panaecea

This is in response to Esther’s Weekly Word Prompt.

This week’s prompt :  Red

Down The Readers’  Lane

As far as I remember my earliest readings in English were from two books: The Pancake and Careful Hans. The stories that I read and re-read were:

Little Red Riding Hood where the little girl in a red hood goes to meet her granny and gets waylaid by a cunning jackal.

Goldilocks And The Three Bears where Goldilocks gets lost in a forest (picking berries?) and lands up in the cottage of the three bears – mother bear, father bear and their child – the young bear. The house has bowls of food and furniture in three sizes for the mother, father and the child. Goldilocks tries them all one at a time and goes off to sleep on the child’s bed where the three bears find her eventually.

This Is The House That Jack Built is a poem where various characters (and elements like malt) like a cat, a rat, a dog, a cow, a maiden, a man , a priest, are introduced in relation to the house that Jack built. It is a cumulative nursery rhyme where the previous lines of the poem are repeated again and again with the introduction of the new entrant. It’s peculiar repetitive rhyme is great fun to read.

Then, of course, there was such others like  Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and The Sleeping Beauty. As I grew up I was introduced to the Classics – abridged or translated versions. I was fascinated by The Three Musketeers and Ben Hur and read them innumerable times.

Alongside, followed Enid Blyton – The Famous Five. At once I wanted to be the tom boy George with her dog Timmy snooping and sniffing for mysteries. In the classroom we girls competed with each other for Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys. Who could read first the latest.

In my teens I was more into  murder mysteries. But for my class mates Mills & Boons and Barbara Cartland were the craze. I loved Georgette Heyer though – historical (Regency) romances and thrillers with an added dash of wit and comedy. Victoria Holt was an exciting mix of romance and suspense too and Evelyn Anthony , although could not replace Christie, had good measure of suspense and thrill. Daphne du Maurier was another writer we chased. But it was Agatha Christie I thrived on.

The reason I am going down memory lane is that I have recently become a grand aunt and I wish to make my grand niece read all the fun books that I have grown up reading. I still love to read kids’ story books and books for young adults. They always transport me back to my childhood days.

I do wish I am able to inculcate a reading habit in my grand niece too though I know she will have many other tempting means of exposure in this fast age of information and technology. But is there any greater pleasure than holding a book in hand and reading? More so when the books have attractive illustrations which can tickle a child’s imagination more than anything else and take her uphill and down the river, through the forests and meadows and fly like a bird with the clouds ?

I know nowadays children are more attracted to visuals like watching cartoons on mobile and laptop. But I hope our new member of the family can make a choice of her own between  pictures that words create and a pre-designed visually depicted story.