Summer Reading

I read a quote the other day that said there are two types of women: those we read and loved the Betsy-Tacy books, and those who didn't.

Not sure where I ran across it - it's summertime, and I stumble across all sorts of summer reading advice. Newsweek has its weekly author-of-note listing five influential books; People magazine lists what celebrities are reading, and NPR's Morning Edition chats with renowned librarian Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust, on her summer reading choices.

But I do know which category I fall into: I adore Betsy-Tacy. And Tib, too. The books are charming - they have a certain innocence and simplicty in their story-telling that has been lost today.

Which isn't to say there isn't excellent children's literature out there today - Sharon Creech and Lois Lowry, Kevin Henkes and Lisa Yee. Not to mention JK Rowling.

But my favorite part of reading with my girls is taking them back to books I adored as a child. I always loved to read. I went to school so anxious to learn to read books for myself. I had grown up with Captain Kangaroo reading aloud to me, books like Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Curious George. I checked out books from the library on Jeanne-Marie, the little French girl who watched the sheep. We didn't start learning to read in earnest until first grade. Which was OK - in kindergarten I contented myself with listening to Mrs. Shipman read aloud. Until we got a new girl, Janet Anderson, and she could actually read. Herself. I was crushed - I wanted to be the one who could read first.

I actually ended up being quite good friends with Janet (her older brother, Jeff, was friends with my brother John, and she and I shared a love of David Cassidy). But the sting of not being the first reader never quite left me, and I made up for it. Once I was a certified individual reader, I made up for lost time. And it's an obsession that hasn't quite left me - the master's degree in literature is testament to that affair with books.

It has been with great joy that I have shared the books of my childhood with my own daughters. I have read aloud to them the Carolyn Haywood books about Betsy and Billy, the Eleanor Estes series on the Moffat clan, and Beverly Cleary's accounts of Henry Huggins and gang. Charlotte's Web, A Wrinkle in Time, books by Lois Lenski and Sydney Taylor. I have read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books aloud three times, all from the well-worn set of paperbacks I got for my ninth birthday - they are taped together, dog-eared, and missing parts of the covers, which only shows how much they have been enjoyed.

I even got Alison turned on to Nancy Drew for a time- I love that she read Nancy critically. Her favorite part, she told me, was when Nancy lost her scuba diving equipment when it was washed overboard - so she rushed home to get her *spare* scuba set - !

I cry every time Mary goes blind, every time Jack the dog doesn't wake up one morning. I cry every time Charlotte the spider dies along at the state fair. And I cringe a little bit when they talk about putting on black face for the minstrel show or describe the Indians as red-faced savages. So I pause and explain to the girls that we don't use those terms anymore, opening up discussion on how life and mores have changed over the years.

I've had to open my canon to explore some other books with the girls, books of their choice. I've read Junie B. Jones and Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Treehouse Books. We've enjoyed many, many picture books over the years - there was a time when I could recite Fox in Socks, Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat verbatim. And we enjoyed the American Girl books together; not too long ago I found Sylvia on her bed reading one of the Felicity books, and she proudly told me she had read the entire book in one sitting.

All three of the girls have taken up this same love of reading. Alison adores fantasy, books like Lord of the Rings and a new series of books by authors like Amelia Atwater Rhodes. Maddie prefers books by Sharon Creech, though her latest purchase was The Westing Game, a book I remember reading and that Alison has read, too. Sylvia is still well into Junie B.

And at the moment, we are reading aloud Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. My girls, too, will fall into the category of women who read and loved Betsy-Tacy. It's the best gift I could give them.