It played a critical role in my early life because we belonged to an evangelical church that took the Bible literally, for the most part, and which only used the old King James Version--with its lofty-sounding Elizabethan language and its fanciful imagery.  In the King James, in a certain chapter in Isaiah, the word "ostriches" is mistranslated as "unicorns," for example.  "Jackals" is mistranslated as "dragons."  It's much more fun to have a biblical world of unicorns and dragons than one of ostriches and jackals.  Our borderline fundamentalist church(es) always insisted that we memorize great swaths of Scripture in Sunday school, but never anything about mythical creatures, just stuff about heaven, and hell, and salvation from sin.   

I would often flip through the big display-Bible at home because it was filled with these classic and grim illustrations by the French artist Gustave Doré.  For some reason, Doré loved to illustrate the darkest, most disturbing scenes from a book that is full of them: people drowning in Noah's Flood; Jonah and the Big Fish; Leviathan; the dismemberment of some poor woman in the book of Judges; the Slaughter of the Innocents; the crucifixion... David is depicted here, proudly displaying the head of his fallen enemy--Goliath--to the crowd, after killing and beheading him.  Let me ask you this: Why were serious books about art and anatomy off limits, but this stuff was considered sacrosanct and somehow acceptable for children?  Come to think of it, though, our book of fairytales was almost as gruesome and violent as the Bible.

Here's a nice enough scene, Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount.  

"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye not much better than they?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."  

That's poetic.  It's comforting.  It's way better than a public beheading...  But it's also probably true that if Doré had only illustrated the pleasant scenes like this one, then the display-Bible in our living room would have gone completely untouched.  The horrors of the Bible are more compelling to small children.  Early on, my parents did buy a set of encyclopedias, "The New Book of Knowledge," 1973 edition.  They were kept in a glass case in one of our houses, on display almost as prominently as the Bible.  It was as if to say to visitors, "This family is godly and knowledgeable," though we weren't really either.  I was the only one who ever used those encyclopedias, and I did use them!  Ever after buying them, my father bemoaned the waste of money that they were.  But not for me.  I loved each and every one of them and read them cover-to-cover--skipping only the articles about science and math.  

My job traveling as a carnie allowed me enough income to dive deeper and deeper into the world of books.  We had to read "Great Expectations" in school, which caused me to buy a bunch of Dickens paperbacks.  Then I discovered poetry, and biography, and travel writing.  In an almost bookless home, three solitary books launched me on a lifelong quest of discovery and learning.  I wonder if everyone has a few books that got them started?  What early books made you into the person you are?  You don't need to tell me the answer...unless you want to.  But answer the question for yourself.  What relationship do you have today with the books that formed you?