Book by Book by Michael Dirda

Coffin.
                                                                                     —HENRY WARD BEECHER
WE ARE WHAT WE READ
    Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) has written more immortal works than any other twentieth-century American author. Think about it: Virtually every child in this country has read, is reading, or will read
The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The Butter Battle Book
, and perhaps a dozen others equally splendid. Consider too that each of Seuss’s more than forty titles is read not once, not twice, but scores of times, usually to pieces. In a library they become, literally, things of shreds and patches.
    And what do we learn from Seuss? The joy of words and pictures at play, of course, but also the best and most humane values any of us might wish to possess: pluck, determination, tolerance, reverence for the earth, suspicion of the martial spirit, the fundamental value of the imagination.
    This is why early reading matters. At any age, but especially in childhood, books can transform lives. As Graham Greene once wrote, “In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.” For the young are all what college English professors would label “bad” readers: They identify with a story’s hero or heroine, and they daydream about being as resourceful as the Boxcar Children, as brave as Brave Irene, as clever as Dido Twite or Ulysses. And what children behold, they become.
ONCE UPON A TIME
    As a boy I never read
Winnie-the-Pooh
or
The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan
or
Charlotte’s Web.
Perhaps our local library didn’t stock them, or maybe I judged such works too feminine for the tough guy buried inside my pudgy, nearsighted body. Once I could actually read, and my mother turned her pedagogical attentions to my younger sisters, my dad started to take me regularly to the Lorain Public Library. There I checked out
Curious George, The Five Chinese Brothers
, and Danny Dunn’s series of misadventures with antigravity paint and homework machines. I vividly recall
MissPickerell Goes to Mars
and
Treasure at First Base
and the maritime derring-do of Howard Pease’s young heroes. A little later my elementary school class joined a paperback book club, and I soon began to build my own personal library:
Big Red, Secret Sea, Mystery of the Piper’s Ghost, Snow Treasure, Revolt on Alpha C, Mystery of the Spanish Cave.
    In fifth grade the book club’s newsletter offered three of the best adventure stories ever written: Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
and
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
What has ever been better than to be ten years old with books like these to open on dark and stormy evenings? Late one happy fall I settled down with the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, as well as Verne’s
The Mysterious Island
, all checked out from the branch library in the kind of thick volumes you could live in for weeks.
    Alas, city libraries then refused to stock many popular juvenile potboilers, in particular the innumerable exploits of the Hardy Boys and Tarzan; still, one could always unearth yet one more new adventure of these and other similarly resilient heroes in the cluttered basements of neighbors and relatives. To this day, I remember a certain Saturday afternoon, a paper bag of candy corn, and the sun streaming onto the glorious pages of
Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.
Life has been downhill ever since.
    By the time I finished elementary school my