Children's Literature - The Story's the Thing

It's all about the story. My story -- who I am today -- still somehow has echoes of the earliest stories I heard or read. Snuggled down under the covers with our daddy reading to us, my sisters and I giggled to the contrariness of the Barber Pole Man who did everything backwards. He was a main character in a book called "Wonder Hill" that my father first read when he was a child and which he kept all his life. My father also told us of the adventures of Jimmy Beaver and his family of beavers and their uncle, Otto Otter. Uncle Otto had a magic carpet and would take the young beavers on marvelous flights to exotic lands. When our daddy wasn't home to tuck us in, my mother began to tell us about the gnomes that lived in the rock under the big pine tree outside our house. I spent hours staring at that rock and imagining their antics. Then, too, there were the fairies that lived in the woods on the hill above our house. To this day, I have a lingering belief that I really did go out one night and dance with them beneath the light of a silvery moon.

On one of the freelance writers' job sites, a client offered the task of creating an annotated list of 100 children's books for kids ages birth to 5 years old. The wheels in my head started turning. I am a little stymied by what you might read to a baby fresh out of the womb but can think of lots of books that were important to me as a slightly older child. In my 'other life' as a teacher of English as a foreign language to students in Asia, it has occurred to me many times that one of the best ways to learn a language is to start with kids books and work your way up -- just as we native speakers did. Reading the books that shaped childhoods may also be one of the best ways to get insights into a culture.

So here's the challenge:  Can you remember books that you read or had read to you as a child? Do you think they have resonance for you today? Have they shaped you in any significant ways?

There's an amazing website called the ICDL -- International Children's Digital Library -- that has more than 2,000 'kids books' online -- there for the reading! Or re-reading! ("Children's Literature" doesn't have to be only for kids!).
http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

From the time I could read, I often spent the night in my father's library. He put a very comfortable bed in there -- sometimes I wolfed down 3 or 4 books a night. To this day, I am a night owl. My father collected first editions of children's books, picking them up at library discard and tag sales. Because he knew so much about books, he was able to form a fabulous library from 50 cent and $1 finds -- including a complete set of first edition Horatio Algers. His collection was especially strong on the Edward Stratemeyer boys books turned out in the 1920's by a syndicate of writers. Later I was to read an account of the syndicate in a wonderful biography called "My Father was Uncle Remus."

Here's a further challenge: What was the first book you ever read on your own?

One of my first books was the story of a little yellow duck named "Ping" who lived in China. When I finally went to China, I told my students there how the duck lived on a junk and would go with his family to the fields every day, then back on to the boat each night -- and how one night Ping didn't hear the whistle and was left to adventure in the dark. When I was four, I had told my parents that I would go to China to see Ping. It took me some 46 years to get there, but I did! My students got the message: dreams can come true!

Here's a partial list of books that I remember from childhood --  "for your reading pleasure..."

Wonder Hill
The Story of Ping
I Can't, Said the Ant
The Children's Homer
The Children's Shakespeare
Rudyard Kipling, How the Camel Got His Hump and other tales
Hans Christian Andersen's stories
The Brothers Grimm's stories
The Perrault stories
Andrew Lang's (colors) Fairy Books
Aesop's Fables

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

The Snow Queen and other Tales

Jorinda and Joringel

Baba Yaga

Dr. Suess Horton Hears a Who

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Babar and the Elephants

Eloise, Eloise in Paris

Cinderella

Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer and other Jack tales

Water Babies

The Wind in the Willows
Toon Tooney Pie (Pakistani stories, illustrated by my mother)
Little Black Sambo (now considered non-PC but memorable)

Margaret Sidney, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

Snow White and Rose Red

Pinocchio
The Blue Willow Plate


Series:
The Little Maid series -- Little Maid of Nantucket, Little Maid of Fort Ticonderoga, etc. - about fictional little girls living heroically through the American Revolution

A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six, The House at Pooh Corner, etc.
Victor Appleton, Tom Swift  - 1920's inventor series (continued by other authors)
Don Sturdy - boy explorer at the North Pole, etc
The Bobbsey Twins

The X Bar X Boys - they lived on a ranch

Baseball Joe
Frank Barbour Football series
Horatio Alger series
L. Frank Baum (and later authors), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Land of Oz, Glinda of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, The Tinwoodsman of Oz, etc.
Marguerite Henry, Misty of Chincoteague (and her many other horse books)

Bits and pieces (whatever happened to encyclopedias!??)
Compton's Encyclopedia
The Popular Mechanics Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Good Housekeeping Magazine
The Story of Your Body (Your Skin, Your Respiratory System, etc., illustrated by my mother)












The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew








Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)