Saturday, May 30, 2020

Charles Dickens - Pickwick Papers




 
When I was a boy we sometimes went to dinner at Annetta Turner's house.  She was my father's cousin on his mother's side, and she had introduced my parents to each other. She was married to Ralph Turner, a lawyer with a handlebar mustache who restored old automobiles in his spare time. I later found out that he was close friends of one of my beloved English teachers Helen Fawcett and her husband Ron who was a master at restoring old cars and had a vast garage full of them!
 
Once, Ralph Turner had just finished restoring an old fire engine with long running boards for the firemen. We all jumped on the running boards and he took us for a drive around the neighborhood. Unforgettable! 
 
Ralph Turner was also a fan of Charles Dickens and being a lawyer once read to us the hilarious climactic court scene of Pickwick Papers. I was intrigued. I knew we had an old copy of Pickwick Papers at home, and I was soon avidly reading it. My first Dickens novel was also the first he had written, and written with such energy and exuberance that it became a publishing phenomenon unlike any other. 
 
Dickens had originally been contracted to write monthly numbers to accompany some sporting illustrations, and it soon became the reverse: the illustrator was providing illustrations for his marvelous adventures of Mr Pickwick and his eccentric companions!
 
 

Stephen Leacock - Laugh With Leacock





This collection was in our house, and not only had a great impact on me, but left me laughing for days on end and turned me into a lifelong fan of this great and absolutely unique Canadian humorist:



Many of Leacock's writings are available for downloading in a choice of formats at:


There definitely was something I would term the "Leacock Effect". After reading some Leacock the next thing I read, such as my chemistry textbook, would somehow seem equally hilarious!


Friday, May 29, 2020

Jack D. Hunter - The Blue Max




I had been reading a lot about the WWI fighter pilots and saw this book while bookstore browsing. 

I was excited to find a novel about aces in WWI and this would also be the first adult book I had ever bought. It said on the cover that they were making a movie from this book, so it had to be good, right? And it was, though the hero Bruno Stachel was more dissolute than I expected heroes to be. 

The movie did come out the next year and I did see it, and was impressed by excellent aerial combat scenes, as well as by Ursula Andress, of course!



I only found out recently that a few decades after writing The Blue Max, Jack D. Hunter wrote two more books that followed the dissolute hero Bruno Stachel into the Luftwaffe in WWII and later into disenchantment with the Nazi cause. All the books in the trilogy are available for loan from the Internet Archive:

Thursday, May 28, 2020

J. D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye




When I was a twelve year old in grade 6, I thought it would be a good idea to read my big sister's copy of this book, and see what all the fuss was about. This book seemed to be notorious and controversial. 

I had never read anything like it.  It was absolutely riveting and turned me into a lifelong J. D. Salinger fan.   A lot of people didn't seem to like the Glass family saga that Salinger got into after Catcher in the Rye, but I loved it, particularly the book Franny and Zooey

I am intrigued by what Salinger books his son Matthew found in his father's safe and what will be published soon.  I would be happy to have more books in the Glass family saga.

Bruce Catton - Banners at Shenandoah



This is literally the very first book I ever bought for myself. I had become interested in the Civil War, probably from reading the... 




 
And I was excited when I saw this book in the bookstore in Oshawa.  At the library, I had been browsing through the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War with all those amazing and moving photographs taken during that conflict, as well as the detailed panorama maps by David Greenspan. 

David Greenspan's panoramic maps became quite famous among Civil War buffs. Here is the Spotsylvania map which is a kind of bird's eye view of the battlefield:



Couldn't help occasionally reading the accompanying text and noting that the writer Bruce Catton was considered one of the great contemporary historians of the Civil War. 

So finding he had written a novel about the Civil War for young adults was a pleasant surprise. I knew that even if he was not a particularly good novelist, at least he would be historically accurate and I was not disappointed. Not only was Bruce Catton a great historian, but he could also spin a thrilling and totally absorbing yarn about a young man caught up in the war. 


The above cover photo is my own copy (which I still have) since all the Internet pictures of this book cover are deplorably bad. 

 Best 60 cents I ever spent!

