Basic Reading: Fourth Grade Upgrade

 

Basic reading. A memory collection of books, comics, and magazines I read from elementary (McQueeney) through middle school (Briesemeister). Ranging from very simple to what I would describe as ‘cusp books’, that would lead to more adult reading. They will come in batches; some are representative parts of series. Some we had; some we saw in libraries. Most have appeared on the blog before, but I think arranged here by category and time they can be more illuminating of certain aspects of my childhood.

I have spoken elsewhere of how the Fourth Grade was a sort of Renaissance of Reading for me. Though starting to fall behind in Math, I saw how I could still be brainy in English, and I began cultivating a bookish persona, probably partly in an effort to impress our new teacher, Mrs. Bratton, who was my ‘Mrs. Othmar’. This was quite easy because I really enjoyed reading anyway. I began concentrating on the ‘chapter books’ that were now more available to me.

This was the grand time of Roald Dahl, where Mrs. Bratton read us James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the class library I read Detectives in Togas and Childcraft Volume 2: Storytelling and Other Poems (1954) with its wonderful illustrations, many by the Disney Studio. I read The Nip and Tuck War, and “I set out to prove at the time that the story of Nip and the story of Mowgli bore more than a passing resemblance to one another. It's the first instance of literary criticism I ever essayed.” To stretch my literary bona fides I ordered The Three Musketeers and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I indulged in the science fiction of the Sprockets books, Matthew Looney books, and the Mushroom Planet books. I read the never-forgotten if not-too-precisely remembered Cinders. And the next year in Fifth Grade I found Blanche Winder’s Stories of King Arthur, my first plunge into the Matter of Britain. All these books and others shown here are written about in more detail elsewhere in the Niche.