Tim's Amazon Store

An Early Devel­op­ing Love Of Books

I’ve been enjoy­ing books since my mother read to me from her col­lec­tion of Lit­tle Golden Books when I was about three years old.  At roughly the age of five she gave me a book called Fun with Dick and Jane, 1^st Primer and taught me how to read on my own.

(Mother was not a trained teacher and would have pre­ferred to send me to school.  But we were then liv­ing in a very rural area.  Hav­ing cere­bral palsy I could not walk much on my own.  And the near­est school was on the other side of the moun­tain and not equipped to take hand­i­capped kids in 1953.)

As I grew older books became my best friends.  They took me places my body, age at the time, or state of trans­porta­tion tech­nol­ogy pre­vented me from vis­it­ing.  Books whisked me away from what I thought was a hum­drum exis­tence to one of high adven­ture.  From an envi­ron­ment of lim­its to worlds with­out them.

My mother was a co-conspirator in these escapes.  At about age nine she enrolled me in a his­tory book of the month club for young read­ers[i].  It brought me sto­ries about Davey Crock­ett, the Alamo, the life and empire build­ing of Genghis Kahn, and even the war of a young United States against the Bar­bary Pirates of Tripoli.

After awhile my mother started slip­ping me the paper-back nov­els she was read­ing when she was done with them.  I can­not remem­ber the name of the woman author who wrote them[ii].  But they were always about a hero­ine who became involved with a mys­te­ri­ous cold war spy in a Euro­pean loca­tion.  A mys­tery to solve (usu­ally involv­ing at least one mur­der).  Exotic locales. A lit­tle romance (but noth­ing very explicit, given the time).  Clear good guys and truly evil bad guys.  I was eas­ily hooked.

Mother also gave me her paper-back Agatha Christie nov­els.  These days I watch them dra­ma­tized on TV.  Over and over again.  I tell my wife an early case of undi­ag­nosed Alzheimer’s keeps them fresh for me.

I fell in love with sci­ence fic­tion at my gram­mar school.  My teacher, Mrs. Gru­man, taught a class of roughly 15 stu­dents with vary­ing phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties in grades four through eight.  So I had the same ded­i­cated, unfor­get­table teacher for four years.  Mrs. Gru­man made arrange­ments with the Kern County Library to stock our class with a long shelf full of fresh books every two months.  She then taught us how to check out books, care for them, and check them back in by a stan­dard two-week dead­line.  We took turns serv­ing as the class “librarian”.

Our lit­tle library always had a well bal­anced selec­tion.  And it always seemed to have at least two sci­ence fic­tion authors.  This is where I first acquired and read Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle long before it was made into a movie.  It’s also where I read authors like Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asi­mov, Robert Hein­lein, and others.

Read­ing sci­ence fic­tion greatly expanded the lim­its of my imag­i­na­tion.  It not only intro­duced me to the ideas of trav­el­ing to new plan­ets, galax­ies, and times. It also exposed me to the idea that soci­eties could be orga­nized along dif­fer­ent lines with very alter­na­tive con­cepts of suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships, cus­toms, and sys­tems of jus­tice.  Hein­lein was among the first to really open such pos­si­bil­i­ties to me in clas­sics like Stranger In A Strange Land (pub­lished June 1, 1961) and The Moon Is A Harsh Mis­tress (pub­lished 1966 while I was in high school).

My Store

Given my love for books it’s no sur­prise I also have a deep fond­ness for book stores.  And now, thanks to the Inter­net, some of the tech­nolo­gies it pro­vides, and the good folks at Ama​zon​.com, I am able to eas­ily set up and man­age my own vir­tual bookstore.

On the fol­low­ing vir­tual pages of this blog you will find books which I rec­om­mend because I have read and enjoyed them.  My ini­tial sug­ges­tions are divided into the fol­low­ing categories:

• Cos­mol­ogy & Space
• Mys­tery & Thrillers
• His­tory
• Pol­i­tics
• Sci­ence Fiction

I’ll may add more cat­e­gories in the future.  I may also add cat­e­gories for non-book items I rec­om­mend.  Like a dig­i­tal cam­era or two, com­put­ers or com­puter acces­sories, or com­puter software.

I’m not look­ing to make a for­tune through my lit­tle store or even a liv­ing.  I will make a small per­cent­age off of any items some­one pur­chases from Ama­zon by fol­low­ing a link from my store.  But my main goal here is to share my enjoy­ment of cer­tain types of books and authors.  While maybe help­ing to defray the costs of main­tain­ing this blog, pay for a few books and toys for myself, and per­haps help me con­vince my wife I’m not just wast­ing time which could be bet­ter spent on tend­ing to her list of things I should be doing instead.

Thanks for read­ing.  Yours,

Tim

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[i] The Children’s Book of the Month Club (CBOMC) appears to oper­ate like the one to which my mother sub­scribed me.  It allows you to start your mem­ber­ship off by pur­chas­ing six books for one very low price.  In return you agree to buy four more books at reg­u­lar club prices ($12.99 to $22.99 each) within a year.  I am not in any away affil­i­ated with, or com­pen­sated by, CBOMC.  They don’t even know I have writ­ten this article.

[ii] Mul­ti­ple attempted searches via Google and Alexa were unsuc­cess­ful at iden­ti­fy­ing or help­ing me to remem­ber the author.  Bing pro­duced results which were hope­lessly skimpy and ridicu­lously off-target.

Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Required By Ama​zon​.com: “Tim Beck­with is a par­tic­i­pant in the Ama­zon Ser­vices LLC Asso­ciates Pro­gram, an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­gram designed to pro­vide a means for sites to earn adver­tis­ing fees by adver­tis­ing and link­ing to ama​zon​.com.”