Another thing I picked up today in Blackwell's... Susan Hill, Howard's End is On the Landing. One of those books about reading that seem to be going around the past few years; a nice, classy, personal, terse, realistic one by an experienced writer with a brain.
She speaks at one point of the first books she read, lots of Enid Blyton and a few others... but as she muses on them of course I'm dazzled by the memory of my own first books and stop paying attention completely even as my eyes reach the end of the paragraph.
Two of the earliest (as Tolkien says of, I think, Tom Bombadil? – "oldest and fatherless" – there are always books and other things that seem to have been made when the earth was created, as far as your mind can experience it) are still on my shelves. The earliest is Ruth Krauss' A Hole is to Dig, with pictures by Maurice Sendak – the sweeter pictures don't mean much to me now, but the tiny picture of the girl smirking as she spins impudent cartwheels is still pretty wonderful. My mother's handwriting says this is my book (mine, do you hear me, so hands off) and the date is November 1962, a month before my sixth birthday.
A couple of years later, there is a copy of Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line, with a lovely note written by my sister Sandy, who died two years ago (too early, of cancer); it recalls everything about my slavish admiration for my eldest sister, who was obviously the smartest person in the world. The book itself is a charming tour de force, not amazing now – but it is by Norton Juster, and functioned as a sort of warmup to his The Phantom Tollbooth, which is clearly one of the greatest works of literature in the history of the world, especially when you include the illustrations by Jules Feiffer. (Apparently Juster didn't write more books in the same vein – which is a shame, because even as an adult you can pick up the bizarre, hilarious, hyperimaginative Phantom Tollbooth and be as dazzled as anyone ever was by Alice and Wonderland.)
Hmm, it's nice to have roots....
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Oops, was back in bed before I thought of one that should be mentioned along with these: because it is another forgotten Great Book, and because someone has inscribed it to me. Mamie Spruill, librarian at Parklawn Elementary, gave me this as "Library Merit Award to Paul A--- for the most creative annotated list of books read during the school year 1967-68." Which tells you all you need to know about me, my life, and all that happened afterwards – it wasn't first prize or second of course, but a sort of tangential prize that reflects, if I'm not reading too much into it, a certain amount of puzzled encouragement from a sweet librarian tasked with handing out prizes.
It is in Joan Aiken's Armitage, Armitage, Fly Away Home, which is funny, sarcastic, witty, sad, resonant, brilliant... Aiken wrote many children's books, but none of the others ever mattered to me as much as this, including Black Hearts in Battersea (couldn't see the point really – probably London children would identify more with that more famous book).
So all right, I was going to tell you how hilarious, touching, and well-written Armitage is, but I have just discovered something miraculous online – I didn't know there was another book plus uncollected stories, a total of 24 in all! and here I've been living for the past forty-two years with just ten of the stories... so you'll excuse me as I must now rush headlong to buy the complete collection. You can let yourselves out I'm sure –
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