rachelmanija | Childhood nostalgia poll

I read just enough Danny Dunn and Tom Swift to realize that science as an end in itself bored the crap out of me--where were the bad guys? Where were the spies and the good stuff? Where were the girls? (Homemaking or girls needing rescue did not count.)

But Irene!

I don't think I met her in the very few that I read.

I never read Tom Swift, just Danny Dunn, and Irene left enough of an impression on me that until Rachel's review I'd forgotten there were any of those books she wasn't in.

You must have only read the first one or two Danny Dunns - a girl, Irene, shows up very early in the series, and is an equal to the boys, except possibly smarter and definitely possessing a lot more common sense. I'd actually forgotten that she wasn't around from the get-go until I read that early one last night.

I don't know if you would have liked them anyway, though. They're about exploring strange new worlds, not fighting bad guys - "Oh no! Can we ever escape the bottom of the sea?!" rather than "Fight the villain at the bottom of the sea!"

I read the later (written by someone else) Tom Swifts, which added two kick-ass girls and actually are about fighting aliens/robots/etc.

I think it was the first couple of them, yes.

I liked Danny Dunn and I think that was the first time I ever had friends who liked some of the same books I did (Third grade, Vic, Irving and Mike, now all Facebook 'friends' which makes me happy.)

Reading them in the 1970s, it struck me as deeply bizarre that the boys carried Irene's books home from school.

I read Cherry Ames when I was an adult, actually.

Didn't read Blyton, but did read Edward Eager and E. Nesbit

I also read Edward Eager and E. Nesbit! Let's be friends.

Edward Eager!

And because of him I read some E. Nesbit, although not enough to consider myself any kind of authority (mostly the Psammead series).

me too!

And me! Kids travelling in time, hurray! So also Hilda Lewis, The Ship That Flew, and Uttley's A Traveller in Time (though I never cared for Mary Queen of Scots even as a kid.)

Like!

I love "Half Magic" so much that I ran out and bought it as soon as I knew I was pregnant.

Then I recommend Laurel Snyder's Any Which Wall. (And also her Penny Dreadful, even if that owes most to my *least* favorite Eager, Magic or Not? I prefer magic, thandsverymuch.)

I am going to check those out! Thanks.

My own kids are no longer reading children's books. My oldest is currently reading Satre, Delilo and Cheever, while my younger is reading tests on typography.

I was completely shocked to see neither Eager nor Nesbit on that list. Or Baum!

My oldest read every Wizard of Oz book every written. And wrote the first two chapters of a sequel, including him as a character. He was 7 at the time.

You left out Alvin Fernald and the McGurk Mysteries.

I never read them. What were they like?

Alvin is a boy with a clever brain, an athletic friend, and a young sister. He solves mysteries with spies, a swap shop, environmentalism, and something I'm forgetting. Fun stuff. About fifth grade? Pre-sexual tension.

....International trade, town politics....

And he invents things! I tried his Automatic Bed-Making Machine with middling success.

I didn't think anyone else remembered these! Although of the E.W. Hildick books my favorite wasn't McGurk but Active Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch.

ZOMG I LOVE THE MCGURK MYSTERIES.

I remember loving them but otherwise not a damn thing about them!

Me too! I remember one bit from one of the fantasy books and that's about it.

I just ordered the first one on Amazon (they're mostly out of print, but seem fairly available used) so that I can refresh my memory!

I only really remember the only one I owned, which was the one where Wanda (? tree-climbing girl) has her Japanese penpal come for a visit, and she turns out to be a ~super-amazing detective~ and everyone has to A) foil a dastardly kidnapping plot and B) put up with McGurk's increasingly and ridiculously petty attempts to prove that He Is The Best Detective Here Thank You Very Much, and also karate. The rest of the series... I remember something about a lost turtle. And the narrator typing a row of 7s over a row of 8s on their typewritten business cards so they would look all fancy and interesting.

Further research reveals the author also wrote The Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, which I utterly adored. And still have around here...somewhere.

Also Encyclopedia Brown (whose best friend Sally supplies the muscles of their team).

My favorite series as a child was the Red Bicycle series, which started out as exciting urban fantasy Christian propaganda with magical bicycles and varyingly dubious morals (video games are bad for you! popularity contests in school are bad for you! be nice to your siblings, even the annoying ones! adults probably don't understand the mystical battle between good and evil going on in your town!), which got weirder and weirder as the series went on. And then darker and darker, as the author decided to stop pulling from modern life and cue up the book of Revelation. It went sort of...The Last Battle, really.

I also remember being passionately invested in whether the Black Stallion or his son, Satan, could actually win in a race between the two of them, and disappointed that the answer was carefully left ambiguous.

And now I desperately want to track down the Henry Reed stories again. (Not so much the Mad Scientists Club series, which was fun but kinda forgettable.) Were there more than two books in the series? My library only had the two.

Yeah, there were four or five, I think.

The Red Bicycle books sound interesting. Does everyone die and go to Heaven at the end?

Just about. But you don't get to see them in Heaven. The last scene of the last book has a kid who's been a recurring villain since book 3 or 4 get back to his hometown, ready to meet his family and friends again, so very overjoyed that he got the Mark of the Beast, which in this case was a forehead-injected antidote to a paralyzing gas that's going to be released to kill all of the eeeevil Christians. ...but /everyone/ in town has already converted. So he gets to town and there's all these dead bodies frozen in positions of great joy and rejoicing, while he runs around, the only one left alive, trying to find anyone else. And there are the bodies of his family and friends, all frozen in expressions of great happiness, completely dead, while he's left utterly alone...

