Childhood Book

I was having dinner with my niece and nephew. They didn't really eat. They were reading Winnie the Pooh story on my iPhone (it comes for free when you download iBook).

"Do you like the story?" I checked with my nephew, who is five.

"Yes." he nodded hard without looking at me.

"Did you read it?" my niece asked.

"I just started." I said honestly. Call me childish, but Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet have been my new friends on subway.

"Uncle Simon, what stories did you read when you were little?" my niece is eight and she always has one more good question.

I forgot how I answered her. When I got home, lying in bed I asked myself again, what did I read when I was little?

The first story book I can recall is Aesop's fable about how fox tricked a piece of meat from crow, or maybe the race between hare and turtle. Those were picture books though.

The first real book was Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales. Aside from his well-know stories like "The Little Match Girl", "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid", the details of life in Copenhagen more than a hundred years ago left me curious impression. For example, one had to wear wooden overshoes to go out on street. Two pairs of shoes at the same time! But as a kid, I liked Grimm's Fairy Tales better. Those stories have more drama. Maybe that's why nowadays we saw more production of "Snow White" and "Cinderella" than those of Anderson's, even he is such a great writer. By the way, there is a Hans Christian Anderson's statue in Central Park with a happy little duck. Go find it out if you have not seen it.

Then I bumped upon the great "One Thousand and One Nights" at a relative's home. What an excellent book! I dug out all the volumes from the bottom of a closet. Each of them are hundreds of pages thick. I devoured all of them in a single summer, and came back the next year to enjoy them again. One thing about folk story is, it doesn't really care about coherence and structure. The story flows along despite all the fixed rules about how a story should be. There is story in story, story about a story; and sometimes you feel the story-teller forgot the story. Had you read "One Thousand and One Nights" first, modern novels like Hundred Years of Solitude won't come as a complete surprise. When comes to magic, our imagination are bound by nothing.

Jules Verne was big in my elementary school years. I read fast so I finished almost all the Chinese translations of his works I could find in a couple of summers. Still unsatisfied, I searched school and local library for sci-fi books and found Isaac Asimov. His books instantly became my golden standard for every sci-fi book. His style bears some typical characteristic in paperbacks, yet it is very clear and direct without nonsense.

At fourth grade my interest shifted to Great Chinese Classical Novels. I read three of them except Hong Lou Meng. Those I read are all heroic epics in a way. I enjoyed the war, crime, mythology, adventure but despised love stories. I tried a couple of times on Hong Lou Meng, but was never able to finish the first three chapters.

After Jules Verne, I picked up detectives by Sir Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie: Sherlock Holmes and Poirot.