Back to the Books: Honey Bunch, Just a Little Girl

Last week my WriteOn Joliet co-leader Tom Hernandez commented that I "breathe a different air."

Being asthmatic, I'm happy for any air, but he does make a point.

I think it's true that "we are what we read" in some part, at least.

In my sixty years of living, I've read many books that most of the people I encounter have never read and, in many cases, didn't even know they existed.

Yes, I am going to tell you about all of them, one blog post at a time.

The first one is called Honey Bunch, Just a Little Girl, by Helen Louise Thorndyke. I  always assumed belong to my mother at one point, or perhaps someone in her family, although now I'm not certain she ever read it.

It was published in 1923, and my mother was born in 1935. Now it could have belonged to father's mother (we had some of her books, too), but the date is wrong for that.

But Honey Bunch, Just a Little Girl was one of the books that sat on the bookcase in the hall between the room where my sister and I slept and the room where my parents slept.

And it was one of the books I picked off the shelf one a day I was either not allowed to go outside (my mother, I later learned, had agoraphobia) or was not able to go outside due to my asthma.

Helen Louise Thorndyke was a pseudonym used by several authors for this series. The Honey Bunch books (thirty-four books in the original series with extras and reboots in later years) were part of a series of books for children by the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

You might not know what the Stratemeyer Syndicate was, but you will be familiar with many of the book series it produced, including Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

For more information on the Stratemeyer Syndicate, go here. 

"Just a Little Girl" was the first book in the series, and I had really enjoyed it. It left on a cliffhanger, of sorts, to encourage readers to pick up the next book. 

Of course, I never did find any of the other titles, and I don't know what happened to my mother's copy; I haven't read it in fifty years.

But now I can.

All of the original series are now digitalized through the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN), "a set of digital publishing initiatives that are hosted and coordinated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, according to its website.

Here are two different ways you can read this book. The first link will also send you to subsequent books.

https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/scalar/thesweetpublicdomain/toc-just-a-girl

https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/scalar/thesweetpublicdomain/media/honey-bunch-just-a-little-girl-pdf

If you love reading about life back in the day, here is a "real time" version of it. One part that has stuck in my head all these years was the way Honey Bunch celebrated her fifth birthday (it sounded so exciting to me) and how she nearly suffocated when the "coal man" paid his annual visit.

You see, Honey Bunch felt the gleaming coal was so pretty, so she jumped into the pile in the coal cellar. The coal man never saw her, and the coal kept sliding down the chute toward its goal of filling the room for for winter.

The book, although some would disagree, is surprisingly well-written, and, I'm certain, has subliminally conbtributed to my own writing "voice" over the years.

Happy reading! :)

Six Months of Reading Only Local Authors

When Before the Blood went into editing last year, I decided to spend 2019 reading only books written and published by local authors.

Six months into the process, a very enjoyable process, I'm rediscovering the joy of discovering new books and enjoying them.

Publishing, like other industries, undergoes its own trends. By reading only locally produced, self-published books, I'm bypassing those, and its making a richer reading experience.

When I was a child and stayed inside the house due to asthma, I read. When I ran out of books of my own to read, I turned to the books of my mother's childhood, which sat on a shelf.

These books, although some where mass-produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, didn't have flashy covers or hyped-up back text.

They had a title, a name, and perhaps a frontispiece. The only way to discover these books was to read them. And I did, flipping through the pages, reading snippets as one samples appetizers, and finally heading to the first chapter to savor the entire book.

Liken it to the difference between seeing a blockbuster movie versus an independently produced film, where a discussion with the director and actors follow the viewing.

So although the books I'm reading now do have back cover copy, and some do come with enthusiastic promotion on social media, the carefully-crafted, targeted campaign is, thankfully, missing, and I'm able to relish each book for its own merit.

The covers give me an idea of the words between the pages before plunging into the poems or stories, but other than that, the rest is a quiet adventure of setting aside the hats that say "writer" and "editor" to burrow into someone else's world for awhile, a world I had zero hand in creating.

Do I enjoy each book equally? No, of course not. But each book is read for its own entertainment or informative or inspirational merits.

Not because it's famous. Or well-reviewed. Or because I know the author.

But because each reading is a delicious adventure. And, perhaps, because I know the author has, in most cases, overseen each step of the book production and wrote it because he/she had to tell that story, or write that poem, or deliver that message.

There's love and passion and hard work in the process. And a desire on the part of the author to share all of that with those who will pick up that book.

For a reader like me, it's pure delight.

Illustration by Kathleen Rose Van Pelt for "Bryony."