Now there is a scene that lasts a lifetime in memory, I'll tell you.

WOW.

Yeah.

The Last Battle was scarring in its own way, but that series loved it some nightmare fuel. The bit in an earlier book where a kid finally finds his long-lost parents, who have sold their souls to the local Satan-equivalent, working in a carnival ride where their job is to make faces at passing cars of children while said children throw mud-bombs and the like at them...

...yeah. That's all I've got. "Yeah."

WOW.

...the first two books were pretty much just exciting adventure series! Really!

And in retrospect, the book that was all about how RPGs Are Evil (...except it was all LARPing, done on bikes, in a special private facility) is downright hilarious.

Other series: Willard Price, [Noun] Adventure.

Ohhh, those look vaguely familiar. But I think I never actually saw any, only read the tempting-sounding descriptions in the backs of other books. (Volcano Adventure! Gorilla Adventure!) Perhaps I am lucky to have missed Cannibal Adventure.

omg, I read those. they were in my middle school library.

I checked "Sweet Valley High" although I only read one of those because I read a ton of "Sweet Valley Twins." Fascinating exploration of a completely alien culture.

I forgot that "High" and "Twins" were separate series. They sort of blend together into a mass of blondeness in my mind.

That's a frighteningly apt way of describing them. :-)

Maybe my tolerance for Simon R. Green's addiction to the descriptive phrase "tall, dark, and no longer handsome" actually dates back to the endless descriptions of the Wakefields' blondness and their Pacific-blue eyes or whatever it was.

Don't forget their "perfect size 6 figures"!

Now downgraded to size 4 (http://gawker.com/#!5004617/random-house-proudly-promoting-eating-disorders).

I managed to completely avoid those, although I seem to recall that most of the non-geeky girls in my school seemed to eat them up like hotcakes. (I'd pretty much abandoned YA by the time they started coming out, and had long since learned that non-genre "realistic" stories about girls my own age usually read to me like dispatches from a somewhat alien-but-in-a-really-boring-way alternate dimension. I'd branched out from F&SF and was in a bit of a mystery/thriller phase at the time -- lots of Dick Francis and Robert Ludlum and sundry forgettable Cold War spyfests -- just as alien, but with lots of exciting sex and violence!)

There was also eventually Sweet Valley Kids, and I think Sweet Valley University. And I'm pretty sure that the historical books created my love for sweeping epics.

I am somewhat ashamed at the number of those books I read. In my defense, I am a twin who grew up in SoCal, so the culture was not so foreign. Their barbie-lifestyle, on the other hand, I think lowered my IQ and self-esteem by several points.

Yeah, I didn't read much Sweet Valley High, but I read a lot of Sweet Valley Twins.

Huh.

On perusing Wikipedia, it seems I only ever read 'High', not 'Twins'. Weird. (But I seem to have only read the first 20 or so High books. Which took about 45 mins each.)

Same here! I think I remember checking them out of the library at a certain age because my parents had this idea that for every lot of ten library books or so I should get at least one that wasn't sff, and the Sweet Valley Kids books were an easy way to comply with that rule.

I totally read a random assortment of both High and Twins (and occasionally Kids), because I was still in the stage of reading pretty much anything fictional and not grindingly depressing that my middle school library had. I didn't start focusing specifically on genre stuff till high school, IIRC.

I will admit that I liked them mostly because a) they were a quick read, so I could check one out and bring it back the next day (or even at the end of the day), and b) I loved goody-two-shoes characters and older sister characters as a kid, so when you pair that with the fact that the goody-two-shoes older twin had my name... yeah.

I LOLed hard at dead dogs and dead teenagers categories XD My childhood fell on the first years after Ukraine became independent, so my childhood reading was a mixture of Soviet books about pioneers who fought the nazis and died by scores, and US-ian books some church group translated, where little girls acted as paragons of virtue and also died by scores:) There were also books by Gerald Durrell, Jane Goodall and some other stories about wildlife preservation (where animals died by scores).

I loved Gerald Durrell. I probably would have loved the Nazi fighting, too. Did any girls get to fight?

They did! From what I remember, those books were pretty much equal-opportunity gender-wise when it came to fighting, and would have been a great read if they cut out the propaganda. (The girls fighting might have been a part of the ideological message as well, though: in post-war times, the inhabitants of the occupied territories - that is, mostly women, children and other non-combatants - were mostly depicted as collaborators, there were very real legal repercussions etc., so those childrens' books sort of provided a model for how those people should have acted: that is, die heroically rather than try to survive.)

Gerald Durrell is awesome! I still remember lengthy passages from many of his books by heart.

I've read almost none of these, possibly because my childhood wasn't that long ago.

Edited 2011-03-20 21:52 (UTC)

And what did you read?

...doh, I really should've added that too. Most of the series in nextian's comment plus Goosebumps, Austen, the Dear America series (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dear_America), and of course Harry Potter.

The works of Enid Blyton tend to form rather a blur in memory, but definitely the Famous Five and the Secret Seven and various others. Possibly one or two Malory Towers.

Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jansen, Wayside Stories, Madeleine L'Engle, Diane Duane...

Oh, that's right! I'd forgotten until you listed them, but I read all of those except Wayside Stories.

Also loved Boxcar Children, Wayside, and L'Engle.

Oh man, the Boxcar Children! My friends and I used to play Boxcar Children pretend.

(Also +1 to Wayside Stories and Madeleine L'Engle and Encyclopedia Brown.)

