Once Upon a Time

Few, if any, serious readers emerge into literacy reading the "classics." Although many can point to a transformative moment sometime in adolescence when a "great" book--Steinbeck, say, or Austen--suddenly caused in them a voracious appetite for the most enduring works of the past, they can hardly say that they had read nothing before that. Maybe it was Goosebumps, or the Boxcar Children series; I remember my younger brother working his way through the Magic Tree House books as enthusiastically as I have seen college students devour Woolf. Did you read and thoroughly enjoy anything as a child that you now consider to be ridiculous or a little embarrassing, maybe returning for a second or third read? I certainly did.

An essay in one of my summer reading books inspired me to peruse the family bookshelves for the books I enjoyed most as a young child, regardless of "merit," and lo, there they were on the bottom shelf:


What are those, you ask? A Childcraft encyclopedia set from 1966: fifteen volumes on "how the world works" broken up into themes like "Stories and Fables," "Scientists and Inventors," and "What People Do." I think what drew me to them originally was the slightly musty smell, the lavish (and often funny) retro illustrations, and the sense, in some, that I was smarter than whoever wrote some of the articles. For example, I had a good chuckle over the pages that predicted human flight with jet packs in the near future:


Superior as I felt while reading about technological advances, however, I pored over the fairy tales and stories of famous people even though sometimes they looked like this (titled "How They Bring Back the Village of Cream Puffs When the Wind Blows It Away"):



Or this:


Isn't that a little terrifying for a young children's book? The encyclopedia also included some very informative articles such as this spread on how raised bread was invented:



Complete with disgruntled, mustachioed medieval knight! And the development of anthropometry, the first criminal identification system, by Alphonse Bertillon (really, I don't know how they chose these):


Needless to say, I was not interested in breaking the law after reading that one. Finally, the set included some lovely articles on the great technological advances of human history...including the one that made it possible (cue dawning recognition in child's mind)!

Some of the articles would seem hopelessly out of date to the modern reader; others perhaps less than PC. Certainly parents today would probably be horrified to see their child reading something like this, if they're the kind of parents who want their children to read "good" books. My mom thought they were funny, but never imagined that anyone would get anything out of them. Nevertheless, I spent hours reading and re-reading these volumes, outdated and ridiculous though they were. And really, where else would I have learned about Cyrus McCormick?

There's something to be said for trying to reclaim that sort of excitement for reading, the experience of sitting down with a book that has somehow attracted your attention, without considering what it contributes to your overall self-education or whether the name on the cover is recognizable. Several times in the past few years I've spent days hacking away at a book that I felt some cultural obligation to read while letting more enticing, if less illustrious, books go unread. Why? Of course, I don't mean to declare that all literature is of equal intellectual rigor or stylistic refinement and that challenging books should be dropped. If the next thing you feel genuinely compelled to read happens to be a "classic," then by all means go ahead. But we all could benefit from stopping for a moment to remember that time somewhere in the past when our tastes might have been somewhat less discriminating but our enthusiasm was endless. Can you still lose yourself to a book without thinking first about how it fits into your grand scheme of Things I Should Read Before I Die? I know I have trouble doing that, but I think my summer reading list has inspired me to abandon it for a while and go off in search of something new.