It may surprise you to learn that I was not fond of reading as a kid. I found school boring. I was not excited by Dick and Jane and Spot. My mother grew concerned about my lack of reading. So for Christmas, “Santa” brought me some books: Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire (1956) by Victor Appleton II and The Hardy Boys The Tower Treasure (1959) by Franklin W. Dixon.
I read Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire in one day! The next day, I talked my mother into taking me to the department store where she had bought the books and I spent my Christmas gift money on Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books. That ignited both my love for reading and my love for collecting. At one time I had complete sets of both Tom Swift and Hardy Boys. I was hooked!
Over the years, I’ve picked up the older Tom Swift titles. Recently, I stumbled across Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle from 1910. Tom Swift’s father, Barton Swift, is an inventor. His latest project is a new turbine that could be worth a lot of money. A team of industrial spies attempt to steal the plans and the proto-type turbine, but Tom and Barton foil that plot.
Tom Swift decides to take the plans and the turbine to Albany to deliver to Barton Swift’s patent attorneys. Tom rides his new motorcycle and immediately gets into trouble. But, not to worry: Tom Swift always figures things out!
In Tom Swift In the Caves of Nuclear Fire, Tom Swift, Jr. investigates a mysterious mountain in the African jungle emitting deadly vapors, potentially holding the key to understanding atomic energy. I love the cover on this book!
Like Cheryl Strayed who took a 1,100 mile hike to change her Life, my encounters with those Christmas books changed my Life, too. What books fired up your love of reading?
I wish I could say I was reading Proust and Tolstoy as a kid, but the truth is, I was a comic book fan from age 7, then Edgar Rice Burroughs at age 12 thanks to those wonderful Ace and Ballantine paperbacks. In junior high, we kids in 7th and 8th grades could order books through the monthly TAB (Teenage Book Club) flyer. I don’t know for certain but I suspect the Teenage Book Club no longer exists, more’s the pity.
Fred, teenagers read their phones now…rarely books. Like you, I found Edgar Rice Burroughs around the same time as you did through those wonder ACE and Ballantine paperbacks. You should take a bow on the Wednesday post I did for your SIXGUN VIXENS ON THE TERROR TRAIL. Wonderful book!
Thanks, George. (belatedly but gratefully)
Fred, I plan to feature SIXGUN VIXENS on the cover of my next issue of QUICK DRAW! Well done!
And don’t worry, Scholastic has enough money these years that even if the school “book clubs” weren’t money makers (and I suspect they still are), they might just keep doing them just keep the goodwill of potential ebook readers. Though the TAB/Teen-Age Book club fliers dropped away by the ’70s, the Arrow Book Club and other similar offers to younger students continued into the ’90s at least.
I was a big Hardy Boys fan from the fourth grade on, reading the original Leslie McFarlane versions; luckily the overt racism went over my head. They had everything a young boy cold ask for — action, adventure, danger, a dash of humor, outdated and questionable scientific theories, camaraderie, and the knowledge that somewhere boys were doing things without adult supervision. The series lost ,much of its non-PC charm when the books were rewritten/updated/sanitized.
I was in the sixth grade when I tried to get into the Tom Swift Jr. series — and failed miserably. Strange, because I was already a proto-science fiction buff. There was something about them that just seemed too blah for me, Later, as an adult, I dove further back in time to read the original Tom Swift books, which were again not very PC. The original Tom was always a mealy-mouth, but he had grit! The growing cast of characters were diverse and amusing, with the exception of Tom’s girlfriend Mary, who was sexless (but so, too, was Tom), Tom always acted in a good cause, and vanquished his opponents (from schoolyard bullies to enemy agents to unscrupulous businessmen) with ease. As the series went on, the inventions got wilder and wilder, most of which were put into use by the U.S. government. Once in a while Tom would get away from his quiet, determined self, blithely killing dozens of attacking natives in one book, for instance. **sigh** But, all in all, the books were great fun — and yes, I’ve read every book in the original Tom Swift series,
As my younger (and older self began to recognize the racism and jingoism in these early and mid-twentieth century children’s books, I was able to view them as a snapshot into contemporary thinking, thankful that we as a society and a nation have grown out of that dated and disturbing thinking. Then the current Administration came in…
Jerry, I’ve only read a handful of the original Tom Swift books. I picked them up when I ran across them from time to time. Like you, I have mixed feelings for Tom Swift. He’s a Good Guy, but sometimes a bit clueless. I enjoyed the Tom Swift, Jr. books back when I was a kid. I’m sure I’d have a different opinion now.
The Hardy Boys here too. I broke my nose playing “touch” football with my brother and my cousin and it healed wrong, so I had to have it rebroken and reset. The first two Hardy Boys books were my reward for stoic reaction. I never read any of the Tom Swift books.
I do remember Old Yeller, however. Then, believe it or not, after seeing Ben-Hur at age 11 on a school trip to the Rivoli Theater in Manhattan, I bought the paperback of the book by General Lew Wallace and actually read it!
Jeff, so you were the one who actually read the Wallace book!
Jerry, I also read the novelization of WEST SIDE STORY. Eclectic has always been my middle name.
The WEST SIDE STORY novelization was written by Irving Shulman, who penned THE AMBOY DUKES and the source novel for REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, so he was required reading in my high school years.
Jeff, you must love those chariot races!
I did! I still do.
