Part 2: My Junior High and High School Experiences with Books

In seventh grade, a new friend (who, incidentally, remains a good friend today) introduced me to the Lad series of books by Albert Payson Terhune. For the first time in my life, I read voraciously. The books moved me so much that I successfully begged my parents to let me buy a purebred collie puppy, even though our family already owned two well-loved, large dogs. Terhune is the first name I would place on a list of authors who influenced me. I can easily remember both his name and the titles of two of his books. Owning a collie had a huge impact on my life, though I couldn’t say the Terhune books influenced my writing.

My friend and her circle were into J. R. R. Tolkien books. At lunch, they pretended to be the characters from the novels. They decided I should be Arwen. I was clueless until I saw the Lord of the Rings movies years later. I have attempted to read The Hobbit a few times over the years and have always given up. In fact, I don’t think I read a fantasy novel until I was an adult. 

When I was in high school, my English teacher reserved a drawer in her file cabinet for 5”x7” note cards. She initially assigned one per student and grouped the cards by class. We were supposed to use our card to keep a list of the books we read during the year. My best friend accumulated half a dozen cards filled front and back. I, on the other hand, had just the one card, and the only books listed on it were the ones that our teacher had assigned to us. At some point, I decided to read Gone with the Wind. Perhaps I saw the movie on TV and became interested in the story. It was a long book, and I was proud to finish it. I even referenced it in an essay. The teacher was not impressed with the book. Apparently, I was supposed to pull examples from a more worthy one, such as The Scarlet Letter or Pride and Prejudice. She and my dad evidently thought alike when it came to the value of classics.

Part 3 of this blog post will describe the influence my children had on my reading and writing and will begin to answer the title question.

©2023 Sherrie J. Lyons