My Dad’s Books
Posted by Ted Bronson | Filed under Nostalgia
I learned to read by crawling up on my dad’s lap and trying to follow along with Louis L’Amour. Not only were the stories more interesting than “DickandJane”, they were conversational. It was more like people actually spoke than the pap available on “Sesame Street”, “The Electric Company,” and my primary books. The L’Amour books led me to Jack London. London led me to Mark Twain, Twain to Melville, Melville to Verne, etc. I was hooked on adventure. (I don’t mean to imply that I was reading Verne in kindergarten, but the roots were laid back then.) A good adventure book had a combination of things to make the story complete: a hero, a villain, and wonderful new skills and tools that I never even knew existed.
Starting with L’Amour: it was said that if he wrote about a character stopping to camp by a stream, and if a reader could follow the verbal map, that stream would not only be there, but the water would be good to drink. But the stories were more than just the landscape, the heroes were actually heroic. The writer himself is a heroic figure, an man who made himself and every break he ever got.
London, Twain, Melville, Verne, Stevenson, and their contemporaries wrote some of the best darn adventure stories in the English Language. What made their heroes so memorable, so alive, so much a part of our childhoods and our fathers’? The heroes, in every case, either had esoteric knowledge from the beginning of the story or learned it along the way. Jim Hawkins learned how to sail an entire schooner single handedly in Treasure Island, Captain Nemo harnessed the power of the atom, Huck and Jim navigated the Mighty Mississippi, Ishmael was so full of jargon it was like reading my Bluejacket’s Manual, even Buck had to learn how to survive and he eventually came out on top. These stories were about so much more than just rollicking good fun…they were about how a person (and yes, Buck is a person to me) has to be able to stand up on their own two (four) feet and come to terms with the world around them. They glorified individuality, knowledge and, (wait for it) self-reliance.
My father had bookshelves all over the house. He kept his books pretty well organized, too. Westerns and other adventure books were all together on the little brown metal bookshelf in the den. Spy novels, courtroom dramas, and true crime histories were in the wall shelves in the front room. The Time-Life book series books, (and there were many different series) had pride of place by the front door.
By far, the most used books in the house were the FoxFire books. These books gave countless afternoons of projects, education, and fun for a house full of growing boys, and our Dad. We learned so many things about how to DO STUFF that we had only read about in books. Having read the books, we wanted to know HOW in real life. The series is up to about twenty different books by now, I think, and there is guaranteed to be something worth learning in each and every one. Out of context, they seem to just be a bunch of hicks doing stuff the hard way. However, when you consider that Huckleberry Finn and Jim Hawkins were heroes to young boys, boys who wanted to know the silly superstitions about how to make a wart go away as well as how to clean a river trout or make a magnetic compass, the books are truly wonderful. Unlike so many books we read in our youth, the classics stay readable over time. So do the FoxFires. I count them among some of my most important reference books, along with several field manuals, history books, maps, and the Complete Works.
In a new section that Hazel added today are fiction and non-fiction books. Go. Look. Buy. These books belong in every house that respects our cultural past and wants to keep alive the ideals of self-reliance for our future. These are the books of my youth, the books I read as a young man fresh to the world, the flights of fancy as well as the practical, as well as some new books for my own kids that I hope they will pass along to their kids someday.
Tags: things my dad taught me
Help Support Simon-Jester.org!
January 15th, 2008
Might i suggest two books to your must have list. They have served me well when i had limited space to collect reference material.
The Merchant Marine Handbook and the Machinery Handbook. I lost my BlueJackets manual long ago, anyone be willing to trade a BJM for a Machinery Handbook?
January 15th, 2008
I forgot all about the Machinery Handbook! Thanks.
January 15th, 2008
Don’t know about America, but when I was growing up back home in Wales seemed most boys wanted to be train drivers or soldiers. Me? I wanted to be a tiger hunter when I grew up (ended up enlisting, but there you go …). Y’see, when I was seven I discovered my dad’s copy of ‘Man Eaters of Kumaon’ by Jim Corbett. First adult book I read, and it really got me started on books (and at least I now knew how to hunt a man-eating tiger
). At nine I discovered science fiction; a short story called ‘The Monster’ (sometimes called ‘Resurrection’) by A.E. van Vogt. It instantly became my favourite story, and I still have a tattered old copy. I’m now 55, and it’s still my favourite story. Of course, you have to suspend your sense of reality, but isn’t that exactly what science fiction is all about?
And imagination.
PS I’ve read every word Louis L’Amour ever wrote … and every word A.E. van Vogt ever wrote.
January 15th, 2008
Favourite L’Amour story?
Flint. By a country mile.
January 15th, 2008
Definitely on my personal list, Morgan…but I can’t put ALL the L’Amour books on the Amazon list…
January 16th, 2008
If I might also add a suggestion esp. for those who have girl children. I have re-read the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder (NOT to be confused w/ the T.V. series from the ’70′s) more than once as an adult and I find that they hold up exceedingly well.
They are stories of our cultural heritage and self-reliance in the “wild west” of the settlers that are neither revisionist nor romanticized. That’s not to say that they are not sentimental but I don’t count that as necessarily a lit’rary sin myself.
If you haven’t dusted them off in a while, pull out “The Long Winter” and take another look at which solutions are offered up (all of ‘em) when some residents of the town are in real danger of starving to death and others own stores and still others need to keep their seed corn for the next season.
Just to keep Nanny on the edge of her seat, I won’t tell what happens to an armed and desperate group of citizens with no police force and no FEMA to save them. She’ll never guess in a million years…
Although any descriptions of hog butchering are bound to be a disappointment as a detailed how-to for the boy children, I do know a few guys who have copped to reading at least “Farmer Boy” as kids. ‘Cause they had sisters, just so we’re clear. And they had nothing else to do. I mean really. Made no impression otherwise. Didn’t even LOOK at the other girl books. Really.
Well, I just thought I’d offer my suggestion.