So did we! I always had to be Violet and carry my friend's cat around everywhere, which was a problem at that stage of childhood when I was afraid of animals . . .

Man, I even shortened my name to Nita in middle and high school because of Diana Duane.

Yes to all of these except Diane Duane. Cam Jansen! I used to practice my photographic memory skills because of those books, except even as a dorky 10-year-old I didn't say "click."

+1 to all of these except the Boxcar Children and Duane (whom I discovered as an adult).

I didn't pick up the Young Wizards books until I was an adult either -- a somewhat younger S.O. introduced me to those.

Oh! Yes! Cam Jansen and Encyclopedia Brown, and Wayside Stories.

All of the above!

Me too with the Boxcar Children.

Oh, yes! Encyclopedia Brown absolutely; Madeleine L'Engle devotedly; Diane Duane I didn't discover till high school, but adored her once I did. Cam Jansen I've never heard of, and Wayside Stories never really grabbed me.

I loved the first Boxcar Children book, but I only read a couple of the others, because what I wanted out of that series was Plucky Orphans Surviving By Their Wits, and after the first book it hopped genres into Plucky Children Solving Mysteries. I had Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins already for that.

You forgot the Baby-Sitters Club.

Elizabeth Levy's The Gymnasts series is surprisingly non-terrible, in fact quite good.

The all-time greatest single book title (not book, title) of my childhood remains I Spent My Summer Vacation Kidnapped Into Space. The book is not bad.

I never read Baby-Sitters Club. ;)

I recall a book called something like The Secret War Between the Horrible Teachers and the Glorious Kids, and that it was just as weird as it sounded, but googling the no-doubt garbled title fails to turn it up. I think the author's name was something like Stanley G. Weingartner, only not actually that.

I remember that book. It was amazingly strange and sort of mentally scarring, especially with how it ended. And I don't remember the actual title, either.

omg that book terrified me. I think it scared me into never ever breaking a school rule well into high school.

Is this it? http://www.amazon.com/Between-Pitiful-Teachers-Splendid-Kids/dp/0380578026

I remember the book as well, but I can't tell if this is it.

Yes! That's it! The Amazon reviews are hilarious:

I've always remembered reading this book, a surreal and really rather sinister and apocalyptic tale of kids on the run in the name of individuality. The premise bears a lot of similarity to the 1998 movie Disturbing Behavior, with parents zombifying their kids in order to make them behave, but minus the "mature themes". If anything, one could say it was like Disturbing Behavior meets Logan's Run, written for sixth-graders.

...

Shark-infested rice pudding! Just like mom used to make! This book should be required reading.

...

I read this book when I was a kid, and it's strange! I was unable to tell if it was a parody or just bizzare. I read it again recently, and what do you know? I still can't tell. But it did teach me that I'm worthwhile, and that I should always stand up for myself.

...

I remember this book! It was bizarrely depressing. Did you ever read Julian F. Thompson? He was kind of similar, only without the depressing.

I think I read some of his? There was one about a summer camp where parents sent their problem kids to be whacked? (I mean killed, not spanked.) I recall that they were also very strange, and feeling that most of the story was whizzing over my head. I also could never figure out what happened at the ends.

Oh my god, I remember that book! It was so weird and memorable, and there was a lot of it I didn't like at all but somehow it kept me reading right up to the horrifically depressing ending.

Baby-Sitters Club was after my time -- the first one came out in my senior year of high school. Even if they'd been around in my childhood, though, I probably would never have picked them up -- I tended to reject most real-world contemporary setting mundane stories, especially girly ones, as boring-looking, and I had zero interest in babysitting or babies, in real life or fiction. (I loved it when I could find cool girl characters in the kind of adventure/F&SF stories that I preferred to read, but the classic "girl books" people always expected me to read were mostly mundane domestic/friendship stories that didn't really grab my attention. I read them when there was nothing else around because even a dull book was better than nothing, but I could never really get into them.)

I read an embarrassing number of Babysitters Club books, embarrassingly late. They were completely mindless, totally popcorn, and I could read one in something like half an hour, and sometimes what I wanted actually was to not have to think very much for half an hour.

My memorable-for-the-title-not-the-book memory is "The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks," which was about... a plant that ate dirty socks, truth in advertising. (Actually, two. But one of them, IIRC, ate clean socks.) The plants had adventures, including things like the time where they ate a singing Christmas sock and got sick from the battery.

In the way of goofy early-90s middle-grade books, it had sequels, including, if I remember correctly, "The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks Goes Up In Space," which I may have read, and "The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks Gets a Girlfriend," which I did not.

I strongly suspected that you had made up the concept of "The Plant that Ate Dirty Socks" out of whole cloth, but no, there it is on Amazon. With a title like that, it really ought to have been written by Daniel Pinkwater...

Oh jeez, I was super into The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks long past the point at which they were age appropriate. They were so bizarrely hilarious. It didn't hurt that the first one I read was the second book in the series, and it was a road trip/family vacation plot, my favorite subgenre.

Oh man, the Baby-Sitters Club and The Gymnasts! Yeah, I devoured both those series too. (Especially since I totally wanted to be a great gymnast as a kid, despite being enthusiastically terrible at it. I was nowhere near fearless enough, and grew into the wrong body type entirely for it, but I had a lot of fun anyway.)

Boxcar Children, Narnia, and E. Nesbit were probably the other major ones for me.

