Greenburgh Public Library Blog

Revisiting Childhood Favorites to Discover New Ones

Ah, the nostalgia of a favorite book...

Recently, the Greenburgh Library Staff shared a fun survey that included a thought-provoking question: “What’s the first book you remember?” That got me thinking about the most memorable books from my childhood.  

When I was in elementary school, I did not have ready access to a public library. I was limited to the books at the school library, the Scholastic book fair, and whatever books we had at home. Most of the books in our house were grubby 10 cent paperbacks belonging to my father. There were a few on that shelf that I really enjoyed: The Catcher in the Rye, Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, and Of Mice and Men. Others, like Catch-22 and The Canterbury Tales, were far beyond me, even though I was a fairly precocious reader.

My grandparents dug out all of my mom’s Nancy Drew and Bobbsey Twins books for me, and although I loved them, I don’t have any strong memories of specific books. She also had a set of 1950’s abridged classics, but most of them never held my interest.

I found many more appropriate books at school, where I got personalized service from the librarian Mrs. Oliver. From Charlotte’s Web in second grade, to the latest Newbery winner, plus everything Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume could write along the way, Mrs. Oliver provided me with an endless stream of books. She even kept the school library open for a few mornings each week during the summer, since our small town did not have a nearby branch of the county library.

I was really surprised to look at my list and see almost exclusively historical fiction. 

Some of these fall under the category of "Be Careful Which Childhood Favorites You Revisit." For instance, Strawberry Girl is set among the “Crackers” of Florida, and the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder has faced sharp new criticism for racism in her writings.

 

Oddly, I grew up to hate studying history.  As a college student I took the minimum of required history courses. I even had to take Western Civics twice because I got a D the first time around! But over the past few years I’ve come to realize how important it is to understand history. While I’ve read some really gripping nonfiction, my favorite way to get acquainted with an event or time period is still through a good novel. From there, I usually dig a little deeper to find out the history behind the fiction.  You can find a list of some of my favorites here:

I love books about diseases and medicine.  I especially enjoyed these two about the Black Death. Geraldine Brooks is the author of quite a few historical novels, but this one was my favorite. I'm looking forward to reading The Turn of Midnight, the sequel to The Last Hours. Walters has a reputation for meticulous research and her novels are full of details that bring the period to life.

I’m currently on a WWII hiatus, after bruising my soul by reading too many Holocaust books in a row, but this was a relatively light detour into the everyday life of a young woman in London; she wants to be a war correspondent, but ends up with a very different “jourmalistic” job. 

I’m particularly moved by books about “recent” history, things my grandparents and parents lived through. These novels, in roughly chronological order, uncover some of the lives of the 20th century that aren't seen in the history books. Midnight without a Moon is actually a middle grade novel, but they never taught us Civil Rights history in the 80’s, so I have a lot of catching up to do. 

My history teachers of the 1980’s had a penchant for chronology and the male perspective, so we repeatedly started “at the beginning” but never made it past WWII. As it turns out, these books all have something else in common: the female perspective. I can relate more to these books, which add day-to-day experiences of women to make their history more personal to me. Maybe History wasn't the problem after all.