I was obsessed with Arthur C. Clarke in elementary school through junior high. Then Ray Bradbuy and Harlan Ellison through junior high. By high school it was Dickens and Faulkner.
I too have fond memories of the book (and record) sections of department stores.
Byron, I went through a Harlan Ellison phase in the late 1960s. Ellison was at the height of his powers and seemingly published a book every few months. I got around to Dickens in College.
I was an avid reader from an early age. I remember seeing my mom’s copy of THE CARPETBAGGERS (probably around the time it was released) and realizing that books didn’t need pictures to tell a story. The first “adult” book I remember reading was Evan Hunter’s MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, which I read when I was 11. It wasn’t just adult in theme and content but also in style—with flashbacks, interior monologues, and something that remains to this day one of my favorite literary devices: the gradually-revealed “shocking” revelation.
Deb, your reading was well above mine! I was reading ACE Doubles and other SF paperbacks in my teens. I did binge on a couple dozen Agatha Christies and Ellery Queens. I also went through a phase of Private Eye novels: Mike Shayne, Carter Brown, Frank Kane, etc. In my Senior Year, I finally started reading Literature–Dickens, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen.
The proxy! Jackie got it from The Carpetbaggers.
Like Deb, I was an avid reader from the age of four or so, since until I was almost 5yo, my parents and I lived in Fairbanks, AK, and there was a Lot of winter indoor time. Both my parents also were readers, if my mother more casually…so I Can Read It volumes of Grimm’s and Little Golden Books and Suuss were my first, and I was reading various sorts of adult-audience texts not long after, and in love with particularly but not exclusively horror fiction by the time I was 8yo, as well as tearing through the Newbery Award winners and shortlists at that time, along with Twain and Kipling and discovering Lancer/Magnum classics and such at the local Grant’s Department Stores on sale tables at a quarter a piece, and there picked up Twain and Wells and Jack London…having read a number of my father’s sf books as well by then (sadly, my mother’s backfile of EQMM and my father’s of 1950s/early ’60s sf magazines had been destroyed by the 1967 Chena River flood in Fairbanks.) And I read Harold Robbins’s THE BETSY about that time, and found even at that age a woman character’s claim that her bedmate’s semen tasted like “sweet, heavy cream” rather unlikely. My folks continued to be readers, after all, and didn’t try to hide their books, except perhaps a few with illustrations, away too much. (They were also auto-racing participants in Alaska, which is probably why they picked up THE BETSY, and the quality of the novel is probably why they didn’t ever buy any other Robbins books.).
Now if only we could encourage more of our fellow voters to analyze what is told to them rather than try to “think” with their limbic systems, we would have fewer Drumpfs, or for that matter Andrew Cuomos or Gavin Newsoms, in positions of anything like power in this or any country.
Todd, I read a couple of Harold Robbins books because they were EVERYWHERE back in the day…and incredibly cheap at used bookstores (I think I paid a quarter for THE BETSY).
Robbins gets a deservedly bad rap for the reams of dreck he published, although A STONE FOR DANNY FISHER, STILETTO, and, even (God help us!) THE CARPETBAGGERS were worthwhile reads.
I sold my parents’ copy with some other unloved items to a secondhand store in Honolulu in 1984…I’ll bet it wasn’t that copy you bought for a quarter, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same printing…
Jerry, I’d read that A STONE FOR DANNY FISHER was Robbins when he tried, in the context that the KID CREOLE film version starring a young Elvis Presley actually trying as well, which I thought at time of reading would be two bets that might be easy to win.
Checking if I’m disallowed further comment…
Suuss, as I tried to post previously, was discount Seuss.
I had some Little Golden Books and Classics Illustrated comics!
Bob, I was keen on Little Golden Books and Classics Illustrated comics, too! Then I graduated to DC comics…and Marvel.
I remember babysitting down the block and discovering this woman’s copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Don’t think I ever read Harold Robbins.
My mother subscribed to Readers Digest Condensed Books, with 3 or 4 abridged “classics” each month, and I read stuff like The High And the Mighty and The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant (the basis for Damn Yankees). Also, she had a bunch of Perry Mason books that I read.
My father always seemed to be working then, and it wasn’t until years later that he became a real reader. Of course, in Arizona my mother was on a first name basis with the librarians, and they’d call her when a book by an author she liked came in, which was often.
Jeff, my mother and father subscribed to a dozen magazines: LIFE, TIME, SATURDAY EVENING POST, READERS DIGEST, etc. Many of them were weeklies and so almost every day a new magazine arrived for us to read. Those days are long gone now…
Our family moved to The Pas in northern Manitoba when I was 10 years old. The town had no library or bookstore. but there was a small library in the school that had grades 1 to 12. As I always was a reader, I read what I could find in that library and the only books I remember were Tom Swift so I read them. Not the sort of book I should have liked. You could buy paperbacks and magazines in a tobacco store and that’s where I got most of my reading material such as Sport, The Sporting News and some detective and entertainment pulps. My father bought mystery writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner, George Harmon Coxe, A.A. Fair and Brett Halliday and they started me on the road to the crime novels that I read today. I still have some of the Halliday Michael Shayne paperbacks that my father bought.
Kent, my parents were members of the BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB so we had books arriving at our house on a regular basis. A friend of mine who got his PhD. in Reading, told me once: “If you have a home environment with plenty of books and magazines, the kids will become readers.” That was about 20 years ago. Now, with cell phones, I’m not sure that’s valid anymore.