That "book I had been looking for since fifth grade," I mentioned at the end of my last post? Here's that story...
I had a taste for fairy tales as a child, but “fantasy”—except for the OZ books and a few others—was in short supply in America in those days, so I had to sigh and make do with whatever else came to hand. Being a greedy reader, I simply devoured my way along my parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves. Our Curry grandparents had “sets” of books, most of them soberly unfantastic: all of Nathaniel Hawthorne, all of Dickens, Carlyle, The Letters of the Presidents, George Eliot and assorted other worthies of the nineteenth century. So, even though much of it sailed right over my head, I read them all and—the mind reels—I read evenThe Letters of the Presidents, of which there must have been eight or ten volumes. (I can only hope that I skipped like mad.) Fortunately, Read More