**Thank you. Yep, read lots of Dr. Seuss. These days, while currently on
Sabbatical and traveling, my laptop is loaded with old favorites
(Middlemarch) science fiction, and Jennifer Wiener.
**Tiptoeing through the Middle East, homeward bound.
TC,
/Steve (not in NJ)
On Wed, Mar 11, 2020, 05:15 Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
*Good to hear from you Steve, and what better way to wile away your time
in a recalcitrant airport than by corresponding with your old friends
(etc.) at Lit-Ideas. *
*I can’t be positive but I don’t think I ever heard of the 500 hats of
Bartholomew Cubbins, although I do recall getting some Dr. Seuss books for
my kids. Just looked up your favorite here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_500_Hats_of_Bartholomew_Cubbins
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_500_Hats_of_Bartholomew_Cubbins>*
*Lawrence*
*From:* lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:
lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *Steven G. Cameron
*Sent:* Tuesday, March 10, 2020 6:37 PM
*To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: On reading at a young age....
**Sorry. Stuck in an airport. Meant to say that "500 Hats…" was my early
favorite. Even in high school, while waiting for the late bus after
athletic practice, the best place to hang out was our school library. Read
anything and everything. When imminent interruptions were possible, just
grabbed any encyclopedia and read the articles. My fiction choices seem
somewhat aimless today: started at one end of the section and just kept
reading. Loved virtually everything. And today, still an over-educated
reader/professor.
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 3:32 AM Steven G. Cameron <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
**Haven't posted to our list in years… But, books… <sigh>
**In our home, we went to the library every Wednesday (almost 70 years
ago). Still own my Hillsdale, NJ library car (No. 14) — they were just
changing to a new card system. My parents required us to borrow the
maximum four books each week. That mandate was totally unnecessary. A good
deal of my free time was spent in the library, still is.
**My early favorite was _
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins_.
Even in high school, while waiting for the late bus after athletic
practice, the best place to hang out was
On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 12:32 AM John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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
