The most important present my parents arranged for my 13th birthday was a week
with my mother’s cousin Caroline who was living and working in Washington, D.C.
Caroline gave me a place to stay and fed be breakfast. After that I was on my
own, free to wande around the city, visit the Armed Forces Medical Museum as
well as the Smithsonian and discover the old Astrounding (later Analog) Science
Fiction magazine, edited by John R. Campbell. The one with all the fascinating
pseudo-scientific speculation about psionic powers, anti-gravity and
faster-than-light space travel.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 11, 2020, at 10:27, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John,
The only one on your daughter’s list that I read was STARSHIP TROOPERS. I
wasn’t a tween though when it was published in 1959. I was just graduating
from college and starting work at Douglas Aircraft Company, but I loved the
book. Being a former Marine I didn’t at all mind his society where only
veterans were constitutionally franchised. J The movie shouldn’t have been
given Heinlein’s title: Verhoeven stated in 1997 that the first scene of the
film—an advertisement for the Mobile Infantry—was adapted shot-for-shot from
a scene in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), specifically an
outdoor rally for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. Other references to Nazism in the
movie include the Wehrmacht-inspired uniforms and insignia of field grade
officers, M.I. working uniforms reminiscent of Mussolini's Blackshirts,
Albert Speer's style of architecture, and its propagandistic dialogue
("Violence is the supreme authority!" [from Wikipedia]
But I did develop an interest in Science Fiction at some point. I have a
memory of climbing up to my favorite spot on our landlord’s garage and
reading and being powerfully impressed by When World’s Collide and then After
World’s Collide. The novels were published in 1932 and 1934 respectively and
I acquired them from the library to read; but I don’t recall how old I was
when that happened. I read a lot of Science Fiction. There were several
magazines that published SF stories and serialized novels. There was a book
store in Wilmington that carried used copies of a lot of them. I remember
the old man who ran the store telling me that I was the only boy he liked
because I was the only one who ever bought anything. The others wanted to
read them a bit and then leave; something he hated.
I knew about Tom Swift and Tom Corbett but I was never attracted to them –
don’t recall why.
I do recall that I read just about everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the
Tarzan, Martian, Venusian, Center of the Earth series and probably some I
can’t recall at the moment. I tried to reread some of these in later years,
and couldn’t manage to. Probably, what I read and appreciate in college,
being a much superior class of literature, spoiled me from nostalgically
revisiting some of the novels I appreciated as a boy.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
On Behalf Of John McCreery
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2020 3:32 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On reading at a young age....
Ursula,
Very interesting questions about those books we chose for ourselves. One of
my great pleasures as a tween was having my mother drop me off at a public
library while she went shopping and did other errands. Started out by reading
a lot of what would now be called Young Adult fiction, then, around the age
of 12 or 13, slipped into the Adult stacks, where I discovered my first
bodice-rippers, a series of wonderful trashy novels by F. Van Wyck Mason,
mostly nautical adventures with pirates, battles, and, yes, bodice-ripping.
Very exciting to a pubescent boy.
Also, if I may, another category to add to your list, books given to us. On
my thirteenth birthday, my maternal grandfather gave me complete sets of the
Tom Swift boy inventor and Tom Corbett Space Cadet series. What madly
optimistic pictures of the future they contained. Still lots of villains, but
also intrepid heroes who got them in the end.
Turning to Lawrence and Oz. My musings about the effects of what we read as
children is shaped by an intersection between what was read to and later read
by my daughter and my career in advertising, where I learned how little of
what we happen to see or read has any effect at all. Our daughter grew up in
a home full of books and started reading very early. She certainly recalls
Mother Goose and The Wind in the Willows, but also Maurice Sendak’s Where the
Wild Things Are and Leon Leonni’s Frederick, about the mouse who was a poet
and “I know it.” Then came Shel Silverstein and science fiction like
Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Orson Scott Card’s Enders Game. And this
barely scratches the surface. That makes trying to understand which threads
from these and multiple other sources were influential on her parental
guesswork at best.
John
Sent from my iPad
On Mar 10, 2020, at 6:03, Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My background is in philosophy and history (more of the same eventually, but
never piled higher and deeper). I didn’t start teaching until almost my 50th
year.
English is my second language (I was six when my parents dragged me across
the ocean and deposited me in Chicago) and I had difficulty reading in 1st
grade. My mother, who had trained as a teacher in Germany, undertook to
teach me phonics and I became a voracious reader. Interestingly, my four
brothers and sisters had no such trouble and so they did not get the
individual phonics treatment. For years after, I was the only one in the
family who read anything not assigned in school....almost all the charm, all
the insight, all the adventure was in that outside-of-school realm. If there
was nothing else, I read cereal boxes (a habit which served me well when I
came to Canada and tried to learn French).
John thinks we overestimate the influence of the books we happen to
read....somewhere here lies my point: I was questioning whether, in fact,
we merely ‘happen’ to read them. I’m thinking not of the books our parents
choose and read to us, but of the books we seek out ourselves in our early
and mid teens. How do we and they find each other?
David, when you’re done with the theses (or you break free for a walk around
the yard), query the chickens....they may have thoughts on this.
Ursula,
Far from any virus at the moment,
But with an extra can of tuna or two just in case.
On Mar 9, 2020, at 2:02 PM, david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 9, 2020, at 10:34 AM, Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Safe travels, John (on your way to Oz)....
On Mar 9, 2020, at 12:40 AM, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Coming late to the party, grabbing a few minutes from preparations for a
flight from Japan to Australia tonight.
[snip]
The daughter wound up a US Naval Academy graduate married to a very large and
masculine Marine Corps jet fighter jock. I have long felt that people with
literary tastes overestimate the influence of the books they happen to read.
John
Good one, Ursula.
Overestimate and underestimate imply a norm. My experience of college
students suggests that reading as a pastime is waning. Perhaps it will wax
again, but at present they seem little influenced by books.
My first degree was in Literature; my second was in History. One reason for
the switch is that I felt less passion than others about, say, “The Divine
Comedy.” First World War poets engaged me, but the war itself seemed more
interesting as a puzzle.
I have long since brought the two subjects into a balance that works for me.
David Ritchie,
off to read two hundred pages of theses in
Portland, Oregon