For some reason, I never think of the Narnia book as a "series", because in my head series had amorphous, unknown numbers of books, and occasionally, like magic, a new one would appear on the library shelves. Whereas the Narnia books were done by the time I got to them, with a quite concrete and knowable number, all packaged in one box on my brother's shelf.

Hmmm, I would call a non-finite series a "serial"; a series is simply more than four books. But as far as serials go, E. Nesbit probably wouldn't qualify either.

Yes to both the Boxcar Children and Narnia.

Like!

My "others" was Kay Tracey mysteries and the Dana Girls. They were hard to find, though.

Wasn't sure what to check - for a bunch of series, I only read one or two books (Black Stallion, Sweet Valley High, Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys).

But I did read Encyclopedia Brown. And I'm not sure if this is a little past your age range, but I was an adolescent girl and like all of my ilk, I was obsessed with the Flowers in the Attic series and anything VC Andrews for a long time.

Other than that, I don't remember reading many series books, actually - mostly one shots or I'd just read one or two books in the series. The Judy Blume books of course, which were mostly standalones. And Lion Witch & the Wardrobe - but I think I got bored with the others in the series and stopped. The Cat ate My Gymsuit and the sequel.

OMG FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC. I read terrifying amounts of V.C. Andrews before I started to twig that, Wait a sec, these things are...kind of formulaic.

But they went straight to my adolescent id. And gauging by my fandom tastes today I don't think I've ever recovered.

Oh, I hear you. They clearly went straight to my id too! My issue was that the library had a ton of them, so I could read everything they had in a month, so I sort of burned out and went back to reading...Piers Anthony. Yeah.

Ah ha ha, I think "what childhood reading permanently warped your fandom id?" could make for a delightful MASSIVE discussion all on its own. XD

I only read Flowers in the Attic last year, and was so inspired that I wrote Yuletide crackfic for it, crossing it over with a paranormal romance series (Nalini Singh).

It was our first Christmas in the attic. Little had we realized, on that terrible day when Momma had first explained that we were the forbidden children of an incestuous Psy-Changeling marriage and that she, a powerful Cardinal Psy, had fled PsyNet to marry her half-Changeling, half-Psy, half-uncle, but after he was killed by Psy assassins she had been forced to flee to the elegant but cold home of her mother, who locked us in the attic as punishment for Momma's incestuous sins and also to protect us from the deadly Psy Council who would erase the dark blot of our existence, that it would be years before we saw the yellow of hope and sunlight again.

I don't know the Nalini Singh series but that sounds amazing :-).

Did you read the whole series? (The real series - Flowers, Petals, If there be thorns, and Seeds - i.e., the books written before she died). I also loved, loved, loved Heaven, and many of my peers loved My Sweet Audrina, although I did not care for that one.

No, just the first book.

Nalini Singh...

- is responsible for my tag "adverb male" (ie, resolutely male, ineluctably male, ineffably male, etc)

- has Psy characters whose eyes are like the night sky, and when they come the white stars become multi-colored fireworks.

and when they come the white stars become multi-colored fireworks

Ummm .. this is not a children's series, I take it?

Intended for grades three through six... Ha ha. No. It's adult paranormal romance.

I also read a ton of VC Andrews, starting at around age 12, when a friend in my 7th grade class introduced me to Flowers in the Attic. (Not so coincidentally, 7th grade was when I started going to a school that was right next to a library, and this friend and I would go afterschool and check out all sorts of books our mothers would never have let us read if they'd known.)

Ah ha ha, I was such a precocious reader that my mother, bless her heart, actually talked to the librarians and gave permission for me to check out YA and adult titles when I was still in elementary school...and she was generally so hyper-controlling about every other aspect of my life, I know she would have been utterly APPALLED if she realized some of the content of the stuff I was reading right under her nose! But she wasn't really a great reader herself, and her friends mostly only read really mainstream bestsellers; and she approved of reading as Educational and Improving (and better than watching tons of TV or running about on my own); so once in a blue moon if I tried to pick up something one of her friends brought to the beach (like V.C. Andrews or Audrey Rose), I'd get told to put it down because it was "too old for you" -- but she never hassled me over dragging bags of age-inappropriate stuff home from the library. XD

Oooh, yeah, Paula Danziger. Good for teenage angst even if you're a guy.

Oh God, VC Andrews. The cool girls in 5th grade discovered those (and, importantly, discovered that they had sexy stuff in them) and for the next two years EVERYBODY in my class read them obsessively.

Which was, of course, especially ironic for the kids whose parents wouldn't let them take sex ed. But yeah, so many young libidos, warped forever. :)

If we're getting into adolescence, I want to put in a shout-out to everyone else who got their first confused ideas about sex from Jean Auel's books.

Oh god those books! Can't say they were my "first" confused ideas, but they were an important part of my adolescence.

I remember furtively passing them from hand to hand at summer camp. Probably scarred the lot of us for life.

Same here -- I think at the point I found those I already had a decent idea of the general mechanics from a mix of nature books/documentaries, medical reference books (my mom was a nurse), and the creepily outdated 1950s facts-o-life pamphlets my mom had been hanging on to for when she had kids, and I'm pretty sure I'd come across other sex scenes in fiction at that point, but nothing quite as detailed as Auel. But that was also the same year the Brooke Shields remake of The Blue Lagoon came out -- one of my calabash aunties took me to see that, along with her slightly older kids, because it was ~educational~; and that was simultaneously thrilling because it was the first R film my mom had allowed me to watch, and somewhat embarassing to be watching all that sex stuff with grownups. So yeah, between Ayla and the Lagoon kids, 1980 was a good year for disturbing sexual-awakening mass media. o_O

Ahahahahaha OH MAN THOSE ONES.

