I was asked,
" What's your favorite book? " I consider that a naive question. There cannot
be only one, to an avid reader. You would need to expand the query into categories.
" What's your favorite Genre? "
" What book impacted you most? " Even those questions are limited for the voracious reader that I am. I do not have a favorite genre, I'm very eclectic. Books that influenced me came in stages of my life.
Along with my appetite for reading, I am a reconteur. I have regaled many with tales of my failings in the academic arena as a child. But the journey into reading started with the simple comic book. Under third grade in the 60's I read such classics as; Richie Rich, Little Lulu, Casper The Ghost, and Archie.
My first foray into self read chapter books came in summer school between third and fourth grade. I loved animals and the assigned book was, Brighty Of The Grand Canyon. It was a ficticious account of a real life burro. That book sparked the flame, that later would become an inferno of passion for the written word. Books fueled my active imagination. We did not have techno entertainment, so it was easy to become enamored with the adventures books gave. Sometimes I got so involved with a book, it influenced my actions in the real world. After reading, Aventures of Huckleberry Finn, I ran away from home to have an adventure. My excursion was short lived, (only a few hours,) but it goes to show you the power of books. I will say three favorite books of my elementary school age were: Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Heidi, and A Light in the Forest.
At twelve I was visiting my aunt, and while she was cleaning out her attic, she discovered a cardboard box of paperback books. In it was the Tarzan series, and several Harliquin romance novels. She gave the treasure to me. The Tarzan books appealed to the tomboy in me, and the romance novels to the budding young woman. I discovered that summer, that reading was not only for school, but for entertainment as well.
Junior High and the beginning of High School brought about a distinctive change of litature in the cirriculum. Novels by well know authors such as, Faulkner, Stienbeck, Albert Camus, Hemmingway. Arthur C. CLarke. It seemed strange to me that most our reading had a marked propensity towards dystopian or existential nihilistic themes. Someone with a macabre sense of humor may find it laughable that young hormonal teens were reading so many tragic stories. I personally liked Steinbeck the most, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men. Some I hated like Catcher in the Rye, it was hard for me to relate to a hard coming of age story when I lived a very sheltered naive life. Although sad, I enjoyed, The Glass Menagerie a story of a young woman ostracized from society because of a disability. In the novel she had a menagerie of glass figurines, once again my imagination leapt out of a book and into my tangible world, and I began a collection of glass figurines, complete with the character's favorite, a unicorn.
My biggest source of amazement was how much I fell in love with Shakespeare.
Although normaly I was not academic, I was the top of my Shakesperean class. I struggled a first trying to interpret old English to modern speech, but once I caught on, I was captivated by Shakespeare's ability to use double entrendres and homophones. Sometimes his puns were humorous even amidst tragedy. I was sick one day from class, and as the teacher quizzed the class on that weeks reading from: A Merchant of Venice, she realized how much the class relied on me answering her queries. When I returned to school, my classmates were mad at me for being absent, and the teacher forbade me from raising my hand the rest of the semester.
At eighteen my taste turned toward philosophical or semi self-help genres.
Richard Bach author of Johnathan Livingston Seagull drew me in with his book,
Illusions: The Aventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Followed by Dan Millman's, The Way of The Peaceful Warrior.
