When I was a young girl I read Frances Hodgson Burnett‘s The Secret Garden and dreamed of flowers on the Yorkshire moors. I read Jane Eyre cloaked by the curtains in my girlhood home and felt them as heavy and dusty window dressings from Mr. Rochester’s mansion.
Books have been more of a world to me than the real world I inhabited and now, traveling to one of the greatest libraries in the world at Trinity College, Dublin, I see what preserving these wonders takes, and why it is so essential to do it. For young children like I was once and the people we grow up to be.
Rogue Readers: Which book meant a lot to you as a child?
Read more about the preservation and conservation here:
Jenny Milchman is the Mary Higgins Clark award winning and PEN/Faulkner nominated author of five novels of suspense. Her work has been praised by the New York Times, chosen as Indie Next Picks, received starred reviews from PW, Booklist, and Library Journal, selected for numerous Best Of’s including Suspense Magazine, Pure Wow and Popsugar, and appeared on the USA Today bestsellers list (once, but we authors like to name these things). In 2013, Jenny rented out her house, traded in two cars for an SUV that could handle Denver in February, and pulled her kids out of 1st and 3rd grades to “car-school” them on what Shelf Awareness called the world’s longest book tour. Jenny now speaks nationally on the literal and figurative road to a dream.
Spent some time watching the videos on the Trinity College site. What an incredible library-and process. As a little girl my town’s library was housed in a really old stone house at the bottom of my hill. I was an only child and there were no other children who lived nearby, so I would get my mother’s permission to walk the half- mile down hill to the library. I had a shortcut through the woods, and once there I would tuck myself into a window ledge in the children’s section and devour book after book. Gradually I moved up to adult novels, my taste gravitating toward mysteries, suspense and thrillers. The library afforded me independence in a safe space. They’ve since moved my library to a new building on the other side of town. I doubt they used the same care cleaning the dusty books, but they’re still there, available to my kids and grandkids. Thanks for sharing this.
I never had a chance to visit that Trinity College – but it does sound amazing. Thanks for telling us about it!!!
Other than Beverly Cleary and the Little House on the Prarie books, my favorite was The Ghost Rock Mystery by Mary C. Jane. Obviously my tastes were cemented early!