Excellent article: https://pallaviaiyar.substack.com/p/the-english-conquistador-of-the-indian

In my childhood, holidays and planes and hotels were rare. Doordarshan, the one state-owned television channel went live for only a few hours in the evening and its target audience was farmers pondering seed technology, rather than a young girl with magic on the mind. And so, reading was my most sustained experience of travel. Books had stood in for friends. Sometimes they’d stood in for dinner; I used to forget to feel hungry when I was in the grip of a good yarn.

My rational mind understands that it is futile to compare my proclivities as a child to those of my children, for they are creatures of a different paradigm. They have rarely known boredom, a prerequisite for learning how to read for pleasure. They’ve had lives so filled with gadgets and classes and play dates and physical travel that the space left over for books is meagre. Focus for their generation is a hyperlinked thing, which makes the linear, immutable book-ness of a book and the demands it makes on the concentration, challenging.

We’ve had some arguments, my boys and I, about what they consider to be my exaggerated reverence for the Book. Reading is “old fashioned,” I have been told. Youtube explainers are more efficient than non-fiction. TV series, documentaries, and movies are better entertainment.

Yes, I splutter internally, but do you realize what is lost? What is lost is the stillness of mind that travelling through books brings to the reader. It is the opposite of physical travel, which provokes a mental restlessness; a fear of missing out. Physical travel is often about a need for external validation – enter the selfie- that your trip is every kind of envy-generating superlative.

Book travel is usually more immersive than its physical iteration, because our minds are forced to engage with the writer’s words to bring them alive. While reading, we cannot by definition dwell on the demonically dull to-do lists that form the architecture of our non-travelling everyday. And a further advantage to journeying by book is that the traveler is unmolested by bad weather, logistics, lost credit cards or bad tempered companions.

The above article made me think about my own reading. I agree with the article, but it made me wonder about how it worked for me.

As we all do, I have my own favorite childhood books. I’ve been thinking about what it is that made them my favorites, and how that influenced my adult reading (and writing).

What one encounters as a child is something of a random walk. In my home, the only age-appropriate stuff was my father’s father’s leftover national fairytale collections (tomes too heavy to lift, but I figured it out) and lives of the saints (from my mother’s half-serious failed attempt to affiliate me with convent-school practices and beliefs (from her own Belgian youth). I was sure that these saints led worthy lives in some form, but these were not stories I could care about. (Nor did religion, in its usual indoctrination form, take on me.)

So, effectively, I was at the mercy of school book sales, “these, too, Mom,” additions when I accompanied my mother book shopping, and other random-and-good-cover come-ons. And that got it done. (I also got non-fiction (Time-Life) stuff from my father, which I greatly enjoyed, but this post is about fiction.)

Looking back, what mattered to me was… morality. I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but looking back, it mostly fell into two categories:

…Where a young person suffers, does the right things, and suffers penalties that are overcome with persistence and doubles down on continuing to do the right things, even at personal cost. e.g., A Little Princess, Freckles.

… Where a person is injected into crisis adventure situations, desert islands, new comrades & expectations, a chance to save others. e.g., where only by doing things right (and doing the right things) can the problem be solved. e.g., The Black Stallion, The Three Musketeers, The Keeper of the Bees, Brat Farrar, Kim, Robinson Crusoe.

Well, sure, you may be thinking. But what I notice is that I also disliked some of the classics. While every child likes stories with animals (and I was no exception), I was very conscious of when the tales were more didactic than necessary, and I disapproved of what seemed to me to be the presenting of unnecessary torture to make a point. For example, I greatly disliked Black Beauty — I recognized the obvious setup to persuade the reader to adopt certain practices. Reducing animal cruelty is no doubt a good cause, but I drew the line at being suckered into reading about suffering horses just to advance the Victorian cause. Old Yeller was another one. It’s not that I disapproved of the necessity to kill a rabid dog in context, it’s that I intensely disliked the author for so-structuring his story of a boy growing up. The Yearling is the same sort of thing– I felt like the author had no business making her deer instrumental in that way.

In other words, the actions of the characters in the books I disapproved of was not the for their growth and morality, but for the authors who chose to present what seemed to me unnecessary suffering for animals instrumentally to sell the morality of their story. And I disapproved of doing that to (fictional) animal characters who were innocent victims. Looking back with adult experience, it felt to me like torture porn. Every book that I read that was sold on the premise of a boy-and-his-dog where the dog dies offended me. I felt sure the same lessons could have been presented without the innocent victims.

Why was I sure? Well, there were The Jungle Books. Morality for everyone.

I don’t like villains (yes, I’ve mellowed for comic effects, but even so) and am still entranced by people doing the right thing, often at cost. And it started with me with the earliest books.

How did the books you read as a child influence you as a reader, or a writer?