Yeah, at twelve-or-so I remember reading through The Valley of the Horses and skimming through those innumerable purple prose sex scenes (they put that in a BOOK! Can you DO that??), and then going back to reread them in furtive confused embarrassment.

Oh god, I read the shit out of the Boxcar Children books. Those were so good! I think that is the start of my thing for people reacting sensibly to extreme situations. Also Encyclopedia Brown (10-year-old who's read the entire encyclopedia solves crimes by virtue of the knowledge gained thereby. obviously pre-Wikipedia, smart phones, the Internet).

But you know what other books I actually really liked that I would probably still recommend to other people? The McGurk Mysteries! (http://www.thrillingdetective.com/mcgurk.html) They also feature a bunch of kids solving utterly normal, not actual crime, mysteries. The characters are well drawn, they're funny, and actually every so often deal with real issues in non-faily ways.

I have never read Enid Blyton.

I loved the McGurk Mysteries! I wonder how I'd like them now. Did you ever read the Ghost Squad books? I loved those too, and I picked one up used a while ago. Haven't read it yet to step back into my teenage self.

I still find myself thinking of a few details from the McGurk mysteries every now and then--the one with the contractor who wrote Greek E's in particular. I don't think I ever read Ghost Squad, though.

McGurk Mysteries! I am so glad Rachel posted this, simply because I know what they're called now.

I did always like the way the mysteries solved in the McGurk books were mostly, well, genuinely child-scale mysteries--without seeming boring or stupid.

How did you people leave out Roald Dahl?

He didn't have any series, though, did he? He was too weird for series.

He wrote a few sequels (e.g., Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator), but nothing I'd call a series.

No, but Roald Dahl books became a series of their own. Just to see what he'd write next.

Truth.

Huh, I'm racking my brains here and I know the earlier Dahl titles must have been around in the libraries of my youth, but I don't think I ever read any of them? (The 1971 Gene Wilder "Willy Wonka" movie, now, that seemed to run on broadcast TV every year, and I watched it when it came around, but it never really inspired me to look for the book.)

The Happy Hollisters, which is about as old-fashioned as Bobbsey Twins and, if anything, less plausible. The Hollisters had, like, five kids, plus a dog and eventually, if I remember correctly, a donkey. They solved crimes and traveled a lot.

We knew they were goofy as hell and dated when we read them (they were read-aloud books when I was a little kid, like 4-7ish), but enjoyed them anyway.

Oh, and there was a kid detective series that I adored but whose name/author/etc I can no longer remember at all. I ought to ask

whatwasthatbook, come to think of it. It featured a group of... four or five "detectives," with the viewpoint character being one who kept logs and records for the group. I wish I could remember more concrete details, but all I have to go by is scattered incidents in the books.

You know, that maaaay be the McGurk Mysteries (http://www.thrillingdetective.com/mcgurk.html)!

:D

That was exactly it! Thank you!

I'm so glad to find other fans of those books!

I'm really glad to have a name for them, because I really enjoyed them!

I particularly liked that--if I remember correctly--the mysteries they solved were mostly in the reasonably-plausible-for-kids-to-be-solving vein: who broke a window, who stole a toy, that kind of thing. Kids investigating kid crimes, not kids involved in tracking down jewel thieves for some reason. I mean, I read and enjoyed the "kids investigating major adult crimes" type of books to and enjoyed them plenty, but it was a nice change.

That was the McGurk Mysteries.

Thank you! I loved those.

Yes! I agree that the Happy Hollisters were, amazingly, less plausible than the Bobbsey Twins. They also felt more old-fashioned, even though they were way more recent than the old 1920s versions of the Bobbsey Twins I owned. Something about the happy-family tone of them? Or something?

They sure were happy. I liked them because one was named Holly, like me, and she was a tomboy with pigtails.

Yeah, exactly--I know intellectually that they were (mostly) written after (most of) the Bobbsey Twins books, but they feel at least as old.

I also remember that they certainly did a lot of traveling. They were an amazingly good-natured family to begin with, but it was particularly notable that, on the sixth week of their European vacation, the four-year-old was still sweet and chipper. ;)

Boxcar Children! both old & new, and also both the old and new Linda Craig series (horseback Californian Nancy Drew with Spanish ancestry), although the old ones are best in both cases. And the Saddle Club series from the late 80s-ish, and whenever I could dig any up, the Timber Trail Riders series from the 60s... I was into horse books.

I read all of my dad's old kids books and the books my mom remembered from her childhood and could find at a thrift store - so, like, the original Tom Swifts, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, etc - and the only one I remember that's not on your list is the Happy Hollisters. The Happy Hollisters were a family of pretty young crime-solving kids (and puppy and kittens). IIRC they were less likely to encounter pirates and drug-smugglers than the Bobbsey Twins; the ones I remember were more family drama mysteries.

I didn't read any of these! I did read a lot of Noel Streatfeild.

+1 for Noel Streatfeild. She stands up very well, too.

Noel Streatfield!

+1, definitely.

Another +1 for Streatfeild.

"My Friend Flicka" and its sequel-ish things. Everything by Marguerite Henry.

How can you possibly forget the Oz books? We had all 41!!!!

Two or three Elsie Dinsmores. Loathed her.

Edit: How can I forget the All-of-a-Kind family? Fantastic food values. "Quarter-penny chocolate babies."

