Ten Great Companions

Stone Soup - a traditional folk tale (ca. 1720)

The Emperor’s New Clothes - Hans Christian Andersen (1837)

Go Navy Go - Joe Archibald (1956)

MAD’S Al Jaffee Spews Out Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions - Al Jaffee (1968)

The Story of a Bad Boy - Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1936)

Purple Violet Squish - David Wilkerson (1969)

The Mysterious North - Pierre Berton (1956)

Travels in Iceland :1752-1757— Eggert Olafsson and Bjarni Palsson (1805)

The Room - Mordicai Gerstein (1984)

The Space Trilogy - C.S. Lewis - (1938-1945)

I remember Stone Soup being read to my kindergarten class. I don’t recall the first time I read The Emperor’s New Clothes. Each story illustrates the consequences of gullibility and vanity (maybe the most dangerous form of gullibility); valuable reminders that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Go Navy Go is more representative of my preferred literary genre during my grade school years. I knew where the sports stories were shelved and on library day - that’s where I went.

I grew up reading my brother’s Mad Magazine collection - in my “formative" years. The release of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions coincided with my becoming a teenager and my world was changed forever! At the age of 15 being sophomoric came naturally. As a joke, I checked out The Story of a Bad Boy from our high school library. The joke was on me. It turned out to be a very good book; like a New England Huckleberry Finn. I actually read the whole book . . . and liked it.

If ever there was a mystical bookstore experience in my life (i.e. Never Ending Story) it centered around Purple Violet Squish. At the downtown bookstore where I bought my rock and roll magazines, a paperback with psychedelic colors that matched the equally psychedelic title, grabbed my attention. I bought it to read more about the cool “counterculture.” This event was part of a cosmic design, a step forward in transporting me into a truly, absolutely, never ending story. Not many years after and just a few blocks away, I would find myself standing on a stage beside the author -with his hand on my shoulder!

Military Intelligence? Stationed on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, I was assigned the task of sending an old library’s worth of old books to the dump - in preparation for the new books that would occupy the new library. The Mysterious North did not make it to the dump. Being less than 10° from the equator was an ideal location for reading a book about the Yukon.

Over 200 years after Travels in Iceland was written, I was there - experiencing much of what I was reading about: the northern lights, the midnight sun and the warm hospitality of the Icelanders.

The Room was a Language Arts teacher’s delight, and I was a delighted Language Arts teacher (it also mentions traveling to Iceland). It provided a wonderful opportunity for my students to decide what came next, then write and illustrate their ideas.I read and used it with junior and senior high students.

The Space Trilogy is not only a great companion but an established “must re-read” as well. I'll loan them, one at a time, but you can't keep them!

“Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.” C.S. Lewis