Thirteen books I loved as a kid

I don’t know how well these books stand up over time. Fond memories do not often equal a pleasurable reread. Recently, I tried to reread Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series and thought it a pale imitation of Tolkien. And I’m not even all that crazy about Tolkien.

A list like this is a biography of sorts — or, at the very least, a growth chart. Here we go.

1. Sailor Jack and Bluebell, by Selma and Jack Wasserman. I’m amazed you can still find this book online. Why do I remember it? (A) It was the first book I memorized and was able to ‘read,’ and (B) as a 4-year-old, it provided no end of chortling entertainment, owing to the wilful mispronunciation of Bluebell as ‘blueballs.’ Oh, I was quite a card.

2. Curious George, by H. A. Rey. With my sister’s help, I learned to read thanks to the Curious George series and the L.A. Herald Examiner Sunday Comics. (Oh, Prince Val, will you ever come out of the closet? And Lois was one of my early crushes. Look at the rack on her, will you?)

3. Amazon Adventure, by Willard Price. Here’s the set-up: brothers Hal and Roger travel the world with their father, who captures exotic animals for a metropolitan zoo. In this, the first novel of the series, dad gets taken out of the picture early (stabbed by spies, or something like that — I haven’t read this book in nearly four decades!) so the boys have to finish the job on their own, battling Amazonians (nothing PC about this book, no sirree), army ants, anacondas, and some sort of predatory cat.

Recently, I picked up a copy of this book, thinking Jake might like the series. Atrocious writing, laughable dialog — I couldn’t get past the first chapter. As a kid, I read the whole series.

4. Dorp Dead, by Julia Cunningham. Orphan boy gets adopted by ladder-building freak who keeps him locked up in a cage. Creeeepy. According to the publisher, this novel “dramatically changed children’s literature in the 20th century.” I don’t know if that’s hyperbole, but I do recall this book was way different than anything I’d read up to that point (3rd of 4th grade, that is).

5. Bless the Beasts and the Children, by Glendon Swarthout. Maybe I liked the tragic ending. Maybe I was a closet conservationist as a kid. Or maybe I was a twisted little perv who loved the scene in the movie when the in-crowd kids piss all over our hapless heroes. Yeah, one of those. I certainly didn’t love it for the sappy Carpenters song.

6. The Tripods series, by John Christopher. Another early introduction to tragedy — and I’m still a sap for unhappy endings.

7. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Even as a kid I understood that other little kids were beasts. Not me, of course. The rest of ’em. Golding merely confirmed what I had already suspected.

8. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. I went through a long post-apocalyptic phase wherein I inhaled Earth Abides, Erewhon, Lucifer’s Hammer, and God only knows what else. That’s about the time I saw the movie A Boy and His Dog, one of my all-time favorite SF films. What I remember best about Earth Abides: a stranger comes to live with a group of survivors. Somehow, the men in the group figure out that this new guy has VD. They ask themselves: we have a good thing going here. Do we really want to have some guy with the clap screwing our women? And so they kill him. That made a big impression on my as a kid.

Another near-apocalyptic short story I remember well and still love: Larry Niven’s Inconstant Moon, a romantic story about a man and woman on the eve of disaster. Here’s the full text.

9. Relativity, by ???. From 2nd grade until 6th grade, I must have checked this book out twenty times. In the beginning, I loved the bug-eyed looks the older kids gave me when I read it in the library. As I got older, I loved the book itself. Great explanations of the twin paradox and the expanding universe, the red-shift, and the Doppler effect. All of the math got stuck into the appendix (I remember puzzling over the Lorentz transformations — way beyond me, even in 6th grade). Those were the days, when a guy could impress girls by reading a gnarly-looking book.

10. To Live Again, by Robert Silverberg. What if you could collect the souls of famous or talented dead people and stuff ’em into your skull? And what if they didn’t particularly like being there? Sadly, my memories of this one far exceed the experience of re-reading. I tried it recently and couldn’t even get through the first 50 pages.

11. Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Thirty years ago, Niven and Pournelle took a cheap shot at Kurt Vonnegut by imagining his gravestone in hell, with the inscription, So it Goes. Well, ha-ha, Vonnegut’s still going strong (well, he’s still going, at any rate). Despite this cheap shot, I enjoyed Inferno well enough to read it a few times. It’s a modernization of Dante’s Inferno, in case you hadn’t guessed, and one of the better fictional treatments of hell, in my opinion.

12. All the old Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Slaughterhouse Five, and especially, Cat’s Cradle. As a pre-teen and young teenager, these were my primers on cynicism, religious skepticism, and irony.

13. Xaviera! Her Continuing Adventures, by Xaviera Hollander. I lost my literary cherry to Ms. Hollander, the woman who fed my teenage obsession with sex. I don’t remember this book as being erotic, so much as nuts-and-bolts graphic. Thanks for all the woodies, Xaviera.

D.

Leave a message in the comments, and I’ll give you some cool linky love below.

Darla’s European Vacation

Pat’s List of Literary Wunderkinds (wunderkinden? help me out, Gabriele)

Invisible Lizard has 13 of his own favorites, too

Thirteen sucky flowers from Kate (seven, actually, but since there’s multiple flowers in each photo, we’ll let her slide)

Erin O’Brien searches for her G-spot, with a little help from her friends (so it’s not a 13. so sue me.)

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