Favorite Childhood Book?

Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?

Looking at this prompt, I find I am hard-pressed to remember any specific books from my childhood. I know I read a lot—a practice that would continue into my adolescence and early adulthood—including the Hardy Boys books, but I can’t pick out a singular volume.

When this sort of thing happens with a prompt, I then pivot and tell a story I want to tell. The Martin Memorial Library in York, PA, had a children’s wing. And with that came a certain rule: children were restricted to it and not allowed to go to the adult sections. This was probably more for keeping noisy kids out of the main library than it was about preventing access, which is an all-too-familiar problem today.

In any case, I found it difficult to find interesting things to read. I was already past the children’s book stage; Dick and Jane had long since run away. And many books that were supposed to be for children, as I perused them, seemed boring.

Then I hit on Bulfinch’s Mythology. I’m not sure what it was doing there; maybe because it was full of myths, legends, and fables, it seemed safe for kids. For me, it was the gateway to another world, a world of gods and goddesses and great heroes. It served as the gateway to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and, more importantly, Joseph Campbell’s books. These fired my imagination to help expand my personal universe, understand Greek drama, and create that world for my massive D&D campaign in grad school. (Yes, I was a Dungeon Master.) Without that search for something remotely interesting in the children’s wing, my life and thinking would have been much more narrow.

How about your favorite book? Did you find myths of gods and goddesses interesting? And please like and follow!