I’m of the pre-tv generation—and I think that makes a difference. Some of my most favorite were Richard Halliburton’s travel books: he claimed to have been in various forbidden places, including a night-time dip in the Taj Mahal’s reflecting pool. And he did have photos. [Not of the skinny-dipping event.] He vanished in the China Sea in a storm, on a Chinese junk. Which is a way for a writer to make an exit. I also read Edgar Rice Burroughs, both the Tarzan and eventually [as a teen] the Mars books. I read the Oz books, which have a lot about traveling and adventure, and I think that played a part. And I read Maneaters of Kumaon, by Corbett, about India before one ever thought of ecology. All those books were special to me, in that regard.
All right, another favorite books question: what books waked your sense of the natural world?
by CJ | Sep 16, 2010 | Journal | 78 comments
78 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Another one where I can’t remember not being always aware of nature. When I was very little we lived in a place divided by Route 66, midway between Grants and Gallup New Mexico not far from the Continental Divide — I went on daily walks with the Post mistress and her hoard of dogs out into the surrounding juniper covered hills and looked at Indian Ruins; I can still remember a trip to Chaco Canyon when I was three. Growing up, vacations were road trips to visit relatives in Idaho, Spokane (!), Alberta or Quebec where the rest of the family was at. Mom made sure I was hauled to every museum on the way and I made absolutely certain that every trip north had either the Canadian Rockies or Yellowstone/Grand Tetons along the way somehow. Books invovled just about anything I could get my hand on, include Jack London, horse stories and Kipling, and seemingly dozens of Wind in the Willows stories. Oddly enough, I never did read any of the Oz books. Not sure why.
I used to read parts of the encyclopedia too. My favorite book was one that contained some of the Greek myths. My mother enrolled me in a book club, and I still remember how excited I used to get when a new book arrived! I don’t know what happened to most of them 🙁 She also bought me three mystery books (she loved mysteries!) At least one was by Troy Nesbit, The Indian Mummy Mystery; the other 2 involved mysteries taking place in caves and in a national park. I can’t remember all the details of character and plot, but caves, woods and deserts still evoke the feelings I experienced while reading those books. I also read and re-read my brother’s Tom Corbett novels 🙂
Lord, Tom Corbett. I still have some of those in the original. I used to skip my lunch and save the money to buy them.
Hah, CJ, yours are too funny. Lemme tell ya why. Jim Corbett’s Maneaters of India (Omnibus) which includes Maneaters of Kumaon was one of my early books too. The guy wasn’t just a hunter, he was a renowned conservationist in India. The funny thing is that it’s on the shelf above your hardbacks *grins*, still unreturned after 40 years to my high school library. Tarzan was also one of my world discovering books. Folks that haven’t read the books don’t know he spoke French before English and visited Paris before he was ever in any English speaking country. Lots of things but.. I remember fondly one of the Chip Hilton sports stories, No Hitter that I must have read when I was 9 or 10 about his college baseball team going to Japan and it was all about the culture there. Until then, all Japan had been to me was one of the enemies in WWII. I remember those Chip Hilton stories very fondly. They taught a little boy all about fairness and honor and not doing stuff just because everyone else was. Long time ago, guess they’re dated but I remember that one about Japan very clearly.
Couple others I remember, Robert Ruark’s Something of Value and Uhuru, about the coming of freedom to Kenya (which pulled me in because like Corbett, I thought they were about lions and tigers and bears oh my). Then Leon Uris’s Exodus and QB VII when I was an early teen.
I recall Corbett’s story of the little tigress with the broken jaw—wasn’t she the one that hauled a dead elephant uphill for 300 yards?
And I know that feeling—if you return this book to the library nobody will ever love it as much as you…
Yarr! (Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day) I loved that book. I’d forgotten that little story, thanks.
MRGawe, 4-5 minutes waiting for your e-mail spam preventer to send on my e-mail—and then the thing bombed out and didn’t send, so far as I know. Can you give me a way through your dragon at the gate?
3rd try—it kept asking for more alphabet soup, over and over, and then hung again.
…abject apologies about the spam filter… and the fact I didn’t check the blog again yesterday…
I think we’ve gotten it worked out: but if you could add cj@cherryh dot com and fancher@cherryh dot com to your spam exception list, it would make sure we can reach you if it happens again. 🙂 Lol!
I don’t recall a book that got me interested in the natural world–but then, I was digging worms out of the midden and ‘rescuing’ flies from spider webs from the time I could walk, so.
I do remember how I got into the Greek myths. In the second grade, my English teacher passed out workbooks in phonetics/grammar, and each was based on a different set of myths. There were lots; my memory is saying ’20’, but that is probably inflated. What isn’t inflated is me devouring them, ripping through them at a rate that eventually ticked off the teacher enough that she started refusing to give me more. I recall my mother telling me very seriously that I had to slow down.
I recall being cranky with this state of affairs. I also recall doing the workbooks anyway, then erasing my answers and doing them again, just to get my ‘fix’. 🙂
You would love the Oskar-Seyffert Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. I’ve had 2 copies, pages falling out of both. Trade paper. http://www.ancientlibrary.com/seyffert/
I am hoping this link to Open Library is not a pirate, but it is 50 years beyond the author’s lifetime, I think: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23294552M/dictionary_of_classical_antiquities
There is also a very useful topic index to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities at
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA/home.html
If you scroll down, there is a table giving groups of entries by topic, e.g daily life, architecture, medicine, law, religion, taxes, slavery, kitchen & table, etc., etc.
