Mirkwood

This is the second consecutive post dealing with childhood reads but Kate’s Early Book Meme was difficult to resist. Here are the answers that I came up with:

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

I was not a reading prodigy, so I think I probably learned to read when I was three and a half years old and was admitted to kindergarten where reading and writing were, of course, taught simultaneously. My parents have still not forgotten that I was unable to draw an upright letter “A”, and my kindergarten notebooks, diligently preserved, bear witness to dozens of “A”s standing precariously on one leg. Reading came as a matter of course, and was taught in school, and supplemented by baby sentences uttered at home. English, not being our mother-tongue, was not spoken at home until my sister and I started using a 3-language slang hybrid of English, Marathi and Hindi, that was spoken at school.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

I can answer this with a fair amount of certainty. My mother and aunt were big fans of the Russian book exhibitions that used to be held in the city in those days. From one such, we got a beautiful picture book, which had a minimum amount of words in the captions, the entire story being told in two or three pictures.

Continue reading ‘Vasilisa: Early Book Meme’

On the radio show called To the Best of Our Knowledge, Anne Strainchamps talks to Melanie Rehak, author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. In the interview, Rehaks mentions that in her latest incarnation published by Simon and Schuster, duly revamped for the new millennium, Nancy has a hybrid car, speaks the current teen lingo and narrates the mysteries in the first person.

I don’t know if kids around the world still grow up with Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (probably not), but back in the day, my sister and I devoured books from both series, she faster than I. I started around the age of ten or eleven and in the space of five years had gobbled more than a hundred books. I remember keeping a list of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and the terrible Case Files series, which I stopped updating around #102 or somewhere close. I read The Hardy Boys strictly as mystery stories and was never really impressed by Frank and Joe as personalities, but for many of my middle school years, I found that none of the girls in class measured up to Nancy Drew. How could I have known that she was “designed” to have no flaw at all?

Continue reading ‘Everyone has a Nancy Drew story’