Childhood favorites

I found this at Heather's site, The Library Ladder. (It was written by Kate, of Kate's Book Blog.)

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?
Family legend has it that I read at age 3, and that no one taught me. Family legend also has it that my mother read at age 2 1/2, and she could read upside down, from a newspaper. Family dynamic has it that everyone in the family is a genius, but some have more extravagant ways of proving it.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what’s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?
I owned many books. The first one I remember was a Little Golden Book about ballet. All of the little girls in the book were tiny blonde goddesses. I studied ballet for years, but I never achieved goddesshood, or blondeness. Fortunately, I learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction very early. As for books I borrowed from the library, The Little Lame Prince, which I borrowed so many times from the school library that I still remember where it was shelved!

3. What’s the first book that you bought with your own money?
Jane Eyre. My parents took me to the big Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue in New York because my mother wanted to buy art books. I wandered over to the fiction section and happened upon Jane Eyre. Reader, I bought it.
I should also mention another book I bought when I was very young: Franny and Zooey. I bought it in the local 5 & 10 cent store. The clerk was reluctant to sell it to me because she thought it was pornographic, and that I was too young to read it. I'm sure she hadn't read it. I've read it so many times since then that I can recite passages from it. I've never outgrown the notion that I am Franny's astral twin, nor the gratitude that my mother never tried to put me on a show like "It's a Wise Child." (How did she miss that one?)

4. Were you a re-reader as a child?
Yes. I still am a re-reader. As a child, I re-read Little Women (a gift from my paternal grandfather) and Jane Eyre (see above).

5. What’s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?
Again, Jane Eyre. I identified with her loneliness and the way she had to repress her passions.

6. Are there children’s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?
Andersen's fairy tales, especially "The Emperor's Nightingale,""The Snow Queen" and "The Little Mermaid." I wasn't particularly interested in fairy tales when I was a child, but I became obsessed with them as I got older. Now, I see many things in everyday life as expressions of myth and tale and archetype, and I long to learn more.

Very selective book meme

Very Selective Book Meme

(stolen from The Library Ladder: Orange Blossom Goddess a/k/a Heather)

1. One book that changed your life:
Jane Eyre. I read it when I was about 10, for the first time - I remember that I bought a used, hardback copy in the old Barnes & Noble, downtown, Fifth Avenue. My parents had taken me there as a treat, so you know what manner of child I was. (The child is mother to the woman, eh?) I still have that copy, and I can open to any page and read with pleasure.

2. One book that you've read more than once:
Everyone seems to be saying Little Women, and that would be one of mine, too - but I'll say Mrs. Dalloway, which I practically have memorized.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:
Savage Beauty (biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay) -Nancy Mitford. (The meme doesn't say the ONLY book...)

4. One book that made you laugh:
I'm reading Lolita right now, and it's drop-dead funny, despite (because of?) the sheer monstrousness of Humbert Humbert, and the utterly awful object of his desire. Nabokov's language is outrageously funny and beautiful, and now I know why Amy Tan reads this book yearly, just to plunge into the language.

5. One book that made you cry:
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, by Marion Meade. Something about Dorothy Parker touches my heart, and Meade illuminates this sad, frustrated life. Another woman whose biographies make me cry: Zelda Fitzgerald.

6. One book you wish you had written:
The Time Traveller's Wife.

7. One book you wish had never been written:
Heather said, "I can’t say there are any books I wish hadn’t been written…just books I wish I hadn’t read." Ditto.

8. One book you're currently reading:
Yeats's Ghosts - Brenda Maddox.

9. One book you've been meaning to read:
A Changed Man - Francine Prose. It's on my Summer Reading Challenge list, and I'm going to read it before September begins. I am. I am!

Anyone who is reading this may consider herself tagged.