Edward Eager! Edward Eager hurray! And E. Nesbit.

Edited 2011-03-20 22:22 (UTC)

Oh, I loved All-of-a-Kind Family!

Me too!

Me three!

Me four. The middle books were the best. I loved Ella's romance with Jules, and I was so worried when Lena got polio.

My grandmother lived in the Lower East Side when she was a small child (though slightly later than the time span of the All-Of-A-Kind books). I really felt like those books connected me to her childhood somehow.

YES to Oz, Marguerite Henry (first time I ever cried for a book was at the end of Black Gold), and the All Of A Kind Family, which, I was given to understand, was MY family history in a way that Laura Ingalls' history was not and would never be.

First time I read Black Gold (as I think I have even said in Rachel's comments section before), I was about 20 pages from the end, and then... a section from earlier was inserted! And the end didn't exist.

(So I got to pretend it wouldn't end in complete and abject tragedy for awhile, til we ILL'd it from another site.)

Being a child of the 70s, I watched the "Little House" TV series pretty regularly, but I was so meh about the one book from the series that I read (Farmer Boy) that I never had any interest in picking up the rest of them. Which is probably a good thing, because it meant I never had to reconcile the wholesome, kindly Pa Ingalls on TV with the book-Pa who thought the only good Indian was a dead Indian until I was old enough to understand how fucked up so many of the American "classics" were about my family's history. :/

Oh, no, Pa was fairly respectful, it was MA Ingalls who believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and I believe she'd actually been local for the Minnesota massacre that happened before Laura was born, so she was coming from a place of fear.

Laura actually wrote some fairly sympathetic things as an adult, when she had a newspaper column.

Ah, my bad...looking back to the critical essays where I first heard about the depiction of Indians in those books, it seems that my memory had conflating the Scotts' talk of massacres and Pa's reminiscing of childhood games where he imagined stalking "wild animals and Indians". In my muddled memory's defense, I should note that when I was little, family friends who knew I was a big reader but didn't grok my tastes frequently gifted me with "classic" girly books from their own childhood -- that's how I ended up with that copy of Farmer Boy in the first place; and I'm pretty sure my mother never read them, she never mentioned any familiarity with the series and it was only just starting to come out back when she was a schoolgirl on the rez, so she probably wasn't forewarned as to how Indians were portrayed in the books. So when I first came across Native academics discussing the issues with these books, I read those essays with an increasingly queasy feeling that I'd dodged a bullet there. :/

"My Friend Flicka" and its sequel-ish things. Everything by Marguerite Henry.

Me too. Also Elyne Mitchell's Silver Brumby series, The Saddle Club, Thoroughbred -- because these series had girls and weren't just about racing, unlike The Black Stallion series (which I also read, but didn't love as much).

I didn't even care about real horses that I recall; just the books. And Marguerite Henry could draw.

Those scenes with the cracker flavors! And the one where the girls each pick out their own penny treat, of a piping hot sweet potato or a dill pickle or candied grapes or...

That's the thing. A book with a really great description of food I will remember forever.

Yah, all the horse books. (And Oz. The non-Baum person wasn't any good.) Never did read Elsie Dinsmore.

OMG, All-of-a-Kind Family! My library actually gave me their copy when they deaccessioned it because I'd checked it out so many times.

All-of-a-Kind Family, YES. And Edward Eager was intensely formative for me - the part in Seven-Day Magic where the kids are talking about their favorite kind of fantasy book still fits exactly my favorite kind of fantasy book now, and I'm pretty sure it's his fault. I can't be the only one he led to E. Nesbit, too!

My Friend Flicka! I even have O'Hara's memoire around here somewhere...

(I really wish I was a paid LJ member now because I keep wanted to edit my answer.)

Oh, yeah, I inhaled the Marguerite Henry horse books. Well, horse books in general, but hers were at the top of the heap.

Yes absolutely to Marguerite Henry! I read so much of her stuff.

And Oz too absolutely; I owned all the L. Frank Baum ones except Tin Man and Glinda, which are still a hole in my collection. I really ought to acquire them sometime for completeness's sake. I never read the sequels written by anyone else; I was a tiny snob about the very idea.

I read and loved the All-of-a-Kind family, but only the first. I think there was a sequel I didn't read? Unless I'm misremembering.

Marguerite Henry was great. My favorite was, and still is, King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian. I loved the beginning in Morocco, and the relationship of the horse and the boy.

There were more All of a Kind Family books: More All-Of-A-Kind Family, All of a Kind Family Downtown, All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown, and Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family,

The only two Henry books I owned were Album of Horses and a paperback of Misty of Chincoteague that came with my Breyer models, but I read and reread the rest in the library, and King of the Wind was my favorite there.

My favorite of the teen investigator series sets was "The Three Investigators". I'd love to write a follow-up book where all three have grown up. Jupiter is of course still living in the junk yard, now a computer whiz but not rich because he spends all his time solving crimes. Pete became a lawyer, and the other one whose name escapes me became an archaeologist. Pete has an ex-wife, the other one a long-time partner. And of course all three have much angst about growing old.

Three Investigators were my favorite books, period, for most of my childhood. I discovered them in first grade and fell instantly in love (I think the first one I read was Mystery of the Green Ghost). I lived (and still do!) in the same general area as the books were set, so that was very cool for me, too.

Apparently the Three Investigators have a huge fandom in Germany-- more books, fanfic, the whole nine yards. They were my favorite teen investigators, too.

