Books?
I’ve never been much of a reader. Most of the books I’ve read are children’s books. I do have a thing for kids picture books. They seem to be the best stories. Adult fictional books don’t really do it for me. If I’m going to read a grown-up book, I tend to go for autobiographies more than anything else. But, mind you, I’m not into celebrity and so the field of potential books grows even smaller. But, when on the rare occasion that I find a book that I enjoy, I’ll often read it pretty much non-stop until I finish it. In my younger days, it was often a baseball autobiography. I remember reading My Sergei in college. We picked the book up in the Kansas City Plaza and I read it the entire way back to Texas. I read even more seldomly now though than ever.
Remember I told you that I like children’s books. . . I used to watch C-Span on the weekends when they would talk about the children’s books. One weekend, while flipping to see what they had on, I saw Homer Hickman talking about his grown-up book Rocket Boys. I somehow knew this would be a book for me. It took me a while to find it, but once I did I devoured it. And then the sequel, The Coalwood Way. You may have seen the movie, October Sky, which was based on Rocket Boys. It doesn’t really do justice to Homer’s story. Rocket Boys is the story of how Homer and his friends built rockets in a small coalmining village. But, it’s also a story about living is a coalmining town. Homer, who eventually went to work for NASA, tells more about living in a coalmining town in The Coalwood Way.
In looking for book images, I see that ‘ol Homer’s got a few other true stories out there I’m going to have to check out. Then, I was totally sidelined with his website where there’s all sorts of things about Coalwood and his books. How these books sparked my interest in the coalmining towns of Tennessee and Kentucky! Cody and I would love to take a trip through that area.
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- Events Vs. Moments
- Lessons From The Past- The Little Black Book
- What’s Your Name, Little Girl?
- The Atergater Ate His Arm
- Lone Star Christmas