favorite reading

[Faith Williams <faithw@cais.com>]

I read those horse and dog and animal books— loved Terhune, and wow did
he increase my vocabulary. What about Walter Farley and the Black
Stallion? I remember trying to think of names in the contest about the
B.S.’s Filly.  My school librarian would save the new animal books for
me, shy, voracious reader that I was. There was somebody  named Meeker
(?) who wrote about police dogs, and somewhere there was a wonderful
account of a seeing eye dog.

And what about Dr. Doolittle and Freddy the Pig? It seems to me that
Lofting & Brooks came out with a new one about every year for a while
and that made my Christmases.  I didn’t like the I-books nearly as much
as the ones with the omniscient narrator. I think maybe it’s because I
could sit back and fly through, convinced that I would be told anything
important.

There’s a note of fantasy in all those, and I liked Narnia and Oz and E.
Nesbit too. Our grandmother read wonderfully to us, and I particularly
remember Nils and the wild geese, and one about cats by Paul Gallico
—The Abandoned. We all cried over it.  Maybe these with their
transformations were forerunners of the Animorphs? And of course there’s
T.H. White’s Lilliputians and Once and Future King, with the Wart’s
great education as different animals.

That grandmother also read us Blyton’s Five books — she was a great
Anglophile.  She had bound volumes of St. Nicholas, going back an
awfully long time, certainly to the 1880’s, in her house, and we would
pour over those.

The other one read me Kim by Kipling when I was sick awhile one winter.
I had already read all the Jungle Books —animals, of course.

Faith Williams, librarian at Malcolm X ES, 1351 Alabama Ave., SE, Wash.
DC 20032
faithw@cais.com, fmwill@aol.com    202-645-3409

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