Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Prized possessions

Well crap. Blogger won't upload the photo in the right orientation. Oh well.

Mystery Island was the very first chapter book I read as a child, 2nd grade. There are 8 books in that series, but the school library only had 5 of them, so I read them over and over and over. My teacher and the librarian despaired of ever convincing me there were other books out there. Eventually I discovered The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, which A is currently reading (you don't know how much that thrills me!!!) and its sequel, Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet.

Right there in the middle of the three books in the photo is The Invisible Island, which I finished reading Sunday. What a feeling of completion! I'd searched for that book for over 40 years, but since I didn't know the title or the author, it wasn't much of a search. I think that, a few posts back, I wrote of American Book Exchange. It has a feature called Book Sleuth; you can find the category your book is in then leave a post giving a description of the book you want. In both posts that I left, someone answered within an hour giving the title and author of the book, not to mention that both books are extremely rare and expensive. Just another day in my life.


This is the inside cover of guess which book. I referred to it so many times while I read the book. So cool!

And a couple of photos from Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet. I love these odd illustrations!




And one last one from Mystery Island:

I'm buying back my childhood, one book at a time.

4 comments:

Debbie T said...

What a great thing to pass onto your grandchildren! I did that with one of my favorite childhood books and my daughter still has the book to this day. Hopefully, she will pass it onto her girls.

rita said...

A is currently reading Flight to the Mushroom Planet, she says, and I hope she likes it. I sure did.

I gave both of my grandsons Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which my son loved, and they did too. It's so much fun to pass these things down. I had the original to give to my son; it was well-used.

Tactless Wonder said...

That is so cool! I love reading actual "children's" books (as opposed to the "goosebump/kids" stuff of today). Even the fluffy stuff seems more substantial than what I ran across as a book-report-requiring middle school English teacher.

I like to think I passed on some of my favorites to my students (7th graders) but HA, "forcing" someone to do anything (read) never endeared me to it...a girl can dream...

There are a number of books I'd love to try to find again, but yeah, such things as authors and titles escape me.

rita said...

Go to abe.com, book sleuths, children's books, and write a brief description (in my case, very brief) of the story. Those people are amazing! I found two in one week that way, and I'd been looking for 40 years.

Neither of my children like to read, but I blame that on their heathen of a father who berated me for "wasting time" by reading. But thank God they both read to their children. My daughter is encouraging A to read as much as possible, and I think that A is reading the books I sent to her partially because she likes some of them and because I loved them so much.

Since we bribed her with a trip to Disneyland this summer, her grades have gone from Cs and Ds to honor roll, so bribery does work. And she'll be keeping a journal on the trip, and so will I, to encourage her to write, and so we'll both have memoirs of the trip.

It'll also be good for her home-schooling portfolio for next year.

It's my dream that all of my grandchildren will love to read, but I'm not holding my breath. My oldest grandson said, "Another book? All I get is books." Ungrateful little wretch! LOL