There are hundreds of topics, and a huge amount of fascinating information there.
Henry Beston wrote a beautiful book in the 1920s called the ‘Outermost House’, about a year spent living on the the great beach at Cape Cod. It explores the natural world around Cape Cod as he moves through the year. Everything from great storms to butterfly migrations.
Silver Hollow Audio Books had the sense to do a CD version, read by a gentleman called Brett Barry (who normally reads e-books of Dummies Guides!)who brings this book alive with his performance.
I used to hand sell this at every opportunity when I worked Bookselling for BN.
Rich
I discovered this beautiful book only recently, through the TV series (the new one) battlestar galactica, would you believe
When I was little we used to sit in the living room in the evenings, with the radio on very low and we’d be reading books. Mom and I liked the same books, dad was into stuff like War and Peace, it wasn’t a book I ever completed reading. I thought I’d never go anywhere else but that small town in Germany where I grew up. Books opened my eyes to the world and made we wonder about what certain periods of time were like and what everything looked like then. Books like Gwen Bristow’s Jubilee Trail and Jules Verne’s The Czar’s courier. And Quo Vadis (I’ve no idea who wrote that). I also thought that the Karl May novels about the American Indians and where and how they lived fascinating.
I remember Quo Vadis!!!
David Gulpilil’s Stories of the Dreamtime for me. Tales of the rainbow serpent, wonga pigeon, pelican and magpie, echidna and turtle. It brought Australia to life for me, and I could see at least some of the plants and animals around me. Also Enid Blyton’s Cherry Tree Farm books, although they seemed a magical, fairytale world to me. 🙂
My mother read us Kon-Tiki at bedtime — not when we were toddlers but maybe twelve or so. I DREAMED, literally, of crossing the ocean on a raft (with my Girl Scout friends, actually)!
I got to see Kon-Tiki in the ship museum in Oslo. I followed that adventure intensely too.
ooh, I had that book! can’t remember how old I was or what happened to it. I also remember a beautiful book about a white jaguar in the south american jungle …
Does any one else recall the “Book of Knowledge”? As I recall, it was organized in chapters by subject area rather than the accidental sequence of alphabetically ordered articles. One could get a lot more context at the expense of the serendipitous items one could discover in the adjacent entries when looking a word up in the dicitonary or encyclopedia. Our set was a generation out of date, but still an interesting read.
Oh, yes. When my brother came along, my parents got him that, as they’d gotten me the World Book Encyclopedia. And I did read from that!
I remember Kon Tiki also. I loved it. I have vivid mind pictures of them dancing on the beach when they finally arrived, with the Polynesians, and one of them had lumbago. I wondered for years what that might be. What a grand adventure. I was sad to learn that the theory is apparently unfounded.
The book that immediately came to mind was ‘In the shadow of a rainbow’ by Robert Franklin Leslie, a story about a young Canadian indian man who made friends with a wolf pack in 1964: http://www.wolfteacher.com/books.html It’s a bit like ‘Julie of the wolves’ by Jean Craighead George( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_of_the_Wolves ) which I read many years later.
I loved a lot of the books that have been mentioned by others: did you know the BBC made a film of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and a and short TV series of ‘Coot club’ and ‘The big six’ by Arthur Ransome? I loved those books, though ‘The Picts and the Martyrs’ was my favourite, with Dick and Dot living on their own in the wood and the Amazons having to be ‘nice girls anno 1910’ for their great-aunt.
I won’t repeat any more recommendations, only mention one that’s not listed yet: Gene Stratton Porter has some beautiful nature descriptions in some of her books (Freckles, The Harvester, Her father’s daughter, Michael O’Halloran). She is very bigoted, prejudiced about race and class, has weird ideas about gender roles and interactions, but if you ignore all the irritating people-things she has some really nice descriptions of the ‘Limberlost’ swampy woods and the Californian desert-plants and wildlife. Considering her views on people and society she’s deservedly sunk into obscurity, but The Harvester did stimulate my interest in looking at plants, identifying them, finding out about medicinal properties etcetera; though I have to say Jean Dulieu’s books about ‘Paulus de boskabouter’ (stories for toddlers and young kids about a forest gnome) were the first trigger I remember for my interest in woods and nature in general: whenever we went for a walk in the wood we’d look for his hollow tree, and find pretty acorn-cups and such to bring him. Wikipedia says some of those have even been translated into English, but doesn’t list titles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_van_Oort
Check it out, people, these are some of the first books I read by myself. New England classics:
http://www.classicreader.com/author/45/
In addition to the usual (in the day) Burroughs and Haggard, I once stumbled across White Hunter by J. A. Hunter. This is the memoirs of once of the most noted Twentieth Century white hunters. This book was the one were it clicked for me that real people could have adventures in the African jungle, too.
Definitely Kjelgaard, Chip the Dam Builder, Boomerang Hunter, Kalak of the Ice, Haunt Fox, Desert Dog, Fire Hunter, etc. Still have a bunch of them recovered from library discards & book fairs and still re-read them.
My love of nature was sparked by being it most weekends as a child. We used to go camping (in all weathers), hiking, fishing, swimming, beach combing, cross country skiing and various sports. When we weren’t doing any of these we were taking my grandfather for a drive out in the country. My favourite book about nature was a collection of Ansell Adams photographs. I also bought the Narnia and Lord of the Rings box sets. Surprisingly my love of sci-fi adventure started with the StarTrek paperbacks in the 70s.