I read and reread the Adventure series by Enid Blyton. I wanted to be Phillip with his special animal powers. I don't think there was another childhood series I was so enamored with. Although I did love the Oz series too, and had to defend my reading tastes to friends because they were fantasy.

(My sister was recently reading these books--the upgraded ones--to her daughter who apparently kept rolling her eyes at the girls who do so much less than the boys.)

Trixie Beldon was easy for me to related to, though I don't entirely know why. Perhaps I'd have to reread them to understand. Cherry Ames wasn't a reread series, though I certainly remember her red cheeks. I remember few details beyond that. However there was one scene that I never forgot where someone was wondering out loud (I have no idea of the circumstances) whether God would judge the weak and strong (morally, I believe) with the same yardstick. And I hadn't, for whatever reason, come across this idea/question before. So I never forgot that as it struck me quite hard.

The Black Stallion, I ripped through those. I remembering checking out bunches of those books from the library. That said, I remember very, very little of the books.

The eye-rolling refers to the Adventure books, not the Oz books.

I never even heard of Blyton until I was an adult on the interwebs. I don't think her books are/were really that common in the US. Did you read them here or in India? I did read quite a few other British children's books (someone above mentioned E. Nesbit), but don't remember ever seeing Blyton on the shelves and I just checked the Santa Monica library website now and all they've got are three from this series of hers.

OMG, please read and report back!

Warning: Books may contain horrific racism. Or not - depends if non-white characters make an appearance. Avoid Circus of Adventure at all costs - not technically racist but incredibly xenophobic.

I read them in India. They were quite popular there when I was there.

Haha, yeah, I'm sure a lot of them are pretty cringeworthy to read now.

I just thought to look on BookMooch as well, and there's a fair selection, but so far everything I've clicked on is not in the US. (Though I have a ton of unused points, so if someone's in another country and willing to send to me, I might go ahead and get some.)

They've been updated to address some of these issues, apparently. How well that worked, I don't know.

I only read one or two Bobbsey Twins books and they didn't grab me, but I checked them.

Little House on the Prairie books, ALL OF THEM. Not the truncated series offered today. Having them as background knowledge -- even though there were parts that didn't mke sense to me at the time -- gave me CLICK! moments when studying history (not just events history, but social history and costume history, stuff like that) later. So THAT'S what Laura was talking about, with (pick a detail).

A lot of children-and-the-Holocaust books, why did you have to remind me? (Did you know that When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit has sequels?)

Edward Eager, Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, John Bellairs.

Nina Bawden. My school library had a whole SHELF of hers. They were often very depressing.

Rumer Godden's doll books. I loved them to PIECES. I loved them so much I sought them out to give to my child. The Doll'sHouse, the one about Tottie and the wicked Marchpane, can make me cry now, and Impunity Jane made me very careful about using TINY stitches when sewing for dolls, because someone tried to sew for her but the large stitches HURT. And the Japanese doll books were fascinating.

The "A Little Maid of (colonial state)" series by Alice Turner Curtis -- again, there was a whole shelf of these in the town library (perhaps not surprising as I lived in Lexington MA) but I don't remember details at all. I see that some free downloads are available. I may have to re-explore.

The Noel Streatley "shoes" books -- "Ballet Shoes," "Theater Shoes" -- I know there were a lot of them, I know I read them, I don't remember much.

Anne of Green Gables, of course.

Carol Ryrie Brink wrote more than just Caddie Woodlawn. There was one called Louly, about a girl and her friends in 1908 America. I remember a whole bunch of related books about the same town. That may have been a different author.

All the Lois Lenski books, like Strawberry Girl.

There was a whole series about this girl Betsy and her friends. They were all around six to eight. There was a boy Eddie, and this other girl who'd had her front teeth knocked out and had the replacements held in with tiny gold hooks that hooked to her other teeth. Google tells me the author is Carolyn Haywood. The children were always getting to do things like ride on floats wearing costumes for a town Easter parade. I figured this was normal and that my town was sadly deficient for not having such a thing and that if only I weren't Jewish I'd get to dress up like Little Bo Peep and have ruffles sewn to my snow pants because it was too cold to go without them but the costume needed pantalettes.

I tended to trust book reality more than my observed reality. I also felt very cheated that we didn't get the amounts of snow that Laura got, and that his was a sign of degenerate modern times, and didn't grasp the distinction between New England weather and Great Plains weather. I was somewhat reassured by the Blizzard of '78.

The Anastasia books by Lois Lowry! Made more charming by happening in modern times in locations I knew.

I read ALL THE TIME.

Oh yes, yes! Anne of Green Gables! I think I read everything by LM Montgomery. I also loved the Anastasia books, The Dark Is Rising, and Lloyd Alexander. And Little House.

And while I'm remembering things, Tolkien. I read The Hobbit in fourth grade and Lord of the Rings not long after. (I know they're not typically thought of as children's books, but they were all actually stocked in the children's section of my local library as well as the adult section.)

The Hobbit in second grade, LOTR in third. I can trace it directly to a network broadcast of the Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit, after which my parents said "There are books, you know," and I was off and running.

I had a poster of the party trudging over the Misty Mountains on my bedroom wall for years.

I read both The Hobbit and LOTR so young that I literally do not even remember reading them for the first time -- I don't know when I first picked up my dad's paperbacks, but I'd definitely read them all by kindergarten: my mom had to fight with the school administration to get special permission for me to go to the school library along with the first-graders. Apparently they didn't bother taking kindergarten kids because we weren't supposed to be reading well enough to go, and she had to make a huge fuss about how I was already reading high-school-level books on my own.

