'Of All the Pleasures of Life'

A wistful but gratifying task: giving away some of the books we read to our sons or they read on their own while still boys. We have three bookcases and several cardboard boxes full, from wordless board books to “classics” like Dickens and Kipling. Some we’ll keep for reasons sentimental and literary. The Roald Dahl books are beat-up paperbacks but I remember reading them repeatedly to my middle son, now a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. I’ll keep Tuesday (1991) by David Wiesner which I “read” – it contains six words – to all three of my sons. 

Nine kids under twelve, mostly boys, live on our cul-de-sac. The oldest is also the most enthusiastic reader, and we’ve given him first dibs. Some of the books feel like mine because of the pleasant memories associated with them. We’ll keep Eurotunnel (Gloucester Press, 1990) by Lionel Bender, part of the Engineers at Work series for young readers. When the Marine was about three years old, he repeatedly borrowed the book from the library in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. When he had to return it, I would take him to the library the following day and he would run to the children’s room in the basement, to the place where Eurotunnel had been reshelved, and he clutched it to his chest, almost weeping with relief. We eventually bought him a copy. Michael’s major at the Naval Academy was computer not civil engineering.

 

In the chapter titled “Reading and Learning” in her memoir Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (John Murray, 1970), Iris Origo describes her tastes in reading as a girl:

 

“In early childhood, my choice of books was directed by two contrasting, but simultaneous, preferences, one for the remote, the fantastic, the heroic; the other for a world exactly like the one I knew, only a little safer, more harmonious, more rounded. The latter satisfied my need for the reassurance of a set moral frame; the first, for an ‘expanding universe’.”

 

As a boy I bent more toward the latter, and I definitely favored nonfiction. I was partial to history books. I dove into the Civil War during the 1961-65 centennial. I loved biographies of great men and women – Davy Crockett, Marie Curie, Charlemagne. That’s where “the heroic” came in for this young reader. I think these early interests helped make me ever aware of historical context. Only a little later and very briefly did I start reading science fiction and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Origo says of reading:

 

“Of all the pleasures of life, this is the only one that, at every age, has never failed me.”