Hergé - The Adventures of Tintin





Went on from comics to graphic novels and first stop was flying to the moon with Tintin and company. Time Magazine has a Tintin book in their...


I always loved the meticulous artwork of Hergé. It seemed a step above most comics and was admired by modern artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. 

Eventually read most of the Tintin books and came to own some as well and still love them to this day!

 Tintin has his own offical website with lots of interesting information on the series:




 
One of my favorite graphic novels is P. Craig Russell's adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelung and this is also a great intro to Wagner's Ring Cycle of Operas... 

The Ring of Nibelung


Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The Happy Hollisters



After reading the Thornton W. Burgess books, I went on reading more chapter books and a series that had a great impact on me was the Happy Hollisters, a fun loving family of kid sleuths that had adventures and solved mysteries. 

The Haunted House Mystery was my favorite, it had everything: a tree house, a gang of thieves and a suspiciously haunted house! This series gave me an appetite for mysteries and I went on to read as many of the Hardy Boy books as I could find and eventually graduated to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

The Happy Hollisters series has had a resurgence in recent years, probably due to nostalgic Baby Boomers and they even have their own Facebook page:




And of course their own website:

Happy Hollisters Website



Classics Illustrated Comics


Now, I get to pay homage to another kind of book that sustained and inspired me in my childhood: the comic book. I read all kinds of comics and was always trading them with my friends. Batman was a favorite, but I kept gravitating to the Classics Illustrated comics. They basically stripped the classics down to their bare bones and revealed that they each had at their heart, a great story worth telling. 

Loved all the Jules Verne stories, and eventually read most of his books, but a particular favorite was "The Mysterious Island" that was a kind of sequel to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" which I also first encountered in comic form and then in the Disney movie that I loved. I was excited when I found out they made a movie of Mysterious Island, and saw it in the theatre when it came out in 1961. I was not disappointed even though they strayed a fair bit from the book and combined it with elements of the H.G. Wells book, The Island of Dr Moreau.

The original Classics Illustrated Comics are now in the public domain and the Internet Archives has a terrific set of them that are free to download in PDF format for anyone who loved them as kids and would like to revisit them:


Lots of other comics free to download at the Internet Archives, such as:






Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Mammals - Golden Nature Guide



I have owned and loved this book for as long as I can remember, from when I would just look at the pictures and study the maps, and I still have it now, so it is by far the oldest book I have owned continuously. As a kid, it was endlessly fascinating and I wondered if indeed someday I would head down to Southern California and maybe Mexico and actually see kangaroo rats like those hopping on page 92:


 
We did eventually get to Southern California, though most of the kangaroo rats we saw were in the nocturnal area of the marvelous San Diego Zoo. They have a special feeling for Kangaroo Rats there, and continue to study their conservation in a very thorough going way:


 
 We spent whole days at the San Diego Zoo and once at closing time we passed by the cheetah enclosure and noticed a small dog running around in there! 

Our first thought: "OH NO! THEY ARE FEEDING THE CHEETAHS STRAY DOGS!" But there was a zookeeper standing by and so we asked him, and he said that after hours they put a stray dog in with the cheetah for company. 

Surprisingly, they do become friends, and apparently the little dog becomes the dominant one. The zookeeper said that when the cheetah would start its obsessive pacing back and forth, it was as if the little dog said, "ENOUGH ALL READY!", grabbed the cheetah by the ear and drag him off! You can read more about these unlikely friends...

 


Thornton W. Burgess - The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat




When I began taking piano lessons around the age of seven, our piano teacher Mrs Lodge would present us from time to time with the gift of a Thornton W. Burgess book with a vivid red dust jacket, presumably as a reward for sticking with it. I recall that one of my favorites was Jerry Muskrat, followed closely by Johnny Chuck. These were among the first chapter books I ever read.

Many of the Thornton W. Burgess books are now in the public domain and can be downloaded for free in PDF format from the Internet Archive.  For example, the book:

 


Index of Past Posts


This blog celebrates the books that have had a great impact on me down through the years, in roughly chronological order:







1961



1965






1965

J. D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye 




1967