The classics are books that refuse to be eradicated from your mind and hide themselves in the folds of memory. A classic is a book that is never finished saying what it has to say.”
Italo Calvino
My Favourite Authors
Children’s Authors
Christian Faith
My childhood reading
My mother taught me to read when I was four years old. I’ve been reading ever since!
I was fortunate to grow up in Dunedin, New Zealand. In my childhood there was a wonderful Children’s library, housed in an old two-story house in town. My father would take us there on a Saturday morning and deposit us on the doorstep. My brothers and I would then spend the morning finding new treasures to devour over the coming week. We would then take our big piles of books and walk around the street to the “Adult library”, housed in a wonderful old building in marble and stone to meet up with my father.
I thought that if the children’s library could hold so many wonderful books that the Adult’s version would be like a wonderland. Even the newspaper reading area fascinated me, with all the old men sitting reading the latest papers to while away their Saturday mornings.
I decided at about the age of 10 or 11 to read through every book in the Children’s library. I’m not sure how far I actually got, but spent many happy hours in those books. I especially loved biographies, probably a precursor to my enthusiasm for Psychology. The most memorable being a biography of the female aviator, Amy Johnson. For a number of years had dreams of being a pilot and imagined many exciting adventures. My imagination often gave me an escape from the sometimes harsh realities of my actual life.
Teenage disillusionment
As I transitioned into teenage years, a new, multi-story library was built near the centre of town. I found it noisy and bewildering, everything combined in one place. I also became rather disillusioned with the choice of books in the “young adult/teenage” area. After the wonderful books of my childhood, these seemed a poor substitute. They were full of teenage angst: relationships gone wrong and all the accompanying drama. I craved a gentler, kinder world where imagination and wonder still existed alongside the growing pains. I was not to discover such books until I was home educating my children. So, I stopped reading!
At school, we were given what I considered mostly dystopian books to read; this was the late 70s and early 80s. We read “Tess of the Durbavilles” by Thomas Hardy, I found it depressing and raged against the unfairness it depicted. We also read “1984” by George Orwell, which was not calculated to aid a cheery view of life either. Then we came to “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, the only book from my school years that I have re-read; although it is hardly a cheerful book either . For Plays, we studied Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Othello!
My only bright memory of high school English classes, was studying the War Poets: Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooks and Sassoon. I loved poetry and felt that here was scope for imagination. I’m not sure what the Education department at the time thought it was creating but one thing it certainly did not do was whet my appetite to read!
Love for reading rekindled
I am so glad that in raising and educating my own children, I have been able to rekindle my love for good literature. I have surrounded my children with good books from the day of their birth and they all read for pleasure the genre they each like best.
Books take me to another place, another time and show me life through another’s eyes.
On these pages I will introduce you to some of my favourite authors and books, I hope you will find some new treasures and be reminded of some old friends.
