Growing up I loved books and stories. We did the library summer reading programs at the local libraries wherever we lived: Washington, California, Libya, Italy, etc. It was like shopping for free candy!
When I was really young, we had the hard cardboard books that kids get, which seem to last forever… or get totally destroyed… by dropping them in puddles, teething on them, spilling drinks or whatever. The Little Engine That Could. The Disney tales, Black Beauty, Gullivers Travels, Grimms Fairy Tales. We had bigger books too… some I ventured into and lost interest pretty easily. Not enough action; characters who didn’t spark interest; boring stories. But others that grabbed you and drug you through it till the very end. The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Beverly Cleary stories, Johnny Tremaine.
Once we started school it was the Scholastic Book program. They gave you this four or six page order sheet that had all these new books that you could order and then take home and keep! Not just use, but read over and over again. I don’t know that I ever found many books I had to repeatedly read, but the idea that they were mine and I could, was pretty awesome!
I think that’s where I ran across my favorite book, though I’m really not sure: Ian Fleming’s “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” Not the movie version, but the original English version: Two kids have an eccentric inventor father who puts together this strange car, which slowly comes to life when needed. They get involved with smugglers and hoodlums, then get into dangerous situations, and the car, or their dad always finds an interesting way to get them out of it. In the end, they solve a mystery, stop a robbery, and the bad guys go to jail. Everything a 10-year old thinks is really cool.
Pretty sure I was reading Hardy Boys about that time, but those were teenagers who could ride in cars and motor cycles. The Pott family had kids my age. They didn’t treat adults like they could be replaced. To me it was very plausible, though I was pretty certain it was weird for a car to fly or sprout floats and cruise across the English Channel like a hover craft.
When the movie came out a year or so later, I enjoyed it, but it felt like a ripoff of Mary Poppins. Interesting story, but not as gritty or edgy as the book, and therefore not as real. It was probably the first time I understood the term “not as good as the book.”
Pretty sure I was reading Hardy Boys about that time, but those were teenagers who could ride in cars and motor cycles. The Pott family had kids my age. They didn’t treat adults like they could be replaced. To me it was very plausible, though I was pretty certain it was weird for a car to fly or sprout floats and cruise across the English Channel like a hover craft.
When the movie came out a year or so later, I enjoyed it, but it felt like a ripoff of Mary Poppins. Interesting story, but not as gritty or edgy as the book, and therefore not as real. It was probably the first time I understood the term “not as good as the book.”
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