Books of My Childhood—Part 2/4 Early Science

And so now we move on to the science portion of our show. These were the books that impressed me during the first decade or so of my life and helped shape my understanding of the world.

Science Book of Volcanoes

This book absolutely fascinated me back in grade three and started a long obsession with volcanoes. It focused, in part, on the story of the eruption of Vesuvius, and the dooming of the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum... one of those morbid things that seem to really sink hooks into certain kids. In fact, it led more or less directly to me creating one of the first stories I ever finished: a comic, drawn in grade four on lined paper in a notebook, called K.K.V., "King Killer Volcano". In it, an evil scientist brings a volcano to life; it grows a face and arms and legs of lava, and proceeds to terrorize the world while challenging other volcanoes to duels, and finally losing to the might of Vesuvius. I still have that comic. It's just awful. But it's mine. :)

In the Days of the Dinosaurs

What kid doesn't go through a phase where they're fascinated with dinosaurs? Just about the time you realize monsters aren't real, you discover that, yeah, for a while, they actually were! This book was practically the Bible for the boys in my third grade class. There's a lot of information in this book that's now outdated, but we ingrained every fact, name, and dimension into our memories through constant and repeated readings. On days when it was too cold or rainy to go outside for recess, there we'd be, huddled in the corner on the floor, making dinosaurs out of plasticine.

There are facts from this book I still remember. The earliest discovery of dinosaurs being equated to roughly the time of the death of George Washington. The sad, then-mysterious ending of the age the dinosaurs ruled. That dinosaurs came from huge eggs, often laid in great clusters, which always made me think of giant chickens... ironic, given that by the time I was in my twenties, I was hearing the astonishing idea that birds are, in fact, the last extant line of the dinosaurs, and those things wheeling in the sky and looking so delicious on the plate are actually dinosaurs. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that tyrannosaurus (among others) probably wandered the world wreathed in feathers. I think the thing that really stayed with me, though, was the idea that that ancient world, in which they were the overlords for so, so long, had to move aside in order for us to be here, and what we are, now. The idea that our existence might not have been inevitable was a truly profound revelation at the age of 8.

Stars and Planets

For a couple of years, I lugged this book everywhere. It came with four pages of perforated stickers you had to lick and stick in the appropriate boxes. Each page had a separate topic, along with a line drawing suitable for colouring... which I did. I loved the hell out of this book when I was 7 and 8. I was mostly interested in the topics about the planets in our solar system; less interested in the other aspects of astronomy such as stars and galaxies. That seems natural enough to me now; it was a moment in time when the US and the Soviet Union were actively sending probes to the planets, so that was in the news a lot. I remember Pioneers 10 and 11, and not long afterwards Voyagers 1 and 2, beginning the exploration of the outer planets; at about the same time, Vikings 1 and 2 had landed on Mars. These were all real places; when I was a child, for the first time in human history, you could actually see photographs of them, just as real as ones of Paris or Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro. That was new, and it was happening right then. This book was my portable little piece of all that.

I found a copy of it a year or two ago and bought it. I scanned all the pages, including the stickers, and then "pasted" the stickers onto the scanned pages in Photoshop. I coalesced the whole thing together into a PDF that I shared with a buddy who also had a fascination with such things as a boy. I guess you don't grow out of everything as you get older. :)

Stars

This was a rather more sophisticated version of Stars and Planets; a field guide to amateur astronomy. It was the kind of thing a kid with a little telescope (not that I had one) out in a field on a summer night would have found useful. Again, I was mostly interested in what it had to say about the planets of our solar system, although there was enough of interest about other topics to finally get me at least passingly interested. I think the thing that really caught my attention was the suggestion that the pole star changes over time as the 'point' of the Earth's axis of rotation itself turns, over many, many thousands of years... That while it is, today, Polaris, that is has been in the past Vega, and eventually will be again. Something about that made me feel tied to a universe greater than me. It wasn't all just here to support me; quite the opposite: I was just a momentary bubble on a great wave passing through that had existed long before me and would carry on long after I was gone.

Extinct Animals

I still remember the ride home from the mall, poring over this book in the back seat. It was the first time the fragility of life was really impressed upon me; the first time I ever realized that extinction wasn't just something that happened to the dinosaurs millions of years ago, but had happened in the very recent past, and was potentially still going on around me even then.

Two stories really stood out for me. One was the tale of the passenger pigeon. The idea that the most abundant species of bird in North America had, all in space of a single human lifetime, gone from the billions to none at all, was sobering... if I can say that of a 10-year-old boy. That they could even identify the last living individual, a bird named Martha in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the very day and hour the species became literally extinct, gripped me in a way little else has.

The other story was the utter extermination of the native people of Tasmania, including the horrifying illustration of a white settler shooting a nude, black-skinned man in the back. It seems kind of inappropriate to me now to number a race of human beings among extinct "animals", even if it is taxonomologically valid. However, I can't say I'm sorry I was exposed to the realization... it was an important one, and was one more thing that helped to shape the person I became and the values that matter to me.

