The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house!
I've even (gasp!) gotten less sentimental about books. I've never been a collector - just a consumer - and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don't normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.
Having said that, there are books I treasure. I would not want to lose the 1960s editions of the Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy that started me reading. I still have my father's copy of Tales of the Western World, which he read to me as a child. I even have my original copy of Fletcher and Zenobia, an odd little picture book with illustrations by Edward Gorey, which was one of my favorites from elementary school. My mom must've read me that book a hundred times.
When I was in college, my parents' house burned down, and took a lot of the possessions I'd grown up with. That's probably one thing that made me realize material stuff is not really that important. Still, I do wish I could reach back in time and retrieve some of the other books that were important to me in middle school and high school. I'd love to see my old Daw yellow-spined paperbacks of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone series. The Blue Fairy Book and the Red Fairy Book, reprints of old Victorian fairy tale collections, also fascinated me with their illustrations when I was younger. We also lost a lot of comic books in the fire, and while you might roll your eyes, the comics were just as important to me any novels. I grew up equally fascinated with the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Zeus and Odin. And really, when you think about it, they have a lot in common.
I sometimes look at my bookshelves today and wonder which volumes my sons will treasure in twenty or thirty years. Which should I be saving for them? Which will fade with time?
If you could put any books into a time capsule for the next generation, what would you choose? Which books do you still wish you had from your childhood?
Editor's Note: Rick Riordan is the bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series. Rick jump starts our Summer Reading Program, which will continue through August with guest authors and celebrities posting every Monday and Thursday.
