DRMacIver's Notebook
When I learned to read
When I learned to read
Recently Dave, Lisa, and I, were all helping sort through my parents’ giant boxes of books that have been sitting untouched for years to decades. We were sorting them into various dubious ontologies - roughly… worth keeping, worth trying to sell, worth giving away, bin. Dave and Lisa in particular were trying to hunt out any gems that looked worth selling.
At some point, Lisa hands me this tiny battered book of some cheap adventure novel and said “Well, this one isn’t worth anything to anyone.”
She was, I think, unprepared for the look of absolute delight on my face as I grabbed it off her. “I’ve been trying to find this for so long!” I said.
Anyway, let me backtrack 35 years or so.
It’s extremely on brand that one of my first really coherent memories is of learning to read in my head.
My school had a reading system. It was a whole thing - there was a box of books, you picked what book you wanted, then you had to read it, log your reading of it, and return it when you were done.
It may surprise you to know that I hated this. I dragged my heels over it and had to be nagged into reading. Couldn’t stand reading, me.
Anyway, one evening I was reading out loud to mum, begrudgingly, and complained about this. I don’t remember my specific complaint, but she told me that I didn’t have to read out loud to her if I didn’t want to, I could just read books in my head. I said “Oh, OK!” or words to that effect, sent her away, and finished the book.
It didn’t take me long to finish the rest of the books in that box after that, and I quickly turned from a kid who hated reading to one who was regularly getting through giant doorstopper books.Not, you understand, good ones. I read a lot of Robert Jordan and Brian Lumley (don’t tell my parents about the second one. They were not age appropriate) and other authors of similar quality levels. My love of SFF trash continues to this day.
It was a pretty life-defining moment - I’m sure I’d have had it at some point, but that was the specific point at which I had it, and it sticks in my mind.
I could even tell you quite a lot about the book that I was reading. It was quite a short book, about some British soldier who is trying to ship logs down from a mountain and wants to pass them through some underground river, but they get lost in the middle, so he rides a log through and finds a giant whirlpool there.
I’ve tried multiple times over the years to find it - asked around on reddit, did a bunch of searching. Never could find it. I can’t remember if I ever asked Claude or ChatGPT, but just testing it now Claude straight up hallucinates an answer.It says that it’s Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”. It’s not. I’d asked my parents about it but they had no specific memory of this event at all, let alone what the book was.
I was for a while half-convinced this was a fake memory.
And then, totally unexpectedly, Lisa just handed me the book.“But David”, you may ask, “if it was a book from the school reading box, why did you have it? That is an excellent question. I have no idea. But it does have a sticker on it with my school form so I’m pretty sure I should have returned it to a box and didn’t.
I think this is another variant on the digital object permanence thing. If I’d read this book on a kindle, there is no chance that I would ever have found in this way,I mean I could have searched in my kindle library, but do you want to take a bet that Amazon will maintain another 35 years of continuity of archive? Admittedly they’re doing OK with the 15 they’ve got so far, but I am not wildly confident. They also have a history of disappearing things that you’ve bought. but because the book just exists as a physical object in the world, it could just stick around in my parents’ house until I found it again.It wasn’t even the only book I found this way! I was also trying and failing to remember the name of Karen Traviss’s Wess’har books, and found “City of Pearl” there, which helped me track down the whole thing.
The book is “The Cave of Death”, by Ian Serrallier. It’s very little wonder that I couldn’t find it, because it barely exists. It’s part of the “Wide Horizon Reading Scheme”, which I can provide very little evidence of being a real thing that really existed other than a scattering of other books with the same labelling. It’s a retelling of a story originally written by J. H. Williams, in “In Quest of a Mermaid”. I originally thought it was an extract, and felt moderately grumpy about Ian Serraillier taking credit for it by being the only name on the cover, but actually having now acquired a copy of the original, it seems to be the same story entirely rewritten. I assume to make it more self-contained and accessible to children, but I don’t know.
It’s in many ways quite an interesting story. It’s very “boys own adventures” and quite colonialist, but… fundamentally it’s a children’s story about an engineering problem, and that feels rare to me.
Even the colonialism is surprisingly interesting - yes, it’s a book about a white British soldier leading a team of “natives” in Burma, assisted by a bunch of itinerant Chinese workers. Yes, there’s a whole bunch of racial stereotyping going on it. But… the fundamental message about race relations in it seems to be “different cultures have different beliefs, but they’re generally still good people, and you’ve got to respect their beliefs in order to work with them”. I’m not going to claim it’s completely unproblematic - the author would certainly get cancelled for writing such a book today - but it genuinely seems like quite a positive message for its time and probably quite a lot better than many things written today.And way less bad than, say, Narnia. All of this would have completely gone over my head at the time though, as evidenced by the fact that I was living in Saudi Arabia when reading the Narnia books and didn’t notice the islamaphobia. In my defence I also didn’t notice the Christianity.
But I think the really interesting thing for me about this whole thing is not the specific book, but the degree to which figuring out your past is just intertwined with actual mundane history, and how much of history is bordering on lost because it’s not, as Lisa said, really worth anything to anyone. This is an obscure book from an obscure series. Of course I couldn’t find it.
Except, of course, I totally could have. I bet you if I found a research librarian and gave them a couple hundred pounds, they’d have found the book for me in a few weeks, especially these days. I’m not sure this possibility even really occurred to me as a live one, but in retrospect it was very possible. I find these sorts of questions interesting - things which clearly have an empirical answer, and finding out the empirical answer is entirely within your means,Although! This is only true in this case if the answer is positive. If it turns out I’d dreamed the whole thing and the book didn’t exist, establishing that with any degree of certainty would be very costly. but it’s just not clearly worth it. My go to example of this is look at a random person passing you on the street, what’s their name? You could just go ask them. It would be weird, but they’d probably tell you.And if they don’t, you can probably still find out! Probably not ethically, possibly not without being arrested, but you can. And yet you don’t do it, because the question is just an idle fancy, and the effort isn’t worth it.
I think it’s often worth doing things that seem like they’re not worth it, and this seems like a potentially good learning opportunity. Even if the answer to the question isn’t worth the cost, maybe the experience of figuring out how to answer it is. If I’d thought to ask a research librarian of some sort about this, yes they’d have found the book, but also I’d have learned more about how to interact with research librarians, and that would in and of itself been worth it even if finding the book was not.
I don’t know if going to ask a random stranger on the street their name would be a good experience in the same way, but it seems like it might be. It seems harmless, and I think generally figuring out how to take greyed out options is good for you.
I think that, perhaps, it would be good to notice such questions as they arise, and every now and then even if it doesn’t seem worth it to try to answer the question, answer it anyway, and see how that changes you.