A memoir written by an Aberdeen academic which explores grief through children's books has been released for e-readers, after its hardcover release in 2022.
Professor Timothy Baker’s ‘Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories’ is also a featured work on a popular literary blog by publisher MIT.
The book is a first venture into popular literature for Professor Baker, Personal Chair in Scottish and Contemporary Literature in the School of Languages, Literature, Music and Visual Culture (LLMVC) at the University of Aberdeen. It was written as a way to memorialise his mother, who died in 2005, through the love of reading she inspired in him.
In the work, Baker rereads some of his favourite childhood books – from ‘The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and ‘Watership Down’ to ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ – and discusses how the act of rereading is a way of interacting with our past selves and examining who we are now.
Professor Baker said: “It is a poignant time of year for the release of the e-book as for many of us, Christmas is a time to think about and revisit traditions.
“I wanted to memorialise my mother and explore my childhood in a format that was accessible and would resonate with many people.
“Reading with a parent shapes our memories and the way we see the world. After my mother’s death I found there was little record of her existence but that one way to bring her back to me was through reading.”
Professor Baker says that no book is encountered on its own as we always read through the prism of the other books we’ve read and the lives we’ve lived.
He suggests that re-reading children’s books as adults offers new perspectives into our childhood and memories and helps us to reflect on the ways in which these shaped us, often subconsciously.
“As a child I read ‘The Hobbit’ multiple times,” he adds. “Then I didn’t read it for a decade, and returning to it one rainy day at university I was shocked to realise how many stories there were in it - it had filled my memory so comprehensively that I couldn’t quite understand how so many characters and set-pieces all fit within several hundred pages.
“It is not simply that we cannot go back to a text as if for the first time; it is that that first reading, and everything we have read since, informs our rereading, and the rereading changes how we remember the first reading.
“I cannot read ‘The Hobbit’ now without adding to it my memories of reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’, or of seeing the film ‘The Return of the King’ in the cinema on a Christmas morning and sobbing with relief that it had been released before my mother died. All of those experiences are now part of the original.”
‘Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories’ was reviewed by Claire Lynch, author of the memoir ‘Small: On Motherhoods’, who describes it as “a delicate weaving of memoir and criticism, this book is an ode to reading, to childhood, and to the books that shape a life. Profoundly moving, it captures all that is slowly revealed to us about childhood, if we are brave enough to look back.”