Primitive Man

This is one of the few childhood keepsakes I have. It's not one of the books I've managed to find and buy retrospectively as an adult, but actually one I've managed to keep hold of through myriad moves and upheavals since 1977. I'm pretty sure it's the earliest book I still possess of which I am the original owner.

I was, if I remember correctly, 9 when I got this book, probably in a supermarket as we shopped for groceries. I absorbed myself in the book in the back of the car on the way home, and I was blown away by the revelations in it. The world and how it worked were coming into real focus as I went through the pages. But it was also kind of unsettling. The world that I knew simply just was. It had always been like this and always would be; the only real changes were the new things we invented. Now I was starting to understand that no long ago, nothing I knew from my world would have existed... even the people in it. Nature wasn't just all the stuff around the human world; the human world, and human beings themselves, were a part of nature and necessarily embedded in it; that we are, for all our special abilities, actually just another species of animal. But as I read along, I came to a passage that was kind of a lifeline. It was a simple line; just a few words, but somehow, it made everything else okay. It somehow remoored everything to a foundation, and safely so emboldened, I felt free to explore more. I'll quote the passage from the book, and highlight in blue where the author encapsulated my fears, and then in red the words that still resonate with me more than forty years later...

Do all people believe the theory of evolution

When Darwin's books on evolution were printed a hundred years ago, many people said Darwin did not believe in God's plan, but in a horrible universe run by lucky accidents and greedy fighting. They said he was making man out to be nothing more than a smart ape. But these people need not have worried. The theory of evolution says certain things happened. It does not say, and it could not say, why those things happened. If God made the world and runs the world, then evolution is God's plan. And it is a majestic and beautiful plan. With evolution, even accidents are part of the plan of life, and even the lowest creature is part of the family life. The theory of evolution does not say man is only a smart kind of ape. It says that for two billion years living forms were tried and improved and tried in improved in preparation for the arrival of man as we know him upon the scene of life upon the earth.

Well, this more or less rounds out the books that really affected me in some key, important way up to the time I was 12 and we moved from Nova Scotia to Ontario. Moving on, I'll be looking at the books that helped shape my opinions and understanding in my teenage years. Coming up next! :)

Books of My Childhood—Part 1/4 Early Fiction

Think back to the favourite books of your youth. Which ones shaped who you are? Influenced you? Or just impressed you with some particular detail? I thought it would be interesting to go over some of the ones that stand out for me.

My parents were always really indulgent with me where books were concerned. I often came back from trips for groceries with some science-based 79-cent paperback, and whenever those little Scholastic Books order forms arrived in class, I always got to order two or three. A good deal of my allowance went on reading material of one sort or another. I had quite a little library of my own by the time I was eight or nine.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in suburban Halifax, Nova Scotia. After that, we moved to the northwest shores of Lake Ontario, where I lived in various cities. I decided it might be best to divide the books both by theme (fiction vs. science/reality) and period (Nova Scotia vs. Ontario). So these are the books slotted into each cross-section.

Most of these books I actually own. The great majority of them are ones I tracked down over the years on eBay or Amazon and picked up mainly for reasons of nostalgia. The upshot of that is I was able to scan the covers and give this little presentation a splash of colour. Now, to quote The Friendly Giant, "Are you ready? Here's my castle!..."

Crosspatch

Crosspatch was a very early book in my collection; really, the first one I remember. I was two or three when I got this book; it tells the story of a lion cub in a zoo who's so thoroughly unpleasant that visitors begin avoiding his cage, leading him to become very lonely. He learns his lesson and becomes frolicsome and fun to watch and quickly attracts a large following of friends. It's an easy enough lesson for even a child of that age to take onboard. But the thing I remember most was a broad two-page spread that depicted a large panorama of the zoo, showing many animals in their habitats, featuring a tall flamingo and clusters of colourful balloons that fascinated me and became seared in my imagination... sufficiently so that I went looking for the book again many years later and gave it a home on my shelf.

The Witch's Catalog

The Witch's Catalog was one of those Scholastic Books I mentioned. I think I was in grade three when I ordered it (this is not that original copy, though). It was written by Norman Bridwell, and was part of his series of books about a friendly witch who served as a sort of fairy godmother to a couple of kids and their friends. If I remember correctly, he was also the author of the Clifford the Big Red Dog series.

It's worth noting here that while this was a surprisingly popular book among my crowd at the time, it's truly become a collector's item in the intervening decades. When I went looking for it, I had to look long and hard to find a copy affordable enough to be justified as a boon purchase. Copies of this book are often offered north of a hundred bucks; sometimes more.

I may have blogged about this particular book previously. It occupies a very special, very particular place in my life and my psyche. The book catalogs a variety of magical items that any red-blooded kid would give his or her eyeteeth to get hold of. A portable faucet with an endless supply of pop. A balloon that keeps monsters and bullies at bay. Invisibility-granting fabrics. Things like that.

