Top Ten Books of My Childhood

In his autobiography Wordstruck, Robert MacNeil talks with great fondness about the books that permeated his mind and saturated his heart as a child, books that taught him to savor rich, carefully chosen and well placed words as a grown man. C. S. Lewis, too, remembers his childhood as one simply overflowing with books. With them, I'm convinced that the stuff we read as kids sinks deep, anchoring our adult hearts in mysterious and formative ways.

As I've been reflecting a bit lately on the power of words, I thought I'd share my list of the Top Ten Books from My Childhood (from no particular era).

10. The Swiss Family Robinson.
Johann David Wyss.
I went through a phase where I was quite taken with the shipwrecked on a desert island motif. I read a few of these kind of books, but none of them were quite as compelling to my imagination as the Swiss Family Robinson (I also tried Robinson Crusoe, but didn't make it past about chapter 3).

9. The Magician's Nephew.
C. S. Lewis.
A friend of mine recently called C. S. Lewis the "evangelical patron saint of the imagination." Nice. I could probably fill up 70% of my list with the Narnia books alone, but the Magician's Nephew was the first one I read, and easily one of my favorites in the series. There is a certain texture and light to this story that sets it apart from the others, I think. More mythic, more antique, more archetypal. My Dad introduced me to Narnia, and Narnia in turn introduced me to the fascinating worlds of Greek and Norse mythology.

8. The Coral Island.
R. M. Ballantyne.
Another of my Dad's recommendations. I really only remember one scene from the book, but I remember it vividly: some cannibals execute their captives by lying them down along the beach and running their huge dug-out canoes over them. Ballantyne describes in graphic detail the victims eyes bugging out of their heads as the weight crushes them. I was intrigued to discover much later, when teaching high school English, that The Coral Island was the book William Golding was satirizing when he started the novel that would eventual evolve into the masterpiece, The Lord of the Flies.

7. The Hobbit.
J. R. R. Tolkien.
Between the two of them, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis spawned a lot of imaginary countries in my childhood. The floor of my room was often strewn with huge maps of made-up worlds, with mountain ridges that looked suspiciously like the misty mountains, and castles with names only a few phonemes off of "Cair Paravel." I had whole notebooks filled with my own versions of Middle Earth or Narnia. I read The Hobbit to my own kids a while back and I was amazed that as a 10-year-old boy I ever got through those long descriptive passages-- Tolkien spends almost ten pages just describing the desolation of Smaug.

6. I Want to Go Home.
Gordon Korman.
I wasn't a huge Gordon Korman fan, but this is a hilarious book. I loved Rudy Miller. I loved that he hated all sports and excelled nonchalantly at them all. I loved the whole "escape from summer camp" theme. This was the first book I ever read that had me genuinely laughing out loud; it gave me a real taste for funny writing.

5. Who, What, When, Where Book About the Bible.
Published by David C. Cook, the Sunday School curriculum people, this was a book of Bible trivia, word games, "did-you-know" stories and last-minute-Sunday-School-activities. It was my primary reading material whenever I stayed home from school sick, and I have vivid memories sitting in bed with an "emergency pail" at my side and flipping through this book over and over again. Could be where my love for biblical esoterica started.

4. The Everything Book.
I have no idea where this book came from, but it was an anthology of craft, game, and activity ideas for kids. At age five or six, I would pour over it, mind racing with imaginative possibilities. Looking at it today, the ideas are pretty simple-- make a "tent" out of a blanket draped over a table is one-- but the illustrations make them look so exotic and antique. The only activity I remember actually doing in this book was a (rather disappointing) homemade paste recipe.

3. Chatterer the Red Squirrel.
Thornton Burgess.
Thornton Burgess' Green Forest books were probably the first chapter books I read to myself. I had a bunch of them in the series, and spent a fair bit of time keeping lists of all the different animals that lived in Burgess' world, drawing maps of the Green Forest and the Green Meadows, and listing the books in the series I hadn't yet read. Chatterer was the first Green Forest book I got, and, since it is probably one of the best, will have to stand in for all the rest.

2. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

C. S. Lewis.
Okay, Lewis gets to entries. This is, in my opinion, the best Narnia book, hands down. Everything about it sparkles. I remember finishing it for the first time and just holding it in my hand and staring at the cover for a while. I felt like the dazzling light of the sea at the end of the world was shining in my own eyes.

1. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Howard Pyle.
The sign-out card in my school library's copy of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood had only my name on it. About fifteen times in a row. There are a number of different versions of the Robin Hood legend, but Howard Pyle's complete, unabridged and illustrated version is by far the classic. Written in "Thee-and-Thou" English, with lots of ballads and poems and fascinating characters, this book absolutely enthralled me as a young boy. It was the first book that I shed genuine, and, in retrospect, grown-up tears over.