Famous authors
A short video that I watched today remind me of how my travels through literature were sometimes controlled by others. Yes there was a school library but I also had to read the things that had been chosen in the curriculum. For example, books by Mark Twain. I have to wonder why the school board was willing to take those on while ignoring the obvious choices of books about the Drew and Hardy for the children. Or the Bobbsey twins. I would like to think that school boards put a lot of time into making curriculum choices but this is probably not so. Rather book choices were made at a higher level in order to fulfill enormous book orders. Much better to buy several thousand copies of a paperback then to go through the hassles of single orders for thousands of children. I cannot remember the first time I visited a real bookstore. Probably much later in life. Instead we received small flyers that gave us access to a curated list of books for people of our own age. Often reduced in content to fit it into a chosen book size. As for the textbooks in my school they were designed to last forever. Or so it seemed. Rooms filled with stacks of books purchased at an earlier date. We paid no attention to the date of printing. We had no choice. When you learned which Shakespeare play would be on the curriculum for a given grade level everything else seemed to fall into place beside it. I realize that the plays by famous authors that were given as choices were anything but. There was a plan. Why else have us read some of those books. I think back to a book called «Cue for treason» which was hardly political. Instead it gave the school a chance to present us with an alternative view to history. Opening our minds to greater things. I tricked them because I then turned around and went to the library and read most of the other books by that author. Breaking out of the mold I guess. And have I ever offered any of those early pieces of fiction to my own children? I hardly think so. By the time my children could read they had also learned that there were places to get pretty much anything you wanted. Good libraries for example. It would be easier to have a book where all of the questions had been pre decided by a committee but that was not how things went.
