A voice from the past

MIKE TOBIAS
The Port Arthur News

PORT ARTHUR July 25, 2008 12:58 am

— It’s always very encouraging to hear from readers of the Port Arthur News when I’ve struck a chord and written something that echoes the sentiments of many.
To this day, I’m still meeting people out and about that agreed with my calling out the lack of a good bookstore, or craft store, in the area. But nothing made my day more than to receive a very validating message from someone whose direction has helped feed my inspiration to read, write, and live at the level of my language. My senior English teacher, Mrs. Reynolds.

Dear Michael,
I am a voice from your past and a member of your fan club. After I read today's column, I knew I had to contact you for several reasons.
First, I agree wholeheartedly with your column and know many people who feel the same deprivation that you include: no bookstore, no craft store. and (I would add) no fabric store (I also miss Hancock's) in our area. I've even heard that a survey was taken tht showed our area lacks sufficient readers to warrant a bookstore. Surely, that idea is only a rumor, but if it is not, who was surveyed? I know many readers because I am an English teacher and do all I can to foster reading.
Next, I am so glad to learn that you actually took my reading list to heart and have enjoyed discovering its treasures for yourself. What a joy it is to learn that you are a serious reader! When you describe your love of Barnes & Noble, you are expressing my exact reaction to it, including the delicious cup of coffee. I could have written the
sentiments in your column myself.
I have always been a loyal fan of your work at the Port Arthur News, and I used to enjoy keeping up with your progress through your brother John, who was very proud of you and always willing to discuss your work with me when I had him for senior English. I remember a picture you took of the new bridge and its surroundings that is one of the best pictures I have ever seen and, I believe, won you an award(s).
Over the years, I have seen you at NHS but have not been able to speak to you much because you are always too busy to chat. That is why I decided to write to you today. Also I want you to know that I retired this year after a career of 35 years of teaching English. Your mention of my reading list is a special retirement gift to me because it tells me that some of my former students do still value the skills and knowledge that they gained in my classroom. Certainly, you have used your talents fully. I wonder if you still write fiction and poetry. You were my Creative Writing award student, and I remember how proud your parents were that you got that award. I think of you any time I hear the word Beatles or any of their music. Since you
graduated from high school, I have had several other students who love the Beatles, but your passion for them is the one that really stays in my mind: I even recall a story you wrote in which John Lennon was a character encouraging a young man.
Keep up the good work and I'll keep reading and enjoying your columns
and photography. Please tell your new wife that I think she is a very lucky woman, and though I don't really know her except through your columns, I think you have a treasure in her as well. Best wishes to both of you. Sincerely, Helen Reynolds.
I have made several correspondences with Mrs. Reynolds since receiving that first one, and as I talked with her, I let her know of the many requests I’ve received regarding her recommended reading list. Alas, with mine tucked away in storage, I’ve finally received another copy, so here goes a few from her highly recommended list:
Arthurian Tales, Pride and Predjudice (Jane Austin); The Bible; Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes); Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe); David Copperfield (Charles Dickens); Autobiography (Benjamin Franklin); The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne); The Iliad and The Odyssey (Homer); Moby Dick (Herman Melville); Mythology; Oedipus (Sophocles); Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift); Walden (Henry David Thoreau); Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); The Aeneid (Virgi).
And yet, more books from her highly recommended list:
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte); Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte); The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck); My Antonia (Willa Cather); Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad); Leatherstocking Tales (James Fenimore Cooper); The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane); Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens); Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky); Sherlock Holmes stories (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle); The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot); Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson); The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and Short Stories (F. Scott Fitzgerald); She Stoops To Conquer (Oliver Goldsmith); The Return of the Native (Thomas Hardy); The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne); For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and The Sea (Earnest Hemingway); Les Miserables (Victor Hugo); Brave New World (Aldous Huxley); Babbitt, Main Street, and Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis); Call of the Wild (Jack London); Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller); Mutiny on the Bounty (Charles Nordhoff); A Long Day’s Journey Into The Night (Eugene O’Neill); 1984 and Animal Farm (George Orwell), Cry, The Beloved Country (Alan Paton); Tales (Edgar Allan Poe); All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque); Robin Hood Tales, Giants in the Earth (O.E. Rolvaag); Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand); Quentin Durward (Walter Scott); Pygmalion and Saint Joan (George Bernard Shaw); The Rivals (Richard Brinsley Sheridan); Quo Vadis (Henryk K. Shenkiewicz); The Song of Roland, The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck); Vanity Fair (William Thackeray); War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy); Around the World in Eighty Days (Jules Verne); Our Town (Thornton Wilder);
And further down the list are books on Mrs. Reynold’s simply, recommended list:
Mansfield Park (Jane Austen); The Way of All Flesh (Samuel Butler); Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll); Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather); The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer); Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton); The Ox-Bow Incident (Walter Van Tilburg Clark): Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad); Inferno (Dante Alighieri); The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers (Alexander Dumas); Adam Bebe (George Eliot); The Sound And The Fury (William Faulkner); Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert); The Forsythe Saga (John Galsworthy); The Power and The Glory (Graham Green); The Mayor of Castorbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude The Obscure (Thomas Hardy); Green Mansions (William Henry Hudson); The Turn of the Screw (Henry James); The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce); The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling); Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak); Dialogues (Pluto), Lives (Plutarch); The Cloister and the Hearth (Charles Reade); Lincoln (Carl Sandberg); Ivanhoe (Walter Scott); Androcles and the Lion (George Bernard Shaw); Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson); Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain).
Myself, I’ve completed just over half of this list since graduating high school nine years ago. Much of the reading has been done in the last three years, since I graduated college. Because, let’s face it…who has time to read in college?
Anyway, there’s the complete Mrs. Reynolds’ lifetime recommended reading list. See how many you can get through, for those of you eagerly up to the challenge, and let me know how which ones you’ve read and enjoyed.
And now that I have you online, be sure to check out The Mike Tobias Show, updated Monday through Friday on the panews.com homepage. Just click play and hear me, Mike Tobias, discuss the daily Port Arthur News front page, weather, sports and much, much more.
Now…don’t you have some reading to do?
Mike Tobias is the photo editor and staff writer for The Port Arthur News. Contact him at: mtobias@panews.com.

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