Of mice and motorcycles
I’ve been thinking a lot about what books have influenced my life. I’m not talking about graduate school reading list stuff. I’m talking about books from childhood that had a huge impact on my world view. I’ve settled on these: the Space Cat series by Ruthven Todd (amazon), Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton (amazon), and The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary (amazon).
What is interesting to me now are the degrees of anthropomorphism each of these books represents. While this is probably not unusual in children’s literature, I wonder how these books contributed to my affinity for cats and motorcycles. I guess it could be worse; I could have chosen mice and steam shovels, which could be problematic.
I am leaving out the set of science encyclopedias from the 1950s that I read at the dinner table in lieu of conversation from the age of 8 until I was 14 or so. I loved these books for their wonderful illustrations and their fresh optimism about the future, which was supposed to have been the world I was living in then. I, too, believed the transistor would make my world a better place. I guess in many ways, it has.
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