This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is books we loved as children… which makes a great follow-up to Why Do We Read? Beastmama made a little meme for it which I’m using here.

1. What is the earliest book you remember loving?

Little House in the Big Woods. And maybe Cassie’s Magic Flower, a book my mother got me from the Lilian Vernon catalog which I still have and which appears to have made no mark on the internet whatsoever… amazingly. Or at least no mark on Google!

Cassie’s Magic Flower… which I don’t guarantee was absolutely for sure called that… was a big picture book about a little girl who lived in “Calico Corner”, where everything was black and white and dreary. And then one day, a star falls to earth and leaves some funny-looking seeds that grow into enormous full-color calico-patterned flowers.

When Cassie takes one, she turns Technicolor and everyone else makes fun of her and is mean to her. Except for a few kind souls who believe in her and her kooky dreams, or who are outcasts themselves. And she gives each of them a flower and soon they are leaving trails of color everywhere and bringing joy to the whole world with their colors. I loved the sense of strangeness of the town, and the magic, and the way it was drawn, and the way everything centered around a little girl with crazy dreams of awesomeness.

I won’t swear that Little House in the Big Woods was the one I first encountered. I went to a Montessori preschool where for a while they were reading to us out of that series every day, and I think it was out of that book. That’s the first one I remember loving, because I had a copy of it (that and Little Town on the Prairie, where they GET KITTENS!!!!1!!1one) and Laura was just about my age in the Big Woods, plus it had great stories within stories from Pa, plus it is the one where Aunt Delia’s buttons look just exactly like big ripe blackberries and I was a sucker for anything that sounded like food. Mmmm… suckers.

2. When you were younger, which book characters did you want to be in your circle of friends?

I didn’t think about it consciously in those terms, but I really wanted to be one of the silver-eyed kids in The Girl With the Silver Eyes, (by Willo Davis Roberts, who also wrote the previously-mentioned Don’t Hurt Laurie!). I identified with feeling like a freak, and being treated like kind of a freak, and I wanted so badly to have Super Sekrit Special Powers ™ to go with it! And I liked books where kids could run away from abuse or do something about it; these kids went behind their parents’ backs to band together and ran away where necessary and totally helped each other have community.

I also really liked the kids in E. Nesbit’s books. They lived in the turn of the last century, and they were all incredibly real and brave and adventurous and clever. She just had a fantastic ear for how kids think and talk and act, and it was a lot of fun to see how much I had in common with children who lived in this completely different world – not only filled with Psammeads and Phoenixes, but also full of social commentary on the class system in Victorian England. Oh, and time travel.

3. What books do you have nostalgia for as an adult?

 All of them?

I went through a serious, many-years-long nostalgia phase. I’m sure many of you can identify with it – that place of not being willing to let go of notebooks, books, scraps of paper, toys, keepsakes, clothes, whatever, from a past phase of life….as if those objects hold the memories of that time and letting go means losing the memories. Or betraying our past selves who loved and used those things. Or betraying the people who gave them to us. Or risking not having enough, like letting go of some appliance or outfit that we never use will result in immediately needing and wanting it desperately and not having our needs met!

There were so many layers to it. The fear of deprivation, because I had deprived myself of so many of my needs in the past. The fear of loss, because I had felt so much loss in the past. The fear of all the emotions, the fear and sadness and rage, that I had felt and hidden from myself in the past, exploding out if I disturbed the objects from that time.

And then, the memories. I realized eventually that a lot of my clutter was my way of archiving my past. Accumulating evidence. I had spent so much of my childhood dissociated, burying memories I couldn’t yet deal with, that I didn’t trust myself to remember anything. I needed proof to look at, whether it was a forgotten poem I’d written in high school or a half-kept journal from third grade. I felt like I needed to have hard copies of everything I might forget.

Of course all of this was subconscious. I didn’t know why I kept so much stuff, or why I worried that I would be sad or need something as soon as I got rid of it. I was so codependent with my stuff. I projected all my fears and sadness onto it, thinking half-seriously (maybe three-quarters seriously) that if I got rid of these things they would feel sad and be betrayed. That it would be mean to a once-enjoyed doll to give it away. It felt like nostalgia for EVERYthing, because I projected everything I had felt or experienced or wanted onto the stuff around me.

But of course, there were also books that were especially special to me. Still a lot of them, but off the top of my head: those Laura Ingalls Wilder and Elizabeth Enright books of course, the Betsy-Tacy series, a lot of books by Dianna Wynne Jones who is fabulous, the So You Want to be a Wizard series by Diane Duane especially… the All of a Kind Family, the Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Family At One End Street, ummm…. I might have to come back to this list!

4. What books do you wish to share with the kids in your life?

The Little House series was one of the first, for sure. Re-reading them as an adult kind of blows my mind. There is so much more to them than I could see as a child. Intense political stuff, detailed how-tos for pioneer living….

I read the first several books to my son while I had shared custody of him. We were doing a little project where we’d read books from the 1800s and look at how different people’s experiences were depending on where they lived, what their background was, and when in that century they lived. So for example, we read some of the Little House books and then the first American Girl book with Josephina, and a book called A Boy Becomes A Man at Wounded Knee which takes place in modern times but talks a lot about the history of Wounded Knee. And If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. With that one, we looked at the world map and saw all the different places that people came from, and talked about where our relatives had come from. I wanted to read him The Great Brain at the Academy next, about a scheming young con artist/genius going to a Catholic boarding school in 1800s Mormon Utah, but we didn’t get that far. (That’s another winner of the “if it sounds like food” bonus – my favorite part in the book is where he starts his own candy store, sneaking forbidden chocolate bars into the Academy, carving a key for a hiding place out of freaking SOAP, and making a tidy profit.)

He totally loved “the Laura books”, but I think his other favorite was “Return to Gone-Away,” another Elizabeth Enright book. Of course: who doesn’t love her stuff? I want to share SO MUCH with him. It is hard to have loved so many books and want to pass so many on. Like holding a firehose.

5. More philosophical question— how do you think your childhood reading shaped what you like to read as an adult?

I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult revisiting children’s books that I loved. And I’ve found that I still love new ones too. The Penderwicks, and the Bartimaeus trilogy, and those Hermux Tantamoq books especially come to mind. I tend to like chick lit, funny fiction, speculative fiction, very personal fiction, and adult non-fiction the best – which is to say that I want things that are either relaxing or exciting to read. Or both. I guess that that comes from how I read as a child, too; I like to be able to read as a nice relaxing adventurous trip away from daily life. And now I also get to read stuff that enhances my daily life, books that teach me new interesting things about how to live and about the world around me.

Bonus: speaking of the Lillian Vernon catalog (as we were waaaay back up at the top there) this song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch is now what I think of, and what starts playing in my head, every time that’s mentioned. (The youtube page has the lyrics written out, too.)