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.
I didn’t misspend my youth in any of the normal ways. Instead I got moderately invested in what was then called the Star Wars Expanded Universe and is now called Legends canon. On one hand I still glance fondly at the two separate editions I have of Timothy Zahn’s Thrown trilogy, with one being a newer set I picked up at a con to get signed and the other being the half-deatroyed set of old paperbacks I assembled from used book sales over a solid ~5 years or so, each of which was in at least fair condition when I first got it and is now much farther from it from the ravages of being carried around by a teenager and read and reread in any spare 5-10 minutes that didn’t have anything else to do. Oh the joys of having ADHD before smart phones were ubiquitous.
The tradeoff is that by virtue of picking things out of used book sales rather than seeking out specific series and the like is that I read so much weird junk The Jedi Academy trilogy which culminated in Luke’s first class of students collectively force pushing a whole fleet of star destroyers into interplanetary space? Yep. The Corellian trilogy featuring Han’s villainous cousin and yet another galaxy-rending superweapon that will only respond to a small child? Read it. Darksaber where Jabba the Hutt’s nephew tries to build his own death star only to be undone by his own corner cutting and incompetent workforce? Oh yeah. I also had bits and pieces of the Scholastic Book Fair-approved Jedi Apprentice series of YA stories about Obi-wan and Qui-gon’s adventures before episode I and more interestingly for this thread a few parts of a different children’s series I can’t remember the name of featuring a Jedi prince, multiple attempts to impersonate the emperor’s son, attempts to recreate iconic force powers with technobabble, and various other nonsense. Oh, and I almost forgot about the one where the rebels and empire team up immediately after Endor to fight off an attack from an army of soul-stealing dinosaur people.
It got so weird, so stupid, and honestly I loved it all the more for that. The little Bantam Books sticker managed to get past my elitist attitude towards straight-up fanfiction and the editing was just strict enough to keep everything coherent and readable, allowing me to have a whole lot of good times reading a very very mixed bag of books.
I don’t think the Scholastic Book Fair ever gave its blessing to the Star Trek Voyager tie-in novel where a derelict starship is the centerpiece of a battle between alien races-of-the-week that has raged for generations and stripped the metal from all the habitable planets in the sector. The derelict is from the species of the “this is tranya, I hope you relish it as much as I” guy played by Ron Howard’s brother.
I had a bunch of Tom Swift Jr books growing up and boy was that 1950s.
Also Jules Verne!
Imagine the confusion that I experienced because I did not have the Internet to explain to me that there were the original Tom Swift books, the Tom Swift Jr books, the Tom Swift in space books and then the Tom Swift Jr but now it’s the 1990’s books. That last series had two crossover novels with the Hardy Boys, one about time travel and the other about aliens.
Do you remember the robot planet one??
There was one where Tom Swift and his spaceship pals landed on a planet ruled by robots, and the surviving organic people were hiding out as refugees in the jungle, and the robots wanted to make Tom’s friend Anita subservient to her cybernetic leg… I think?
aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh god that takes me back
A Book of Abstract Algebra, by Pinter. I did almost every exercise in it while preparing for uni. I didn’t know that mathematical prose could be beautiful until I’d read it. it’s pleasant, friendly, and feels personally involved with its topic, without being overenthusiastic or chatty. even today I love to show people the intro to one of final chapters. the author launches into a genuinely stirring speech, in which he tells you the great work is almost complete and that not an ounce of your care and struggle has been wasted
I might pick this one up — almost every algebra text I’ve ever read has been an utterly miserable experience, so it’d be interesting to read a math textbook I don’t hate
Warmiest memory is our dad reading to me and my sisters (until we were quite old I think) , the Chronicles of Narnia, really going for the voice acting.
After wracking my brain trying to remember novels I read as kid and coming up blank, I finally remembered most of my early sci-fi books were in French, mostly aimed at middle-school aged kids but, gave me an early taste for sci-fi, and neat cover art to boot: https://www.noosfere.org/livres/collection.asp?NumCollection=-10246504&numediteur=3902
A few choice picks:
Les Abîmes d’Autremer: (rough translation: The Abysses of Othersea)
About a young journalist investigating the planet (Autremer) with the best spaceships (the Abîmes), which turn out to be retro-fitted space whales, that the pilot bonds to, and the journalist herself ends up as a pilot.
L’ Œuil des Dieux: (The eye of the gods)
About a group of 29 kids who were left behind at a lunar station after a serious accident while there were still in kindergarten, (nobody knows they are still alive), told many years later the oldest ones now teenagers, when they don’t really remember this (having been raised by a now defunct nanny robot) , and for them the station is the whole world, and they don’t really understand technology, and are separated into three semi-hostile tribes tribes the Wolves, the Bears, and the Craze.
(Generation Ship sci-fi is still one of ny favorite genre, if I ever write a sci-fi book it would probably be in that setting)
L’Or Bleu: (Blue gold)
This one I don’t remember that well and don’t have at hand, but it follows a young man from saturn visiting Earth for the first time, in a world where water has become scarce, specifically in the Atlanpolis capital city of the now dry Mediterranean sea, Paris with a now dry Seine river, making his living by being very good at arcade virtual reality videogames with leaderboards (the book is originally from 1989), and uncovering machinations of those of have power and control of water.
