Monday, February 9, 2009

An Early Book Memory

It's a new meme started by K.C. Shaw! Early book memories!

Let's see... I remember in the 4th grade (1979) my school had this program they called USSR, which of course stood for Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading. The teacher set aside some time each day for the class to read. Usually it was about 20 minutes, but to a kid it seemed like a looooong time. We each chose a book either from the school library or from the classroom bookcase and read to ourselves. I remember this one book from the library that was called Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum and which was filled with short horror stories. Other kids had read it and were expounding upon its virtues. Eventually my turn came to check it out and I devoured those stories rather quickly. Several more times during that school year I checked that book out from the library and re-read those stories. Alas, the following year I attended a new school that was built closer to home, and it did not have that book in its library. Years and years and years (okay, more like decades) went by, but I never forgot that book and the stories in it. Then one day, while perusing a second hand book store, what should I find? Yes, THAT book. I was overjoyed. I bought it, brought it home and read it all over again, reliving my distant youth. For a short time, I was ten years old again, reading those stories for the first time.

6 comments:

K.C. Shaw said...

I love finding old favorites! I've got a bunch of battered old withdrawn library books I've gotten at sales over the years, all of them books I loved as a kid.

We had a 20-minute silent reading time when I was in ninth grade. By that time, I didn't really need the encouragement, but I sure liked knowing I wouldn't be interrupted by a teacher demanding to know what the answer to #4 was or something useless like that.

Jameson T. Caine said...

Yeah, by the time high school rolled around, I was reading every chance I got. Once the teacher assigned us a book to read in English class and told us to read the first two chapters over the weekend. I read the whole book.

Fox Lee said...

: )

Jamie Eyberg said...

Finding old favorites is kind of like finding an old crush from school.

Cate Gardner said...

I spent far too much of my childhood reading old worn-out copies of the Pan Horror Books.

Anonymous said...

I love finding old, out of print books. "The Dragon Takes A Wife" by Walter Dean Myers. "The Oddkins" by Dean Koontz. Next I'll be scrambling around for old Voltron and Thundercats episodes, I know it.