To quote the grandfather in The Princess Bride, "When I was your age, television was called books."
When I was little, I loved reading books. I read every chance I got. In particular, I loved adventure books (still do) and mysteries. I read The Chronicles of Narnia multiple times. I read most of The Three Investigators books (3 series of them...one set when the main characters are in their preteens and early teens, the second series in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" format in between, and then a third series when they're in their later teens). The Chronicles of Prydain come to mind. As an adult, the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles books joined the honored list, along with the Ranger's Apprentice books and sequel series. There were many other books that I loved to read, but those book franchises are what come to mind offhand. In fact, I loved reading so much as a kid that often when I got in trouble, my parents would ground me from reading for a few hours.
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| William Shakespeare's Star Wars Saga by the great bard Ian Doescher with bookends inspired by the great bard JRR Tolkien |
On long road trips growing up, my mom would read us books. At one point, someone sent us the audiobook of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on cassette, and that was a new experience for me. I was expecting a somewhat dramatized reading of it with a full cast, and was surprised to hear one person reading the whole book, though he did a fantastic job.
They also had a genre called Choose Your Own Adventure that was popular for a while. Every time a character had to make a decision or there was some other "crossroads" in the story, it said something along the lines of "If you want this to happen, go to page 75. If you want that to happen, go to page 95." It made for interesting variations in the story. If I didn't like the way a story turned out, I generally went back until I found a path that turned out better. Come to think of it, it was a bit like a literary maze. Hmm, I never thought of it that way. (Insert lightbulb emoji here...I tried it and the emoji looked more like a tennis racket, so I'll leave that to your imagination.) 😀
At church when we sang hymns, we pulled out the hymnals in the back of the pews and turned to the song in question. It had basic sheet music for the hymns (there's one in the middle of the picture above, with a gray cover). In the 90s, we used a mixture of hymnals and songs with the lyrics on the overhead projector. Now we use PowerPoint. The hymnals are still in the back of the pews, but only rarely used.
In past years, it was common for families to have family Bibles, which were large and heavy, and had places to record birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and more. We also had smaller Bibles we could carry with us. We often marked them up. They sometimes said that a mark of a healthy Christian is a worn-out Bible. Now I have a Bible app on my phone, which offers hundreds of versions and languages, as well as commentary, a Bible verse meme maker, and more. Easier to carry, and it offers more options, but you can't mark it up in the same way. You can also have virtual Bible studies with friends on the app.
Technically, the internet existed before I was born, but it didn't really become popular and public until I was a teenager in the early '90s. Until high school, research was done entirely by physical means. The closest I got to online research was using microfiche in the library to look up old news reports. They had the glossy black microfiche scans that we fed into the machine and read on the screen. (The print on the cards was tiny and too small to read without the help of the machine.) We had computer classes, but we saved our work on the individual computers and on floppy disks. If we wanted to work on it using a different computer, we had to insert the floppy and pull it up that way.
When we had to look up a word, we pulled out our dictionary. There were also special dictionaries for translating in other languages. If we needed synonyms, we would pull out the trusty thesaurus (which was a little more complicated to navigate than your average dictionary). Researching more complicated things, such as history, other cultures, and many other things, involved pulling out the encyclopedia (notably World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica). When we were younger, we also looked things up in the Childcraft encyclopedias for children. We could also look things up in newspapers and magazines, as well as autobiographies and other physical books. In school, I did many book reports, as well as reports on cultures such as Bolivia, Chad and Newfoundland. (I know there were others, but those are the ones that come to mind.)
When I was younger, some people generously gave me subscriptions to magazines like Ranger Rick and Clubhouse. I loved reading the Highlights magazine. When we got our Stars and Stripes newspaper in the Philippines, I would go straight to the comics section. I loved reading the comics, particularly Peanuts, Garfield, The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Cathy, BC, Family Circus, For Better or for Worse, Blondie, Dick Tracy, Calvin and Hobbes, multiple superhero comics, and others. Though I didn't see it in the newspaper when it was syndicated, I'm also a big fan of the Kim & Jason comic strip (though I might be a bit biased because the author is a dear friend...I've mentioned Jason on my blog before). I borrowed the Asterix and Tintin comic books from friends and read them voraciously. The Adventures of Tintin is still one of my favorite comic strips, and I now have the full collection.
When Amazon introduced the Kindle, I downloaded it on my cell phone and read books that way. The Kindle format all but eclipsed the physical books for me. It's much easier to carry a phone in my pocket with an entire library in it, than sometimes big and heavy books.
In more recent years, as I've gotten more busy with work and other things, I've done a lot of my reading with audiobooks. I find it helps to listen to them while I'm working (depending on what I'm doing), as it helps to focus my mind to keep it from wandering thanks to ADHD (which I wish I had known as a child that I had). On the other hand, some tasks require listening to music instead, as it can be distracting at times. I know, I'm sure everyone is shocked that yet another "Days of Yore" post ends with me pointing out that I do most of this on my cell phone now (although some of my audiobook listening is done on a computer).
