FIRST READS

I said earlier that I joined the Great Conversation in high school, prompted by Adler’s How to Read a Book. But it could reasonably be said that my participation began at 4-years-old when my mother took me to get my first library card at the Ben Franklin Library in Detroit. When our family moved to Hudson, Michigan, two years later, one of the first events there was my getting a library card from the Hudson Public Library (an Andrew Carnegie library where, as it turned out, I also got my first paying job in high school).

But as important as my library cards were, just as important was the Scholastic Book Service catalog that came into my hands, through my mother, during each school year. I’d do small jobs around the house to earn quarters, which I’d invest, one per book, in Phantom Roan or Big Red or Bertie Makes a Break—the first three titles that now pop into my mind. I put them on a shelf my dad made for me (later he’d make me two big bookshelves that I use to this day). In those initial lonely years out in the country these books were very much my friends. My mother bought me a stamp to mark my ownership of the books, but after a while I decided I couldn’t really “own” the books—somehow they had an existence of their own—and I stopped using the stamp, an attitude toward books I pretty much have carried into my later adulthood.

I’m sure all who read this page have similar experiences with “first reads.”

In 2005 I came across a book titled Rereadings, in which distinguished writers chose a book “that had made an indelible impression on him or her before the age of twenty-five and reread it at thirty or fifty or seventy.” The resulting essays are fascinating. I tried it myself with Big Red, by Jim Kjelgaard. What stands out to me from that rereading is how this time through I looked at things a lot from the father’s perspective, which I’m sure I never thought about as a kid.

Anyone out there have any interesting rereading experiences to share?