Books read to you in your childhood can still evoke powerful memories of people, places and times from your younger years.
Professor Timothy Baker, Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature in the School of Languages, Literature, Music and Visual Culture (LLMVC) at Aberdeen University, has published a e-version of his book ‘Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories’.
Professor Baker wrote the book as a way to memorialise his mother, who died in 2005, through the love of reading she inspired in him.
Professor Baker rereads some of his favourite childhood books – from ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and ‘Watership Down’ to ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ – and discusses how the act of rereading is a way of interacting with our past selves and examining who we are now.
Professor Baker said:
“I wanted to memorialise my mother and explore my childhood in a format that was accessible and would resonate with many people.
“Reading with a parent shapes our memories and the way we see the world. After my mother’s death I found there was little record of her existence but that one way to bring her back to me was through reading.”
Professor Baker says that no book is encountered on its own as we always read through the prism of the other books we’ve read and the lives we’ve lived.
He suggests that re-reading children’s books as adults offers new perspectives into our childhood and memories and helps us to reflect on the ways in which these shaped us, often subconsciously.
“As a child I read ‘The Hobbit’ multiple times,” he adds.
“Then I didn’t read it for a decade, and returning to it one rainy day at university I was shocked to realise how many stories there were in it – it had filled my memory so comprehensively that I couldn’t quite understand how so many characters and set-pieces all fit within several hundred pages.
“It is not simply that we cannot go back to a text as if for the first time; it is that that first reading, and everything we have read since, informs our rereading, and the rereading changes how we remember the first reading.
“I cannot read ‘The Hobbit’ now without adding to it my memories of reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’, or of seeing the film ‘The Return of the King’ in the cinema on a Christmas morning and sobbing with relief that it had been released before my mother died. All of those experiences are now part of the original.”
Click on this link for more information about the book Reading My Mother Back
Click on this link for the e-Book: Reading My Mother Back
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