Average Jane’s Favorite Childhood Books

When I was growing up, I read so many books that eventually I’d read every children’s book in our small, local library that I wanted to read. I believe I was in elementary school when my mother began selecting books from the grown-ups’ section of the library for me.

In the summertime we often visited my great-aunt in Lake Andes, South Dakota and one of the highlights of those visits was the town’s Carnegie Library. It was filled with fascinating old books like the Edgar Rice Burroughs “Tarzan” and “John Carter of Mars” series (both of which would be considered highly inappropriate for children and extremely politically incorrect by today’s standards), Oz books I’d never seen before, and exotic treats like the Bobbsey Twins series.

My particular favorites were the Oz books. I still have a pretty good collection of the trade paperback Oz books from the ’70s and I like to re-read them now and then. I even have one hardback that belonged to my grandfather when he was a child, but I haven’t bought any more because they run about $70-$100 each these days. Fortunately, you can find a pretty good selection of full-text versions of Oz books online here, thanks to Project Gutenberg. If “The Wizard of Oz” movie is your sole exposure to the Oz world, you owe it to yourself to check out the rest of the stories and the wonderful illustrations that accompany them.

A lot of my favorite book series were written in the late 19th century and early 20th century. I imagine that’s partly because my parents and grandparents eagerly shared their favorite books with me. It certainly helped me develop a wide-ranging and somewhat obscure vocabulary. Of course, I was the kind of kid who’d sit on the teeter-totter at recess reading the dictionary, so there you are.

I’m very much looking forward to sharing my old book collection with my niece when she gets a little older. Pretty soon she’ll have the attention span for me to be able to start reading Oz books to her. Maybe then we’ll have another generation flummoxing her classmates with her large and ever-so-slightly anachronistic vocabulary. I sure hope so!