Books

When I was a kid, I was the sterotypical gawky kid with glasses, slightly effeminate, and absolutely horrible at any organized sport you can name.

I spent most of those years being picked on by the neighborhood kids, which did nothing to help my self esteem, but you also need to remember that this was the 1960’s, way before any “It Gets Better” project.

Kids like me just had to buck up and bear it, and do our best to stay out of the clutches of the nearest bully.

I accomplished this by being an avid reader. Again, it was the 1960’s, there were no computers or smartphones, and while we did have a television, it was a big ugly square box that sat in the living room, and on a great day got three channels, although usually one of them was fuzzy until you went outside to turn the TV antenna mast. This was often a nightly occurrence, with one of us kids at the TV mast twisting it away, listening to Dad yell out the window “MORE!…..MORE! …..MORE!……NO! STOP! GO BACK!”

Our TV was also black and white. I dont’ think I saw my first color TV until after I graduated from high school. So all my memories of the Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, and Superman are in Black and White.

Heck, I was an adult before I realized that only the first 20 minutes of the Wizard of Oz was in black and white. To this day I’m startled when Dorothy opens the door of her house and all that color appears outside.

My great-grandmother was a librarian, as was her daughter, my great-aunt. I could read by the time I was five, and I looked forward to birthdays and christmas when I knew I could count on books.

I don’t ever recall reading “baby” books. I think I started on “real” books, with more words than pictures, and never turned back.

Even my recollection of the Mother Goose stories doesn’t have pictures – although I’m sure there were some, even back then – well before we thought kids needed interactive books that need sounds and pop-ups.

Everyone I knew in my family had vast towers of bookshelves, packed with amazing books, all full of stories that could take you places you could never go yourself. I spent hours of my youth with a nose in a book, often to the point where I was completely oblivious to anything going on around me. Many times I missed a call to dinner, or received a smack upside the head for appearing to ignore a parent, when in truth I was slogging through an African jungle with David Livingston, or sailing the seas on the Kon-Tiki with Thor Heyerdahl, or on a desert island with the Swiss Family Robinson.

My Grandfather had a full collection of a Funk and Waggnall encyclopedia on  a set of custom bookshelves that sat either side of his fireplace. I have one of those bookshelves in my home today, I think my sister has the matching one.

Since we lived next to my mothers parents, seperated only by a vacant lot, often used as a cow pasture, it was fairly common that Friday and Saturday nights the adults would get together and play pinochle until the wee hours of the morning while we kids used old decks of cards to build fantastic card houses with, or perhaps watch TV. I would often pull a volume of the old Funk and Waggnall encyclopedia down, and sit in my Granddad’s old rocker and read myself to sleep.

Some people thought it odd that a 10 year old would sit and read an encyclopedia, but around our house it wasn’t anything special I suppose.

Until I was about twelve, I was a fairly normal reader, happy to devour whatever books I could get from my librarian family members, or pull from the shelves of my grandparents. As I entered Jr. High School though, I was delighted to discover that the brand new school building had a library that was every bit as big as the gym, and packed full of treasures that I had yet to discover.  Even better was the fact that none of the regular crowd of bullies that seemed to take great pleasure in devising yet another way to torture me would be caught dead in a library.

That is where I discovered science fiction. I still recall the first science fiction book I ever read. It was “Have Space Suit – Will Travel” by Robert Heinlein.

From that day forward, I was hooked. Over the next few years, and well into my adulthood, I devoured every Heinlein book I could find, including all of his short stories, and would wait impatiently for his new books to arrive on library shelves.

I could never have afforded to purchase a new hard-back at the bookstore, so all my reading was done a few months behind, waiting for the library to get their copy ready to lend.

I branched out a bit, Issac Asimov, Poul Anderson, James Blish, “Doc” Smith, Lester del Rey, all of these and more of the Golden Age authors became my new best friends. Even though many of these writers peaked in the 30’s and 40’s, their books were still valid in the 1960’s, before we had even set foot on the moon.

I still remember being slightly amazed that I was able to take Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” from the bookshelf of my high school library, and sit reading it in our living room, with no one telling me it was something I shouldn’t read. Back then, that book bordered on the scandalous, but it think sneaked under a lot of  censorship radars because it was “just another space book.”

I was usually picky about my Science Fiction. It had to be believable. By some strange stretch of my logic, I could believe that man had spaceships and could inhabit solar systems on the other side of the universe, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe in flying dragons. To this day I’ve never read any of the Dragons of Pern series that became so popular later.

Later, I became enamored of Orson Scott Card, starting with his Alvin Maker chronicles, later becoming absorbed in his series Ender.

I also became a fanatic fan of Marion Zimmer Bradly and her Darkover series. It was my first experience reading books that dealt with homosexuality on any level, and I found the society she constructed to be fascinating. I looked forward to each new book I could find, although they were not strictly science fiction. There were more of an alternate universe sort of book I suppose.

What started me on this reminisce is the release today of the movie “The Hunger Games”, from the first novel of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. I read the three books this past fall, downloading them to my Kindle application and reading them on plane flights to and from a visit to relatives back east.

The books were very good, but not the first books to deal with that subject, so I’m not sure why Ms. Collins is the one lucky enough to become a gazillionaire from her books dealing with a post-apocalyptic America that mistreats it’s citizens.

I guess “On the Beach” was the first post-apocalyptic book I read. Since the 1960’s were the height of the cold war, and I grew up just 100 miles north of Havana, Cuba, the spectre of nuclear warfare was something that hung heavily in the air for a couple of decades. It made for really scary reading, especially for a pre-teen bookish nerd.

I don’t read as much as I used too. I’m sure it’s because I graduated to playing on-line computer games, or watching TV in the evening. There’s also working for a living, that seems to take a huge chunk out of ones available leisure hours. Reading does take time and concentration. You have oodles of that as a kid, even with school. I do believe that in my day we weren’t strapped with so many responsibilities. Today kids have after school sports, and dance classes or other diversions, as well as more homework to do in a week than I think I was ever given in a month.  So, I think I had more time to read as a kid than I do now.

But, I think books are far more entertaining than one of today’s blockbuster movies. I certainly enjoy most movies today, the special effects are often amazing, and the scenery is awesome, but I don’t think that movies can compare with what I can dream up in my own head when reading a book.

And a book usually lasts longer than your average 93 minute movie, often giving several days of extended entertainment. I still remember simply being unable to put a book down, even to the extent of reading in bed under the covers with a flashlight until mom finds out and takes both the book and the flashlight. Then the crushing disappointment of reaching the end, and realizing it was over. That always left me somewhat off balance, stranded between my world and the world I had just spent several days in, until I began the next book and a whole new adventure.

We are making plans to retire to Florida. Retirement has always scared me, either because I never thought I would be able to, or because I couldn’t figure out what I would do all day with no job, and not a lot of free cash.

Fishing. That’s something I fully intend to pick up again. But, reading as well. Hopefully libraries will still exist, and books. Kindle’s are nice, but I like the feel of a book in my hands, or passing through a room and seeing a book, splayed out upside down on a coffee table, on pause, awaiting my return to whatever world it contains.