You may have heard that I have a book coming out this summer called A Scout is Brave. What? You haven’t? Pre-order it now by clicking the button below!
One of the themes of the book is the disconnect between the model of reality that we place in books and the one we allow or reinforce in the real world. As a kid, I had a hard time understanding why people didn’t take books as seriously as I did, and to me, every book was a handbook.
As a kid with ADHD and anxiety, it was a revelation that there were actual books that could tell you how to live and do things, books that you could go out and make real in the world.
Let me introduce some of them to you.
Model Railroading, published by Lionel Trains in the late forties, was hopelessly obsolete by the early eighties when I read it, but I loved the idea of making my own tiny wholesome, controllable world. I can’t imagine why.
The 1963 Boy Scout Handbook appears in my story, and I had the same problem with it that Bud has: the huge gap between theory and practice, between what we say we believe and how most people behave. I was a kid in the eighties behaving like one from the sixties.
How to Run a Railroad was a book I found in our local library and checked out so many times that my father suggested we steal it when we moved away. It was a great book with kid-plausible ideas for building a model railroad out of random shit in your house.
In 1982, I discovered Steven Spielberg and the idea that some lucky people were actually PAID to make up stories instead of merely annoying others with them. That sparked the idea of becoming a film director, and Filming Works Like This was all we had in our elementary school library on the subject. The technology wasn’t too far off for the early eighties, but I had no access to it and had to settle eventually for…ugh…just writing stories down.
My elementary school library also had a small shelf of books for weirdoes, focused mainly on vampires, missing people, UFOs, Bigfoot, and ghosts.
Daniel Cohen was an author who specialized in telling dubious stories to young people with absolute credulity. I finished each one convinced that yes, there were spirits and aliens among us that nobody wanted to talk about.
So you might say that I started my artistic sensibilities with horror NON-fiction. Or at least fiction couched like it.
Frank Edwards was another crackpot who gathered what we’d call now “Forteana”: the kinds of bizarre happenings chronicled originally by the patron saint of crackpots, Charles Fort. My sister had a few of his books.
These are where I learned about the Marie Celeste, the shifting coffins of the Chase tomb in Barbados, the Bermuda Triangle, frogs dropping from the sky, and the Loch Ness monster.
My experience with more practical handbooks inspired me to imagine ways that we could actually resolve these mysteries, exploring the loch with a submarine, say, or examing the Marie Celeste with a forensic team instead of a bunch of dumbass sailors.
The Hardy Boys’ Detective Handbook was where I got some of those investigative ideas, and like almost every other imaginative kid, I started my own detective agency. I don’t remember solving any actual crimes, which is ironic given how many my father was routinely committing.
I guess there’s a lesson there in how context affects our morality.
One of my long-term investigations involved searching for gnomes. My mother bought me the book at the height of the gnomes fad of the early eighties, prouder of the family’s Scandinavian heritage than the rest of us.
Despite the map inside saying that at best we’d find extremely rare Beach Gnomes in Florida, I still kept searching the woods.
They decided not to show themselves, probably because I wasn’t ready.
Then came the computer handbooks. I started with a Commodore 64 in 1985. My father refused to buy games or even a disk drive for it, asserting that this was for “serious business.” We had a tape drive instead, so I made my own games when my father wasn’t hectoring me to create an automated address book for him.
To find an address in the golden Commodore future, you’d just turn on the computer, insert a tape, fast forward the tape to the program, type LOAD, and wait patiently for the address book to appear. Simple as that!
Next came the gaming books, starting with that red Dungeons and Dragons basic set for which I still have that book. My mother ordered it from their ill-fated bookstore because she’d heard that “gifted kids” played it.
I preferred science fiction, though, and later on I found Star Frontiers at Waldenbooks and then Star Trek from FASA.
And that’s just the non-fiction!
We are all constant compliers (conscious or not) of our own handbooks. I was luckier than some kids to have parents who owned a bookstore (however briefly) and believed in the importance of reading, not to mention a sister who was into weird books like Alive and the ouevre of Frank Edwards, and later friends who enjoyed speculative and imaginative ideas.
I’d be a much different person with different books, and I’m grateful for the ones I got.