But what makes it special to me is that it represents the moment in my life where I was right on the bubble of having to decide, for myself, if these things formed an actual part of reality or not. There was an order form in the back, and I was back and forth in my mind about whether or not filling it out and following its instructions would result in me acquiring the things I wanted to order. No money was required; you were to fill out the form, rub it with bat fat and flea's tears, and then hide it in the hollow of a tree at midnight under a full moon or something like that. I remember that what unravelled the whole thing for me, right on down to finally making me realize that magic must not be real, was that I couldn't imagine where you would get bat fat and flea tears. It strikes me now as funny that I could accept all the wildest claims of the book only for what tripped it all up for me to be the tiniest, least significant details at the last hurdle. But I guess I was who I was the following year in grade four because of that, and ever since.

It also occurs to me now, looking around at anti-vaxxers, MAGA hat wearers, and Brexit voters, that some grown-up people are still looking for the bat fat and flea tears to rub on the order form.

Tom Eaton's Book of Marvels

Another Scholastic Book, but not one I ordered myself. I bought this at a rummage sale in my school one Saturday when I was in grade five or six. The humour in this little tome is actually rather sophisticated for a kids' book. For instance, it includes a rather cynical send-up of The Waltons, a show I was very familiar with. It also featured a very broad interpretation of Archie comics, set in a page-by-page contrast with an average teenager's boring real existence.

I loved the art style and I still find the humour engaging. I gather Tom Eaton, who passed away just a few years ago, had an extensive career writing and illustrating Boys' Life magazine. Personally, I think he could have done just fine with Mad or Cracked. He was that good. I suppose the crucial takeaway I have from this book, though, that I still carry with me today as practical advice, was from a set of updated Aesop's fables, where the moral of one story was "You can't please some people, and after a certain point, you shouldn't try."

Arrow Book of Ghost Stories

A got this book in a trade with a friend, if I remember correctly. It was an anthology of creepy ghost stories. There were two that really stand out in my mind. One was about a "teeny-tiny" woman who finds a "teeny-tiny" bone that she takes to her teeny-tiny home to make her teeny-tiny soup, etc., etc. During the night she is haunted by an ever-closer voice demanding "Give me back my bone!" It ends with her just yelling "Take it!"; nothing really happens to her. But it was so creepily written, ramping up the suspense in an air of isolation, that it genuinely scared me, and it was a kind of guilty pleasure to dare myself to read it from time to time and risk the bad dreams. The other was about a genial 19-century ghost who befriends two boys. A murder victim, he asks the boys to dig up his bones and rebury them in a church yard so that he can rest properly. The boys do so, and it's implied at the end of the story that he becomes quite a good friend to have moving forward. It was an unusual but oddly happy ghost story and I think it made an impression on me for that reason. I certainly enjoyed re-reading it when I got hold of another copy many years later.

Ghosts Who Went to School

Another rummage-sale pick-up, or perhaps a trade; I'm not sure anymore. In any case... this is a fun story, but I think what really sold me on it was its illustrations. I simply loved the art style, and I still do. It tells the story of a family of ghosts, quietly haunting their abandoned house after having died quite some time before... turn of the last century, I think; the story is set circa 1960. The two boys get bored and decided to start going out in the world, culminating in them materializing and beginning to attend classes at the local elementary school as a pair of ordinary kids. The part I remember that kind of shook me up was one of the boys, Mortimer, privately demonstrating to one of his new friends that he actually is a ghost by appearing to the boy "in his bones", which was illustrated with a grinning skeleton appearing before a kid with his hair raised stock straight up. There's a sequel to this book, illustrated by the same artist, that I'd dearly love to get but it's considerably rarer and hideously expensive. Any copy you're likely to find is priced into three figures. Alas.

The Riddle of Raven Hollow

Funny to say, I never actually owned this book as a kid; at least, not at the time. This book was in our school library, and I pretty much had it out on permanent loan for years; renewing it again and again. This book was the one that made me want to become a writer.

It's the story of a boy named Bart who lives in Nebraska with his widowed mother and older sister. Bart was 12 or 13, a few years older than I was at the time, and he had a paper route in order to help his family make ends meet. In the course of his rounds, he begins seeing odd goings-on in the early morning, culminating in him meeting a mysterious, belligerent boy who, in the fullness of time, turns out to be a girl who is hiding out because her grandfather has been kidnapped (if I remember correctly). There's actual existential danger for these kids in the story, and I recall being totally impressed that kids could actually get caught up in situations that might see them murdered just like any adult. Makes you feel like part of the club once you understand that kind of thing. I was infatuated with Bart and I made up a couple of boy detectives of my own and started writing stories about them. I don't think I ever finished any of them, but I thoroughly enjoyed coming up with ideas and taking them as far as imagination at the time would permit me. I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers who were willing to read them and gave me considerable encouragement, and my heart and warm thoughts still go out to them. I really ought to read this book again.

So, that's it for the fiction portion of our show. Tune in next time when we move on to blinding you with science!