Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Books Once Loved

I always have difficulty to answer when someone asks me which books I have liked. I guess my first love was The Little Prince by Saint Exupery, even if I didn't understand the full meaning of it. I remember loving the drawing of the Little Prince standing on a circle, his asteroid/planet.

As to childhood reading, I close my eyes and see their pages, still. The magazines and books given to me and those I read as soon as I learned how to read. Actually, I read most anything I could get my hands on, except for the two-volume children’s encyclopedia. Even that, I read at least 50% of it. Not bad for a kid whose main obsession was stories and poetry. Then, a magazine for children whose name escapes me, Children’s Weekly? or something like that, in which there was a story about a kid born under the carriage of an ox-cart. The story happened either in China or Japan and the kid’s name was Cha-Po-Ghi (sp.?). I still believe the story impressed my mother more than me.

Then, a story about a brave boy scout, and of the slim Golden Books, The Little Train that Could, The Taxi that Hurried, and another one about a new baby in the family were my favorites. I loved Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales in several volumes, too. I also liked a book inside which were stories about nature, written from the viewpoints of a tree, an ocean, and some animals.

My mother, on the other hand, wanted me to like Comtesse de Segur’s works, which she had paid someone to translate them for me. Unfortunately, the stories were written for pedagogic ends, and I never saw the point in reading them from someone else’s handwriting, clearly printed though they might have been. Especially Sophie the girl who acted bad because she had the bad mother didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t like the good children getting punished on account of their little transgressions and especially on account of what Sophie did.

This entire thing with Comtesse de Segur books might have been the result of a culture shock that sometimes gets me when it comes to anything French (aside from Little Prince), although I do like the French people. Even their films sometimes feel like--for lack of a better phrase--much ado about nothing. The actors kill each other with words or silent treatment, carrying minimalism to the extremes.

As I grew older, I dared to read heavy (!) literature. At fourteen, I read Dante and enjoyed it. Probably I didn’t understand all the implications and metaphors hiding in the story, but I did read the entire three volumes.

Coming back to the French writers, even in my later years, they were still boring to me, whereas I was mesmerized by the Russians, Dostoyevski in particular; however, Georges Duhamel, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Victor Hugo proved to be exceptions. I also liked the Arcene Lupin mysteries. Our lit teacher in high school adored Andre Gide and Mallarme. Unfortunately, she couldn’t convince me, even though I did read No Exit without liking it.

Of the English writers, David Copperfield was my first Dickens. Others followed very quickly. When it came to the stories of American writers and the English, I couldn't get enough of them. I adored them all.

I don’t know what made me recall all this; it could be the serene image of our school librarian that never leaves me. She pushed at me as many books as I could read, even if she didn’t have to. I had already been captured by the written word before I started school.

When it comes to books, I could change the words in a song, an oldie, “One girl, one boy, one heart, one toy, memories are made of these” to ‘One girl, a book, to heart, she took. Memories are made of these.’