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Tony Miksak's
Words on Books
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What Did You Read Before You Could Read?

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"What were your favorite books before you could read?" asks actress Molly Flatt in a Guardian UK books blog.
She's referring to the books that were read to you when you were too small to hold a book yourself, and too young to actually read the words. In my case, that's The Three Billy Goat's Gruff and The Story of Babar and The Ballad of Stewey Stinker and a few others such as The Little Fur Family.
I used to drive my mother crazy with "Read it again, oh please, read it again?" I wanted to hear about the troll under the bridge so many times I believe I came THIS close to being pillow-smothered by a mother who truly did love me.
Nowadays if I revisit a book it's either a dictionary or I'm looking for a lost passage, like a ship in the night.
Some readers can't let a year pass without another gallop through Tolstoy's War and Peace. I have read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness more than once, but it's quite short and I play a game called "spot the metaphor" popular amongst us auto-didacts.
When small I did have a thing for repetition. One time on the Staten Island Ferry, or was it somewhere farther up the Hudson, I recited the phrase "all done boat!" (I actually yelled "all done bope!") so many times the captain had to come down and punch me in the mouth.
Molly Flatt believes wonderful things occur when you are being read to before you can read. She blogs, "The interplay of the sound of words and their shape on the page, alongside the visual subtext of pictures, all wrapped up in an intimate act of familial and social bonding, makes such a profound impression on our stripling synapses that Proust will probably never match the pleasure and complexity of 'reading' Each Peach Pear Plum."
Another reader posted this reflection. "I think I learnt the following from books when I was younger:
"1. You can do really stupid things and still be an OK person...
"2. The world is generally a good and fair place.
"3. If you talk like a character from an Arthur Ransome novel in 1980s Yorkshire, you'll get beaten up.
"3 would seem to contradict 2..."
In my wife Joselyn's family growing up her father told the scary stories, and her mom the happy ones.
Daddy made up stories about George the Gopher (pronounced George the Gophert) every night at bedtime. George had a propeller on his nose, and plowed into danger up a tree or down a hole and never came to a good end.
Joselyn hated it when daddy said, "But, UNfortunately, that was the end of George the Gopher."
Joselyn and her sister Loel would beg daddy to tell another George the Gophert story in order to rescue the rodent (and find out what happened next).
George would go over the edge of a dam or get squashed by a truck. Horrible, bloody disasters. And the girls would scream NO NO NO NO!
NO, that CAN'T be the end. That can't be the end of George!
Well, the beer truck did run him over, her father would point out. Then after more screaming he would relent and George lived once again.
"Our daddy was the anti-momma," Loel recalls. "Mom made everything better. In her stories she had a mouse, and a lion named Siegfried. And whatever they did always had a happy ending."
Considering the yin and yang of these conflicting tales I'm surprised the two sisters turned out so well, like little cakes, but they did. Of course I'm married to one of them and I have to say that.
Just kidding, dear.

Aired Sunday November 23, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday November 26, 2008 at 1:00 pm

NOTES:

Molly Flatt on the Book Blog of The Guardian online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/mollyflatt
Which children's books have taught you the most? http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/10/05/life_lessons_wh.html

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