Childhood "Books"

The inspiration for this came from Sheila. Whoever reads this is going to think that I was a weird kid. And I probably was.

The task - list 5 books that played an important role in your childhood and explain why - is simple enough. The thing is, I didn't read a lot of books when I was a child. At least not a lot of books that I can point to as having played an important enough role to make note of. But I did read a lot, so I'm altering the rules just a bit. (Conjure up your best Darth Vader voice in your imagination - "I'm altering the deal...pray I don't alter it any further...").

The Baseball Encyclopedia. I've written about this before, but I got this book for Christmas when I was 8 years old, and it has been a constant companion since. It sits on the bookshelf in my office at work, where I regularly scare people with my ability to recall World Series results going back to the 1950s. My favorite part of the book when I was a kid was the World Series section, and I would read through the brief descriptions of each game and create the game in my head, imagining what the crowd was like, the field, the shadows, the players.

Time Magazine. On Wednesday afternoons, the first thing I would do after getting home from school was look for that week's issue of Time Magazine, and then sit down and read it cover to cover. I may not have been familiar with a lot of literary characters at the time, but I sure knew who Hugh Sidey and Jay Cocks were. I still have all of the issues from the Watergate era moldering in a box, somewhere out in the garage. Every now and then I pull one out and read it.

Sports Illustrated Magazine. This was the Friday afternoon obsession. I still remember a classmate named Mark, and how we would spend most of our day on Fridays trying to predict who would be on the cover that week. I think we even kept score for a while. I even got a letter printed in 1974; ironically, it was in the swimsuit issue, so I couldn't even take it to school.

The 18 Greatest Golf Holes in America, by Dan Jenkins. I've always enjoyed golf, even though I'm lucky to break 100, but became obsessed with this book after a neighbor (who happened to be the Titleist golf representative for Northern California) loaned it to me, also in 1974. Dan Jenkins, the longtime SI writer on golf and college football, had traveled the country, and identified what he felt were the best 18 holes of golf in America. And he had done it the hard way - not choosing a bunch of great 18th holes, but rather the best 1st hole, the best 2nd hole, and so on...it started a life-long interest in golf architecture, to the point where one shelf in our library is almost solely dedicated to books on the subject.

How The Grinch Stole Christmas. This was the first book I ever memorized, and I remember reading it to my cousins when I was 7 or 8 years old. I don't think I could recite it from memory today, but I still make a point to read it several times during the holiday season.

So there you have it - a strange and perhaps motley collection, but one that served me reasonably well in the formative years (or so I'd like to think).