In You've Got Mail Meg Ryan is writing an email (via AOL, speaking of old roads. Though to be fair, the UI looks more like an IM than an email, but it's been decades and I could be wrong.) and she writes "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" It probably should be the other way around, but I know, for myself, that so much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, or saw in a movie.
What keeps us going back to the entertainment of the past? Why do we keep re-reading that beloved book? Why do we re-watch movies and TV shows so many times we can speak the dialogue seconds before they do on screen? (Maybe this is just me.) It cannot be because they are necessarily timeless classics. Some are to be sure, but some are bordering on the terrible.
For me, it often comes down to the pleasant memories associated with discovering these works. As I said in my post Music, Movies, and Memories, Oh My, the song Dirty Pop reminds me of when my son was obsessed with it and those memories are a wonderful reminder of how great it was when my kids were little. Books, TV, and movies, while not as strong a reminder as music is, can and do provoke similar memories for me.
The books I read as a child stay with me, much more than any I have read as an adult. I read a book called The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun by Paul Gallico when I was twelve or so. I probably got it from the local used book store (I was fortunate enough to have one only about three blocks from my house) because it had been published about six or seven years earlier.
I mention this because I can't remember where I got it, but I can vividly remember reading it.
I remember sitting on the chair in my room, reading in bed (like a cliché, under the covers at night with a flashlight, yes, kids really did do that, well, I did anyway), even sitting at the dinner table being told to put it down and eat. Even now, someone will say something, or a location will pop up on the news and I remember a passage from this book, other books too, but I am talking about this one now.
I just finished reading The Riftwar Legacy sub-series by Raymond E. Feist and I could not recall a passage from any of the four books for love nor money. I enjoyed reading each book, I like Feist's style, characters, and the whole Riftwar idea, but it won't be anything I remember ten years from now apart from simply that I read it.
Going back to You've Got Mail for a minute, Meg Ryan also wrote “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.” When Nora and Delia Ephron wrote the screenplay for You've Got Mail, boy, they were really on their game. This is one of the truest statements I have ever heard in my life.
Another book (well, series of books) I read as a child was the Lucky Starr series by Isaac Asimov. I know I got these used as they were originally published in the 1950s. These books got me hooked on science fiction and opened my eyes to the wonder of imagination. I remember reading each and every one of them. I still have them on my bookshelf right next to the Tom Swift (III) series which is the next read I want to talk about.
First published in 1981, the book Tom Swift and the City in the Stars along with the rest of the series took me from age thirteen to seventeen and still sticks with me to this day. Tom can be credited with making me believe that I could be (what I eventually discovered was) an engineer, that even as a kid I could take apart, re-build, and modify the things around me to make them arguably better, or more what I wanted them to be anyway.
Those books directly steered me into my first career as an automotive technician, then into computer science and electrical engineering. The things I make today, from the microcontroller-powered Swatch Beat Time clock I keep on my desk, to the portable camp boxes with computers, radios, controllers, internet, and TVs in them all are because Tom built such amazing inventions.
If I may get a bit preachy for a moment. The idea that what you read as a child becomes part of your life in a way that nothing else does really reinforces the need for parents to read to their children, to make sure their children read. They do not have to become lifelong readers; they don't need to make books a core of their lives, though they will be richer for it if they do. While you can have more control over what they consume and how they consume it, you really owe it to them to make reading part of it. I have three kids. We read to them all, encouraged them all to read on their own. Only one of them took to it, the other two only read what is necessary to get by, or what gets posted online. So be it. They still have that foundation of reading as a child that I really believe helped make them the good people that they are today.
The books, movies, and TV shows that I have made part of my life remind me of the times when I first experienced them. I think that is what keeps us, or at least me, going back to them again and again.
Till next time,
-John
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