July 9, 2006

• Internet Island Topic Entry #14.01

  
  
  
  

  A Topic Entry for The Internet Island Blogring. Topic: #14.01. 'First Books'  More topic entries can be found HERE.

  
  

  Books, an essay by Michael F. Nyiri

  
  

  Opening the door to the El Monte Public Library in the spring of 1961 and being issued my first library card at the age of seven years old gave me permanent access to the many doors of the clustered books within it's walls. Doors which I knew even prior to being issued the card, during a second grade field trip, would grant me the immersion into the many exciting and faraway worlds of literature.

  
  

  The first library book I checked out that afternoon was a picture book about Igor Sikorsky, and had lots of photos and diagrams of helicopters. A true "first book" for a little boy. I read about the life of the inventor, which was sparsely written, and enjoyed the full color pictures. Pictures have always been important, but it was the words which really excited me.

  
  

  A couple of years earlier, even before stepping foot in the first grade class of Mrs. Malin, who would shepherd my instatiable thirst for words, I would sit on my mother's knee as she read from the Humpty Dumpty Children's magazines. Slowly but surely, I learned to read, and in the first grade, those "Dick and Jane" books grew tiring very quickly.

  
  

  Looking over some of the earlier books that I still own, one, a "Children's Treasury" by the publishers of Reader's Digest, shows it is "the property of Gertrude Christman", my second grade teacher, who gave me this and other books as gifts, when I quickly finished the classroom assignments.

  
  

  I still own some of the first books I remember reading. Others are probably still in the stacks of the El Monte Public Library. My parents weren't stingy about buying their children encyclopedias, book series, and almost complete sets of Little Golden Books and Best In Childrens' Books for Young Readers.

  
  

  Some books stand out as early favorites. I still have "The Bible Story", of which a copy of the first volume was in almost every dentist and doctor's office I saw as a child. There was a mix of illustration and text. The pictures got smaller quickly however. I loved to peruse the Golden Book Encyclopedia, in multiple volumes. We also had the World Scope Encyclopedia, a less popular competitor to the World Book Encyclopedia, also peddled door to door in the early sixties.

  
  

  Dick, Jane, the illustrated Bible stories, and colorful reference books took a back seat to the library, where the Sikorsky book was returned and traded in for more fictional fare with less illustration. My mother and father took me to the library every two weeks, usually on a Friday night, so I could immerse myself in the books during the weekend away from school. I seem to think the first long "adult" novel my mother picked out for me to read was James T Farrell's 1935 masterpiece "Studs Lonigan". I clearly remember feeling freed of my own life when travelling to the world inside this sometimes steamy look at the life of an Irish American in the 20s. I was a great fan of the Jules Verne section of the library, and can still envision within my mind's eye the look of the various Verne books as they sat on the shelf. Soon all the cards inside their spines had my name embellished upon them. My favorite Jules Verne novel is "Around the World in Eighty Days". It was a rather thick book, but I sped through this wonderful tale which takes the reader to so many places, each described fully and fantastically.

  
  

  "Gone With the Wind", by Margaret Mitchell, written in 1936, was a favorite book from my early childhood. I read it in the fifth grade, and saw the movie for the first time the following year. Both the novel and the movie are priceless to me now. I've read lots of books that became favorite movies, but this was the first instance where I read the novel and then saw the movie relatively soon. This was in the days before video, so the movie was shown in a theater during a revival in 1967.

  
  

   In junior high, I spent a lot of lazy weekends lying on my parent's bed reading some of the novels in my mother's "Reader's Digest Condensed Book" series. Being condensed, these did not have the complete text of an original edition, but I first read "Youngblood Hawke", by Herman Wouk, as a condensed book, and this spurred me to search out the larger edition in a library a few years later. Wouk became a favorite author, and his "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance" occupy a special place in my library.

  
  

  Also in junior high was where I discovered "Roget's Thesaurus", which is a reference work, and not a novel, but it still is a favored book of mine, which I discovered relatively early in life. The teacher who introduced me to the thesaurus was Mr. Gardner in seventh grade, and he is also responsible for my immersing my own self into the art of writing. I began my first novel, "The Sands of Time", a time travel novel in the science fiction genre, during the summer before I attended high school. By the end of high school, I had finished that novel and had begun writing two others. Two of my short stories were featured in the literary magazine when I was both a junior and a senior.

  
  

  Books opened the door. There are countless unnamed science fictions, westerns, romances, and thrillers, of which their words passed quickly but surely under my eyes as I sped through each action and character thought. Memory gives me good feeling for so many books. My mother loved thrillers and crime stories. My father loved technical manuals. That first book I checked out from the library could very well have satisfied my father, with it's science and mechanics about helicopter flight, but I took more after my mother. She even introduced me to "Peyton Place", written by Grace Metalious in 1956, and still considered a "racy" book. I read that book three times before I got out of high school.

  
  

  The high school library unfolded new bookcovers and opened even more doors. My favorite book series when I was in high school was by Henry Gregor Felson. This was a series about hot rodding and kids trying not to become juvenile delinquents. Two of the titles are "Hot Rod" and "Street Rod". As I remember, the main character in one of these novels dies quite irresponsively and this bore a great deal of weight with me.

  
  

  Another book I cherished from the high school library was about the subject of photojournalism, with examples since the civil war of news photography. This book stirred my interest in photography, and I was enrolled in journalism class as well as a freshman. Newspapers also contain words, and I've been a news junkie and a bookworm for all of my life. Now my hunger for both are being fed by the internet, since actual newspapers are disappearing, and those remaining are losing words for more illustration. I picked up a book yesterday, and have only skimmed the surface, but Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is finally in paperback, and a friend loaned me his copy. I haven't finished a book in three years, and the last four or five books I read were non fiction books about film history, a subject I also love to read about, but which I didn't mention in this article about favorite early books. Daniel Blum's "Screen World" and "The Movies", of which I couldn't find any information, and "Truffaut's Hitchcock", which I "permanently borrowed"  from one neighborhood library were favorite early film books. My library of film related literature probably now surpasses my library of novels.

  
  

  Here's to libraries, teachers, and books. As I turned back the spine of the Dan Brown book, and as my eyes readjusted themselves to the words on an actual page, I became immersed again, and began another journey, into another book, and off on another adventure.  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  The image of the Little Golden Book and the Reader's Digest Condensed books were taken from a Google search on the web. In the Photo at top, the following books are arranged on my bed. "Gone With the Wind" paperback, not original, purchased in a second hand bookstore in the 70s. "Roget's College Thesaurus" is the original, from when I was in junior high. The book open to the image of the spacecraft is the "Reader's Digest Treasury" and to it's left, also open, it the only copy of the multi volume Children's Book series I own. In the foreground is a "faked" book jacket for my own novel, "The Sands of Time", which I created in high school.

  • 6:12 pm
  • 34 Comments