Ooh, I Like This Friday Five! (Even If I Am Answering It Late.)

1. What were your favorite childhood stories? I was then, as I am now, a voracious consumer of stories of all formats and types, so it's a bit difficult to single out any specific ones. But I do recall being especially besotted with the Oz books, to the extent that I expected to be able to look back one day and say, with a considerable (if metaphorical) degree of truth, that I spent my childhood in Oz.

2. What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children? I don't have children, nor do I intend to, but I've already bought a copy of The Real Mother Goose for my two-year-old nephew. My mother swears this book taught me how to read, by simple virtue of having it read to me enough times that I was able to associate the spoken and written words, and, even though I couldn't have been more than three or four, it made such an impact on me that I actually do still remember it. As he gets older, I'm sure there'll be many, many more books from my childhood that I'll look forward to sharing with him. Boy, I really do hope the kid turns out to be a reader.

3. Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything? Oh, all the time. Sometimes I'm surprised by how disappointed I am by them. For instance, I have re-read the first couple of Oz books, and while they're fun, they totally don't evoke the same sense of wonder I got from the series when I was a kid. Other times, I'm surprised at how well they hold up. The Pooh books, for example, where just as delightful to me as an adult. I honestly had forgotten just how clever the language in them is. Sometimes I do re-read kids' books and see things I never noticed as a child. Certainly the religious allegory in the Narnia books flew right over my head when I read them at age 9.

4. How old were you when you first learned to read? I honestly don't ever remember not knowing how to read, though I certainly remember not knowing how to read very well. I do remember being very proud of myself for being able to read all the words on the door of my first-grade (or possibly even kindergarten) classroom (though not, of course, what the sign actually said).

5. Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you? Depends on your definition of "grown-up." If it means books that are mostly text, as opposed to picture books, I have memories of two that were, at the very least, the first "grown-up" books that I owned. One was called The Boy from Outer Space and was about, you guessed it, a boy from outer space. As I recall, the kids on Mars, or wherever he was from, thought the funnest thing in the world to do was sit quietly and watch grass grow and think, and the Earth kid had to teach him how to run and play and do typical Earth-kid stuff. I remember rather wishing I could go and live on the space kid's planet, where enjoying sitting and thinking was considered normal and acceptable behavior for a kid, and nobody ever tried to make you go and play baseball. The other was called The Adventures of Calico Cotton, and was about a girl who gets swept away on the tail of a kite to an enchanted land in the clouds where everything has a holiday theme -- there's a Christmas area and a Halloween area, and so on -- only the inhabitants don't actually realize they're in holiday-land until she somehow removes the enchantment. Thinking about it now, it sounds stomach-churningly cutesy, actually, but I remember being utterly infatuated with it then. I think it actually was the first "grown-up" book I read, in the sense of being an adult-length novel (the Kid from Outer Space book was shorter and on a lower reading level). It was a bit of a challenge to read, but I plunged right in, and I've never looked back since. I honestly don't remember how old I was, but I'd say no more than seven. Yep, my infatuation with fantasy and science fiction goes back a long, long way...