In the spirit of our earlier “happy computer memories” thread, I’ll open one for happy book memories. What’s a book you read that occupies a warm-and-fuzzy spot in your memory? What book calls you back to the first time you read it, the way the smell of a bakery brings back a conversation with a friend?
As a child, I was into mystery stories and Ancient Egypt both (not to mention dinosaurs and deep-sea animals and…). So, for a gift one year I got an omnibus set of the first three Amelia Peabody novels. Then I read the rest of the series, and then new ones kept coming out. I was off at science camp one summer when He Shall Thunder in the Sky hit the bookstores. I don’t think I knew of it in advance, but I snapped it up and read it in one long summer afternoon with a bottle of soda and a bag of cookies.
At the risk of coming over as an enormous weirdo, but most of my warm fuzzy childhood memories about books are with non-fiction technical books. There were some fiction books too, but nothing that stands out nearly as much back then…
I’ll never forget the Commodore 64 user manual. Don’t know if that counts as a book, but at least it was bound like one. It’s unimaginable for a computer manual today, but it contained a whole BASIC programming course, which was my first encounter with the whole topic of programming. Building on that, another book that got deeper into Basic and C64 computer internals. That latter one is the most wonderful written computer book I’ve ever had. It’s not specifically targeted at children, but written in a way that a child can understand it… not sure that genre of book exists anymore. Apart from that, hobby electronics books. Many of them, even more than computer stuff.
Oh and then there was that one book about music making on the Commodore Amiga, music was my other big fascination besides technology stuff. One unforgettable moment was when I read the part where it explained how to use copy/paste in the music software I was using. I had no clue about copy/paste in general at that point. Almost all the software was in English, and I didn’t speak English as a child, so I figured out how to use programs with a lot of trial and error and occasionally looking up individual words in a dictionary. But cut/copy/paste, I couldn’t figure out what those menu options were for. So when I read about it in the book, it was like “omg omg omg” and I tried it out, and I was so happy because now it was so much less tedious to have repeating things like drum patterns. Still remember that moment of joy, I literally thanked the book :')
As for fiction books, the most memorable is LotR, but that was much later, as a young adult. A pretty standard pick, I know…