Bonus Mention:
From a short story, from a collection I don’t remember, but it follows a girl who is interupted in her life [while vacationing with her parents], is interrupted by the “Player” trying to complete his quest, and finding out that she’s acutally an NPC, she’s disturbingly realistic, and falling in love they do eventually complete the quest with a teary goodbye, and hopes that the virtual reality software the boy is using is actually tapping into parallel universes somehow. Cue the reveal, the girl was the Player all along, with slightly modified memories, for “enhanced” “immersion” and “excitement”, she does not mourn or worry about the boy much at all, realizing he was the NPC after all.
L’imparfait du futur, une épatante aventure de Jules: (Future Imperfect, A spiffing adventure of Jules)
This one is a whole French comic book series (Bande-déssinée), which tells the story of Jules an unremarkable young man with average grades, who is selected for a space program for no greatly explained reason (It later turns out the chief scientist is a crazed eugenicist with really flawed software, trying to create “ideal” pairs), which actually explores the concept and consequence of light speed travel, and time dilation, something not properly explained to Jules, until “take off”, cue a horrified face. When he does come back from alpha centauri in later installements, his younger brother is indeed now older than him. This book actually prompted me to ask in class in 2nd Grade for the teacher to please explain Relativity (in front of the whole class), and to his credit he actually gave it a fair shot, and didn’t dismiss the question as not being context or age-appropriate.
[There’s actually also lot of high quality french sci-fi comic books, generally intented for a more grown up audience.]
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…
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.
fuck yes, this is where it started for me too. I don’t have any love for BASIC as a language, but the idea that programming was central to being able to use the machine was incredible, because it normalized the ability to program. all of the documentation and most of the UX around the Commodore 64 and similar 80s micros was oriented around that idea: that programming isn’t scary or complicated, it’s a normal thing you should be familiar with in order to get the most out of your machine.
What comes to mind is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a maritime adventure novel for children, which is, I believe, the first “real” book (as in, not those short kids books you can finish in an hour) I ever read by myself. I picked that for a book report in school, where the assignment was to write like a mini summary for our favorite books. Me, not having read much at that point except for those kids books, which I didn’t want to do, went to the bookstore and just idly browsed around, and for some reason that book caught my attention because of the title (it’s called “Salz im Haar” [Salt in my Hair] in the German translation) and the badass cover art of the edition I own has, so I picked that and ended up really liking it.
Ever since I’ve been a sucker for maritime fantasy.
That book also got me into reading more in general. I’m a huge fantasy nerd, so other books that will always warm me up inside are the first fantasy novels I read: Lord of the Rings, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.
By Ursula K. Le Guin, I really like The dispossed and The left hand of darkness, and The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (espcially the underground mathematicians measuring the distance to the face of God [the sun], one).
I read this and immediately typed out a lesswrong length blog post about all the books I’ve read without thinking, but that might be a bit much so I’ll only focus on “one”:
Maze books and puzzle books. I was obsessed with mazes as a kid. Hedge mazes, mazes with twisty staircases, mazes with tunnels and shortcuts, mazes with monsters, mazes with puzzles. There is (almost) no such thing as a bad maze book! My friend and I would always check out maze books from the library and solve mazes together. One of the earlier puzzle books I read had some absolutely stupid stuff in it like a guy saying “I need some HJKLMNO” with the answer being he’s thirsty and needs H2O. There were also a bunch of puzzle books I can’t remember with these really great settings like exploring another world or stuff like that. Also I know it’s not a maze book or a puzzle book but mentally Dinotopia fits in this category for me and that book was the bee’s knees.
OK I lied I need to say more
I had transferred from a private school to a public elementary school which was way behind in my math education and for some reason no one thought to put me in a better math class. During this time my dad gave me Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure.
This was a textbook with a lot of illustrations and little cartoon characters discussing the fourier waves overly enthusiastically. It was put out by a weird Japanese school (“The transnational college of LEX” – I’m still not 100% convinced they’re not some math and language cult or something).
Despite being about the fourier transform it assumed no knowledge from the reader besides basic arithmetic; and so covered trigonometry and calculus concepts where needed.
So despite only vaguely understanding a lot of the concepts in the book, it really set me up well for calculus class (when I finally got to that years later), and is probably the only reason I was good at math through university. That weird little math book that no one has heard of but I was obsessed with.
you may be interested in learning about the possibility of a moonlight maize maze meander over this side of the world
Now that there is a good maze!
Did you ever read Mad Mazes by Robert Abbott? That was a book of 20 mazes that were practically lessons in graph theory. I remember one involved navigating a public transit map where you could make free transfers of the same type (bus to bus or train to train) or to the same color (e.g., a red bus line to a red train line). Another involved using a die to mark your position on a grid; you could only move to a square if tilting the die over in that direction brought the number printed on the square to the top of the die.
I don’t think so, it looks pretty darn cool though. I’ve definitely seen mazes with those sorts of ideas, but I don’t remember in what books.
I also grew up with some sumptuously illustrated science books, like Roy A. Gallant’s National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe, and the Eyewitness Science series. And everything I could find by David Macaulay.
Eyewitness was great!
