What was your first book-love?
In the most recent Fungible Convictions newsletter (available free when you register), FC readers were asked to e-mail in about the first book they ever loved. It just sounded like fun. Two of the responses, one by Ploughshares founding editor DeWitt Henry and the other by poet Alexis Orgera, caught our eye.
DeWitt Henry:
My first book love was probably Captured by Apes; Or, How Philip Garland Became King of Apeland by Harry Prentice (A.L.Burt, Publisher, NY, 1892). I don’t know how it made its way into my parents’ house or what became of it in publishing history, but it scared and fascinated me, and I still love it, and treasure the copy I still own. Like King Kong, it is naively racist. After that, there some other Y.A. science fiction book about time travel called In the Mists of Time, where the threatening “other” to a modern young man transported back to the ice age were the Neanderthals. The first literary book to captivate me was Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Then I discovered Faulkner, beginning with Sartoris.
Alexis Orgera:
I can think of five distinct “moments” growing up when books really meant something and played a part in who I was becoming. Looking back, they’re strange and wacky choices, things found by chance, pure childhood discoveries, and they made me want to read and write for the rest of my life. I could go on and on about the amazing books, and especially the individual poems, I’ve savored, worshipped even, since those formative years, we all could. But that’s just not as fun as being a kid again for a few lines.
I still have many of the books I fell in love with as a child. Several carry inscriptions from my grandmother, “To Alexis, Love to read,” or “Please read!!” or “Do read!!” The first books I loved were written and illustrated by Jenny Partridge. They were about the daily adventures of small creatures like frogs and mice and had wonderful titles like Peterkin Pollensnuff, Hopfellow, and Colonel Grunt. The books created worlds in which tiny animals lost their spectacles in cake batter and went sailing in boats made from horse-chestnut shells. And the illustrations were intricate and beautifully painted. You could live inside these worlds. The copies I still have are coming apart at the seems, brown and tattered, but I catch myself smiling as I flip through their pages even now.
Around maybe second or third grade I read a young adult novel called A Taste of Blackberries that wrecked me for years. It’s about two boys, best friends, on summer vacation. One of the boys dies of bee stings as the other watches, thinking his friend’s antics are a joke. This one affected me so deeply, I never opened it again. But I never forgot it.
Also around that time: Incognito Mosquito Flies Again, which was actually a sequel to Incognito Mosquito, Private Insective, but I missed the first one. The title made me feel cool in a childhood world where reading books just wasn’t that cool.
Maybe around fourth or fifth grade I became obsessed with the Anne of Green Gables series. I remember sitting in my room for hours after reading one of the books, fantasizing about the characters. I fell in love with the boys Anne loved. When the Disney Channel began airing its Anne of Green Gables series, I remember watching with a mixture of joy and sadness as the characters I’d imagined into being actually made their appearances on screen.
Finally, in the sixth grade I discovered Agatha Christie. The book was Murder on the Nile. I remember the exact shelf I pulled it from in the school library. I’d been meeting a boy, James Collins, at round table in the back of the library for two weeks. We were “going out,” which meant meeting at the library to hold hands. When he kissed me on the cheek I broke up with him instantly. Mulling around with nothing to do after James stomped away, I found Agatha Christie on the shelves near our table. I read all of Murder on the Nile the following Sunday afternoon. Christie books became a weekly ritual for the next several years. They were so proper, so menacing, so full of intrigue and well-planned crimes. Plus, Miss Jane Marple and Monsieur Hercules Poirot were the two greatest detectives (coupled with my childhood crush, Magnum P.I.) in the history of mysteries.
