[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to revisit favorites from different stages of
my life, all of which would make for fun additions to your summer bookbag.
Share your nominations for Beach Reads for a crowd-sourced weekend post that
doesn’t mind some sand between the pages!]
On one of
the books that most powerfully sparked my young imagination.
In my
experience, there are a couple of fundamental truths about young kids and
books: all young kids like listening to books (says something about the power
of words, images, and stories, I’d say); and young kids don’t tend to be very
picky about the quality of those books (ditto, I suppose; but also something
about how taste evolves). I won’t name names, as this is supposed to be a
positive series, but I found that in their early years my boys enjoyed the
worst books I read them nearly as much as they did Frog and Toad, Dr. Seuss, the Elephant and Piggie series, and so
on. Which has made me that much more excited to see which books have started
to speak to them more individually and meaningfully, which ones have begun
to take hold of their imaginations not just because they create stories out of
words and pictures on a page (again, a magical thing no matter what), but
because of some of the specific effects and meanings contained within their
particular words (and possibly images, although for quite some time now they’ve
been into full-on chapter books).
I think Edward
Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix (1957)
might have been the first book to do that for me, but since I’ve
blogged about it before, I’ll focus here on another, even more
lastingly influential (for me) work. Or rather many such works—because when my
Dad and I had finished reading more or less all of the 30-odd books in “Franklin W. Dixon’s” (a
pseudonym for multiple ghost-writers) Hardy Boys series, I was
old enough to move on by myself to the late 1980s series reboot and tackle most
of those numerous contemporary, teen-oriented updates as well. All told, I must
have spent tens of thousands of pages solving mysteries alongside Frank and Joe
Hardy (as well as their parents, peppery Aunt Gertrude, food-loving Chet, and
the other recurring characters). But while most of those pages have blurred
together rather thoroughly (partly because of the similarly recurring phrases
and tropes, such Gertrude’s peppery nature; partly because I’m getting old), I
can still remember quite vividly how taken I was by the first volume in the
original series, The Tower Treasure.
There are
lots of reasons why the Hardy’s first adventure spoke to me so vividly: it was
one of the first mystery stories I had encountered, with all the pleasures of
uncertainty and fear and yet detection and resolution that the genre presents;
it featured likeable young boys acting like, well, recognizable young boys yet
having wondrous and meaningful adventures; the cover
picture was just plain amazing (the image thing never entirely goes
away). But I would say that one particularly potent reason aligns the Hardy
series with David and the Phoenix
very interestingly: both are clearly set in the world of reality, with both
communities and villainous forces that are very much of that world; yet both
suggest the possibility that their heroes can step outside of the norms of that
world in order to make it better. They do so of course in dramatically
different ways—David by befriending and helping preserve a host of mythological
creatures, the Hardy Boys by solving a seemingly supernatural yet ultimately
all-too-real mystery and saving the day—but nonetheless, in each case the
protagonists both confront the realities around them and refuse to be limited
by them, creating and living their own stories within those worlds. Pretty
evocative and enduring lesson for this American Studier.
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Reads you’d nominate?
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