The Life in this Book
Dahlke, Ellen

>>ELLEN: My name is Ellen Dahlke and I'm going to talk a little bit today about my favorite book from childhood. When I see this book on my shelf it makes me think of a lot of different family stories. The first is that this book is by Enid Blyton who is my mom's favorite writer as a kid. She's a British author and it wasn't easy to get her books in the states. So this book came to me in the mail one Christmas and it was a memorable gift-receiving occasion because it came from my mom's best friend who lives in Ireland still and she always used to send a package of gifts for myself and my four brothers. The boys every year got Link's Cologne because they didn't have that in the states either and the boys loved it. Now they do have it and it's marketed as Axe here but for years and years we couldn't get it here. One of the boys' bottles of Link's Cologne exploded or leaked and you can kind of see on the camera. There was Link's cologne over everything in the package so mom locked the door to her bedroom and went in and repackaged all of our gifts so that we wouldn't be able to see through this kind of crumbling, soaking wet wrapping paper which of course gave us the opportunity then the first time she left the house to go unwrap everything to see what we got and then wrap it back up because we had plenty of that wrapping paper at home. It made for a really enhanced reading experience of this book because it smelt like Link's cologne [Laughing] so on every page I would sort of say, "Well I'm half way through the second stain." [Laughing] That was my way of marking where I was at in the book. My second story that I think of when I look at this book is one Easter we were on vacation up in Wisconsin and we were all crammed into one hotel room, the seven of us, and I had left my book out, I was reading it, and Connor, one of my brothers who has severe mental and physical disabilities and one of his favorite things to do is rip up paper, got ahold of the book and ate the last few pages. You won't be able to see that on camera but they're all ripped out. He ate them, tore them up and put them in his mouth. I was just distraught because I was just so near the end of the book and I wasn't going to be able to read that last few pages. So mom suggested that I - this is before the internet - so mom suggested that I write to the publisher and see if the publisher could do anything for me and so I did. I wish I had a copy of that letter and I'm sure I hand-wrote it. A few weeks later I got a package from the publishing company Methuen Children's Books with a copy of every book in this series, this is the first three series, a copy of every book in this series and a note saying, "I hope your brother didn't get indigestion." [Laughing] Which I thought was really great and I had sent this letter totally out of context, my brother ate my book and he responded really well. I think about that when I see this book and just the other day I picked it up to start reading it again just to see because I hadn't read it in years and I found this post it note on the inside that says, "Ellen, this was one of the best books I have ever read in my life." If you look at "best books" you can kind of see that it's underlined ferociously. Megan Foley, she's one of my younger cousins so I must have given it to her at some point to read and it's pretty beaten up for the book that it is. As I'd been reading through it, I'm only on page one hundred or so again, it's really boring and so it makes me wonder who I was at the time that it was my favorite that I really identified with it and loved it so much. The one thing that I still find appealing about it and has always been a source of pleasure for me is that the protagonist is an intelligent, sensible, young woman who tries to do the right thing and I just like characters like that, I always have. My favorite movies as a kid were "Mary Poppins" and "Sleeping with the Enemy." [Laughing] Julia Roberts kind of does the right thing, she's in a terrible situation but she's a sensible, intelligent woman and I like that. I still really like books and movies and TV shows that star or have sensible women at their forefront. I guess that's where it started. So that's it.