Favorite Books from Childhood

I was talking with my friend and colleague, Rebecca Agiewich, about the middle reader she is writing, and we started reminiscing about our favorite books from childhood. Then I went home and found this quote from Nick Flynn’s latest memoir, “The Ticking is the Bomb”:

“The first book I called mine, the first book I remember, was a picture book. ‘The Magic Monkey’—an old Chinese legend adapted by a thirteen-year-old prodigy, Plato Chan, and his sister, Christina. The monkey in the story, as I remember it, was a misfit—lost, wandering aimless, trying to find his way home. He finagles his way into a walled school and there finds that he has magical powers, powers of transformation—he can change into a tree, a bird, a waterfall—but each thing he transforms into has a price, a complication. The tree becomes rooted, the waterfall slips away, the bird must constantly fly. I’m making this all up now from memory. I have the book on my bookshelf, but I’m afraid to open it, in case I find out that the power it held over me proves to be thin, silly, superficial.”

I could relate to this as I had a similar experience with my favorite childhood book, a time-slip novel about a young boy who goes to live with his great-grandmother in an old house in England where the three children who lived there in the 14th century become his playmates. I read this book when I was about eight and then I could never find it again. For years, I trolled the shelves of the children’s section of the West Valley Regional Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, but although I knew that library intimately, I never saw the book again. After a while, I began to believe it had magically materialized for me to read and then disappeared again, a pleasant conceit.

Almost 30 years later, I was describing the plot to a friend who identified the book as “The Children of Green Knowe” by L.M. Boston. I was easily able to obtain a copy from my local library and went on to read all of Boston’s other books (this was the first in a series set at Green Knowe—although none of them were as good as the first), including her biography. The magical old house of Green Knowe was modeled after the house in which she lived, the Manor at Hemingford Grey, which was built in the 1130’s.  

It is hard for me to articulate the power that book had over me. Besides its mysterious existence, which suggested an alternate reality, as did the book itself, it allowed me to believe in a world with much more mythic resonance and depth than the one in which I lived. I took away from it the idea that everything could have a soul, even a house, and that one could travel back in time (a feat I have been accomplishing ever since as a reader and writer of historical fiction).

The author herself described what she was trying to accomplish much more eloquently:

“I would like to remind adults of joy, now obsolete, and I would like to encourage children to use and trust their senses for themselves at first hand—their ears, eyes and noses, their fingers and soles of their feet, their skins and their breathing, their muscular joy and rhythms and heartbeats, their instinctive loves and pity and awe of the unknown.”

What book did you read as a child that influenced you? And how?

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