Literary Residue

How does one recover a lost literary history? Annika and I were recently talking about books that we read as kids. I don't remember. And if one does not have a "family home" where one's parents have maintained a bookshelf full of books that you read as a kid, how does one recover that bibliography. I am sure that my reading formed me, or at least had an impact on me. But in what ways? Is that avenue of reflection lost to me? All that is left is the residue of my memory, so let me at least meander through what is left. My family moved from a central California farm to Oregon just as I was turning 8. This change in scenery was dramatic enough that most of my memories are vaguely categorized as Oregon and before-Oregon. And my literary memory is all Oregon. My first memory of books I read on my own was a series of Pink Panther books. These were approximately 6 inch, square format, paperback books of a couple hundred pages, but each page had a comic on the left and text on the right. I read these at a rate of about 1-a-day for awhile, so there must have a been a bunch in the series. I remember specifically that I got permission from my teacher to count these as "books" for the reading contest.

Otherwise, I believe my first book-book was Pilgrims Progress. My dad and I started reading this together out loud, and by half way through, I couldn't wait, so just finished it. Maybe this is was what led me to CS Lewis Narnia series and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. For some reason, I read LoTR and the Silmarillion and couldn't get enough of this world, but did not read The Hobbit (which is still missing from my bibliography).

I vaguely recall some Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys and some Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). I specifically recall The Hounds of the Baskervilles. Somewhere in there was a brief name-your-own-adventure book, where you got to choose the path of the plot. I say brief because I was not interested enough in the necessarily simple story-lines to go back and re-read with a "different" choice. Elias Chacour's Blood Brothers and Chaim Potok's The Chosen and The Promise definitely pushed my perspective outside of central Oregon. At some point my mom and I got plugged in to Alexander Solzhenitsyn (she with Cancer Ward, me with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich).

In High School, the only thing (and I have thought about this repeatedly over time) that I remember reading for school is the play Death of a Salesman. No Shakespeare, no American or English classic lit, no "summer reading" for history, nothing. You could name any book in the high school canon, and if I have read it, I have done so after my 30th birthday. In that time frame, but outside of school, I only remember reading Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut) and The Empire Strikes Back.

And that is it. This is not a brief overview of the types of books I read. This is a comprehensive listing of the books I remember reading. The volume of reading I remember doing (staying up late most nights with a book) is not consistent with the number of pages I have listed here. So something (many things) are missing. When I browse lists of books like "1980s Science Fiction" or "1980s Fantasy" or "1980s ..." I don't recognize anything. So I find it strange that my identity as a reader is based on a memory that remembers the process of reading, but not the content. And the one nearly sure thing about memory is that it is not going to get any better with time. Those clearly formative years reading at least kept me interested in reading, and formed me into a reader. How the content of my reading formed my thoughts and ideas and persona seems to be lost...