Shelves, Books, and Other Things

I was inspired by bluesleepy's entry about a bookshelf to tell you two stories today. One is about part of a bookshelf here in the family room. What I have tried to gather on this shelf are books that were life-changing books for me, books or stories that changed the way I thought and looked at the world. Of course, there's a Mickey on it, too, because there are Mickeys everywhere.


The tall skinny book next to Mickey is actually a bound copy of a short story by Shirley Jackson called "Charles." It's a terrible edition, but it's not an easy story to find. When I was in eighth grade, our textbook was a collection of short stories, and I read them all, even the ones we didn't do in class. This was in it. Yes, it's the Shirley Jackson who wrote "The Lottery," but this is a very different story. It's about a little boy named Laurie who goes off to kindergarten and comes home with tales of the class bully, a boy named Charles. Every parent should read it.

Next to that is Centennial, my favorite of the many James Micheners I read long ago. My second favorite is Hawaii, but I love many of them.

The Color Purple speaks for itself. If you haven't read it, you should. Ditto Gone With the Wind, but hardly for the same reasons.

I took an amazing lit class in college called Science and Fantasy Fiction, and this collection of SciFi short stories was one of the texts. All the best short scifi written up to this point in time are here. Many of these stories had great impact on me: "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke, among others.

The next few titles aren't very clear, but they are The Grapes of Wrath, Anthem, and All the King's Men. The first is the book I believe to be the Great American Novel, although we could debate forever over what defines that. Anthem is a book I slipped off my sister's bookshelf when I was about twelve one morning when she wasn't home and read until I was done, about 45 minutes later. I've never read any other Ayn Rand, but this is enough for me. It changed everything, helped put the pieces together in my just forming political consciousness. ATKM may also be in contention for the great American novel. I read it senior year of high school; it is famously the only book in my life I couldn't finish before the test and got the Cliff's Notes for, and then, realizing from the Notes that it was an incredible book, took the test the next day and finished the book that night. I reread it every summer through college, and found out years later that the Hubs had done the same.

That's the first half of the shelf. Second half tomorrow. Now, story #2. Bluesleepy also wrote about a book that she would read every summer when she visited a relative. I have a couple of those, too.

My father's sister, Aunt Rose, was married later in life, in her forties, to someone she had grown up with who had never gotten around to it either. Their mothers set it up and they got married. Aunt Rose was a third grade teacher, Uncle Ben was a truck and bus driver. They bought a little brown bungalow, three bedrooms, in the same town they grew up in, where his parents and Rose's widowed mother still lived. Within a year, Grandma sold her big two family house and moved in with Rose and Ben.

My family still lived in an apartment at that time, and the little brown bungalow fascinated me. I adored it. I loved to play in the big yard, to climb the post of the clothesline, for Uncle Ben to hoist me onto his shoulders so I could put a ball through the basketball hoop the previous owners had left there. (We have this all on film, btw.) Rose and Ben had no children of their own, but had many nieces and nephews, mostly on his side.

Anyway, while my grandmother was alive, we went up there to visit every other month or so, and after she died in 1961, we would go up at least four times a year. In the beginning, my parents would sleep in the small third bedroom, my sister would sleep on a little sofa in the TV room, and I would sleep beside her on Jack's old Army cot. After Grandma was gone, my parents slept in what had been her room, the room with her bedroom set from the Depression, and the Sibs and I got the little room.

This room was very intriguing. For one, it was L-shaped, a shape one does not often see in a bedroom, especially a small one. In one leg of the L, ahead of you as you walked in the door, was a single width bed with a padded headboard, and nightstand next to it. This, we knew, had been my grandfather's bed in the old house. For some reason, we acquired the notion that he had died in this bed, although we knew very well he had died in the bathroom. In his later years he had become a noisy, restless sleeper (which, taking family history backwards, we now know was sleep apnea), so he got this little bed and nightstand and converted a small closet into a bedroom. That was in the old house, though; the bed sat in the L-shaped room under a colorful quilt in front of a sunny window.

Entering the room and turning left put you in the other leg of the L, the smaller one. This was under an eave, so the ceiling sloped, so much so that the closet door on the right was only about four and a half feet high. Even so, we would sometimes open the closet and explore; the best treasure in there was Uncle Ben's full dress Marine uniform. He had served in both World War II and Korea, and was, true to family custom, about five foot four, so he must have been the tiniest Marine ever.

A foldaway bed with a real mattress was opened up in the smaller leg for me, the closet door on one side and Aunt Rose's bookshelf on the other. She was quite a reader, but these were the only books in the house, and I think they were college textbooks. (She had gone to Normal School in the mid-1920s to be a teacher, but went back to finish her Bachelor's degree in the early 50s.) Most of them were boring, but one of the two I picked up was You and Heredity by Amram Scheinfeld, copyright 1939.

This book entranced me. I would read as much as I could on each visit and then start it over again the next time. It explained why we have blue eyes or brown hair, and so on. It was written as a popular explanation of genetics, although it was quite long, and had been one of Aunt Rose's textbooks, and is now incredibly outdated, given what we know about DNA and genomes and stuff. But this was before that time. It was science, which I was never going to be a pro at, but which was intriguing.

The other book, and I loved this one so much that Aunt Rose gave it to me when I was about ten, was called Fifty Famous Stories Retold. This is not on my shelf of life-changing books because it's with the antique books, but it should be.


I ate this whole, chewed, swallowed, and digested every story. The book was published around 1918 and must have been a reading book in the town schools. (Aunt Rose had started teaching in 1928 in a two-room schoolhouse.) There were stories of English kings and Scottish heroes, like Alfred the Great and Robert the Bruce. I learned about the Danish conquest of England, and the Kings Canute who ruled then. I read about Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and William Tell. This was history and legends at their best, and it sucked me in 100%. I still love English history; no doubt, this laid the groundwork for Shakespeare for me. Although there was no Shakespeare on Aunt Rose's bookshelf; if so, I probably would have fallen in love with it years before I did.

So, a long entry. Yes, I read mostly ebooks now, but the charm of books is not lost on me and never will be. More to come.



WATCHING QUANTUM LEAP :: ENTRY #1963
READING: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke