The books we read

I don't think I've talked much about our toys and our books. We didn't have a lot of books but the books we had, of course, we shared. We had something called bilderbok which were mostly pictures. Then when we learned to read, we had something called an ABCbok and when we lost a tooth, we put it into the ABCbok and they said that a chicken "laid an egg" in there for us. It was maybe a 5 öre, not much, but for us kids, that seemed like a lot of money.

This is an illustration of Lindgren's Emil by Björn Berg.

Sometimes if the doctor was going to Grönede or somebody we knew was coming through, we would set ourselves out at different gates and sometimes people would throw out a 5 öre. That was called grindpengar. Of course that made it more fun to open gates. Astrid Lindgren has Emil doing this in one of her books.

At school, they brought in a mini-library. I don't remember for sure but I think our school got one of those boxes a year. Then we could borrow these books. That's how I first read Onkel Toms Stuga, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet.... Harriet Stowe, I think her name was. I also read Den Sista Mohikanen, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. I remember one bilderbok that Lennart had that had a moose on the cover. I think that was his favorite because I remember reading it to him many times. I teased him about this later in life when he became the leader of the moosehunt.

There are two other books that I wanted to say something about too.

When all of us Boberg kids were learning to read, we had a book called Sörgården. It was about a farm family out in a little village just about like we were. Sörgården, of course, means south farm and in Kjettestorp, we had a Sör, so we felt right at home in that book. This book was kind of cleverly done. It showed how to write the letters while it told a series of stories. The stories mostly talked about things that we did around the farm. Then there would be some poetry and such worked in too. You could learn on several different levels with those books. When we finished Sörgården, we had another reading book called Önemå. A few years ago, they reprinted Sörgården and I thought that was lots of fun. I got to see my old schoolbook again.