"as the twig is bent": a reader's/writer's childhood

[calimac]

The May issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction (N.Y. Sci-Fi, as we call it), contains answers by many authors to the question of childhood influences that led them to become SF writers. In most cases, this leads through the question of how they became readers.

I'm not an SF writer, but I am a writer, and certainly a reader, so this seems a good subject for anecdotage. And I'd like to read yours.

I was born at a time when teaching children to read before they entered school was officially discouraged. I essentially taught myself to read. The first thing I ever read was "No parking any time," as seen on a street sign near the apartment where we lived. Even as a toddler, I knew that those symbols were a code of some kind, and I wanted desperately to learn that code. I couldn't talk yet - I was late at that - but I kept pointing with increasing urgency at the individual letters until my mother figured out what I was on about and told me what they meant. It wasn't long before I could read at the age of two, even though I still didn't talk. My preferred reading at this age was cereal boxes, since I saw so many of them.

And I preferred reading to any other activity. I had to be forced to put books down and go out to play. In the playground as a small child, instead of playing on the equipment, I would explore underneath it. Why? Because I was reading the manufacturer information stamped on the bottom. When I did play, I drew imaginary road maps in the sandbox, because after books, I most loved maps.

As I could read for myself, I had little interest in being read to. My grandmother did so on occasion, but my parents never did. Instead, they taught a love of reading by example. They both read constantly, mostly history books. They were not big novel-readers. I too preferred history and other non-fiction. The fiction I liked was mostly fantasy, though I had no idea at that time of fantasy as a category. Milne's Pooh books, Dr. Seuss and P.D. Eastman, The Phantom Tollbooth, Half Magic, The 21 Balloons, were among my favorite fiction. I re-read them frequently. When I was eleven, my schoolteacher read us The Hobbit, and I found the book, and the author, for me.

It was a combination of my loves for books, maps, and language in general that indirectly led me to SF, for a book I was given when I was still under ten - and typical of my birthday and holiday presents - was Words on the Map, a collection of place-name etymologies, by somebody named Isaac Asimov. A little later, I got some of his science essays - I had no idea they came from a science-fiction magazine. Asimov became one of my favorite authors, but it wasn't until I was about 16 that I read any of his fiction, the Foundation trilogy, which grabbed me immediately. By that time I'd also encountered scattered works by Arthur C. Clarke, whom I also liked, and Ray Bradbury and Robert A. Heinlein, whom I didn't. Bradbury was too intense for me at that age, and Heinlein was too hectoring. Eventually, I sort of got over my problems with Bradbury, but I still find Heinlein too hectoring. I knew SF could be of potential interest, but I made no attempts to dive into it until I attended a meeting of my high school's SF club when I was 17 - to pass on the grand news that I'd located a local Tolkien society - and liked it so much that I stayed. The other members were far better-read in it than I, and I undertook a crash course in both SF and fandom that set my tastes and orientations in both fields permanently.

At this time I wrote a few SF and fantasy stories, but quickly realized I had nothing I particularly wanted to say in that form; I wanted to read what other people had to say.

But in non-fiction it was very different. I had a lot to say, and still do. Today my writing consists mostly of LJ, Tolkien scholarship and book reviews, and concert reviews. Perhaps I'll continue this later with my background in all of these forms of writing.

ETA: Some of the earlier account modified by my mother's memories.

Comments

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I, too, was an early reader -- but an even earlier talker. I have been informed that my first word, at about six months, was "hippopotamus" (or at least a creditable attempt at same). I did not walk until after I learned to read, afaik, since I walked somewhere around two. The very first book I recall reading was a paperback science fiction book, about an alien policeman who came to Earth chasing an alien criminal in which the alien policeman took refuge in the protagonist's dog and I'm not sure how the criminal kept alive until the book's action started -- what I recall most is the first several pages, which were about a conference between various military bigwigs who were trying to figure out who to send to the Moon to check up on our silent base, since Commies were a big threat, and the mention of the criminal alien (who had taken over both the American and the Russian moonbases) making everyone think they were eating steak, when the food tasted like "library paste". I have a very clear memory of reading this book on my parents' bed, in the house trailer we lived in at the time, and picking the purple chenille bedspread away from the wall it had frozen to. My mother told me that this had to have happened during the winter after I turned two. I do know that I was reading H. Rider Haggard's "Cleopatra" at four, when I went to kindergarden. I have clear memories of carrying the book back and forth to school. This I have confirmed by re-finding the book and re-reading it, and going "yep, I remember that bit!" I definitely read whatever I could get my little pittypaws on, including ancient books on New Orleans brothels (again, I refound that book, and confirmed that I had read it), German atrocities in World War I, and a wonderful compendium of "All About Everything" published in the early 1900s that my great-grandparents had. My parents/grandparents/family were not readers and I very rarely got to a library, so it was definitely catch as catch can.