Quote:
Originally Posted by Victoria
Rereading Anne has me wondering about the influence of contemporary boys’ books. Would the adventure stories like Tom Sawyer have inspired young men in similar ways?
|
I did read
Tom Sawyer as a lad but my reaction to it then was quite lukewarm—despite the praise heaped on it my my grade school teacher. In fact, while I was a voracious reader my diet was about 90% science fiction. Andre Norton was a great favourite and her work is (IMO) eminently rereadable yet. The
Tom Corbett books are cleverly plotted for the most part and though they tried to have a basic valid science fiction background they have certainly dated in that respect. One interesting aspect to them is the presence of a top notch scientist who is a woman and the adverts in the original publications were addressed to “boys and girls”. I take a little nostalgic space trip in them from time to time and rather enjoy that but they don’t replicate the fascinating excitement of my childhood experience. I devoured those old Groff Conklin science fiction anthologies from our public library and have collected them since. Some of the stories which I found fascinating I now realise are pretty low-grade while others that my young self thought rubbish are, in fact, true trail-blazers.
These books and others of that sort did give me an abiding interest in actual science and I did get a minor in Biological Science for my primary degree (my major was English). How much this is the case for others who shared this type of experience I don’t know though one person in my immediate family has gone along a similar path in the sense that her childhood reading had a lasting effect on her later interests.