The Silmarillion I read for the first time when I was nine -- I can date that exactly because it was a Christmas present the year it came out, and I still have that much-battered inscribed copy on my massive shelf-o-Tolkien.

I never made it through the Silmarillion. I would try with the creation myths, get lost, and skip ahead to Beren and Luthien.

I totally called dibs on Luthien when I was part of a masquerade entry enacting

filkertom's song "Return of the King, Uh-Huh" -- Aragorn in an Elvis jumpsuit, Eowyn and Arwen in prom dresses made from a vintage fifties pattern, and a crowd of fangirls in poodle skirts, representing all the races of Middle-Earth. With our poodle emblems referencing our characters. Our Entwife had a tree on a leash! Of course I had Luthien's emblem, and I also had LED blinky stars in my hair. It was AWESOME.

Ah, no love for poor angsty DOOOOOOMED! ~~Kullervo~~ ~~Elric~~ Túrin Turambar, or all the mad-bad-dangerous-to-know angsty DOOOOMED! Sons of Fëanor? I am a total sucker for Fëanorian angst...and in retrospect, I'm pretty sure that Maedhros/Fingon was one of my formative h/c slashy ships long before I had any idea just why those scenes thrilled me so much.

Those costumes sound AWESOME. Please tell me there are photos somewhere!

The instigator's photos have developed link rot, but you can see a few here: http://www.sickpupsnot.org/arisia2004.html

The emblem on green next to Luthien's was just supposed to be "semy of elanor flowers" because the concept was that the 8-year-old was Elanor Gamgee.

Eee, you used the canon heraldic devices! *hearts* And the Uruk biker jacket is EPIC win. XD

Edited 2011-03-21 01:27 (UTC)

That was the instigator's jacket, and she wore it with the One Ring skirt. Oh, and that fellow in the green jerkin is my ex-husband, and we looked up the Quenya word for "security" and how to spell it in tengwar and appliqued that in white felt on the back of his cloak. And someone was able to READ IT FROM THE AUDIENCE AND KNOW WHAT IT SAID. We figured that was the most epic win of all.

I was responsible for three skirts -- Luthien, Elanor, and the Entwife.

Also epic was the White Tree of Gondor on the back of Aragorn's jumpsuit, done up in EL wire. Due to last-minute alterations, the circuit wound up routing THROUGH his torso. Not ideal!

My dad read me The Hobbit, a chapter a night, when I was about 3. There was never a time it wasn't there, and I read it myself as soon as I could.

There was never a time it wasn't there, and I read it myself as soon as I could.

Yes, THIS! I don't even remember if my parents read it aloud to me, but they *did* have a marvelous boxed set of LPs of Nicol Williamson reading the whole thing; I *adored* those records, and loved to listen to them even long after I was reading the books on my own.

_{Not exactly children's literature, although I did read them for the first time while I was still in high school...every time I see your username, I grin and wonder if it's a "Dancers At The End Of Time" reference?}

That sounds wonderful.

And yes, my username is a modified reference to the Dancers at the End of Time character.

It really was a marvelous recording -- you can hear the first ten minutes here, with links to streaming/downloadable versions of the rest, if you're interested; apparently it's never been rereleased, which is a damn shame.

(And hee, I am delighted to hear that! That series is a great favorite of mine, but I've never run into anyone else who knew them...)

Edited 2011-03-22 14:12 (UTC)

The Doll's House was SO HEARTBREAKING. Birdie gives her life for Apple! It is seriously making me tear up right now just remembering it.

I KNOW, RIGHT? I teared up too, writing it!

And do you remember Home Is The Sailor, with them miraculously finding the lost doll at the beach? Oh my heart.

No! I missed that one!

I read the Betsy books over and over again; also Betsy-Tacy, by a different author.

The Lenski books are surprising -- her own doll-like illustrations really belie the serious content. I remember in STRAWBERRY GIRL, the heroine, the daughter of migrant workers, had her mother make a new dress for her of carefully-saved feedsacks. Then she proudly showed up at school for a birthday party only to find out she wasn't invited, and was mocked for her dress.

I know. And in one of them, someone was permanently weakened by rheumatic fever, and I pronounced it wrong, and, after my mother corrected me with some amusement, she explained about why I'd never heard of it or known anybody in real life who had it -- it was because when we got strep throat, we had antibiotics that would clear it up in a couple of days, and that was a thing that happened with untreated strep, before antibiotics.

She explained about diphtheria, when Laura and Almanzo had it in The First Four Years, and all the childhood diseases they had in all the Betsy books (measles, mumps, German measles, the works) and the Great Brain books (another series!) and polio, too. She grew up pre-vaccine and lived through polio scares, and all I'd ever dealt with was chicken pox. I grew up thoroughly respecting the powers of vaccination.

The 1918 flu epidemic was very vividly in the All-Of-A-Kind Family books. I wish I'd thought to ask my grandmother about that, before she died. She would have been five, then.

Lois Lenski! I loved her books and gobbled up my elementary school library's supply. Then I started rereading them.

I credit her with starting my love of sf/fantasy/anthropology, because learning about how people in other cultures/times live is fascinating.

There....there are more than one Doll book? (gapes in happy shock)

I'd forgotten about A Dolls House but I know I have it around here somewhere. I remember that wicked Marchpane, and sweet little Apple...oh, that was a wonderful book. I didn't know it was a series. I will have to find those immediately.

Since we're talking about books that were extremely old when I was quite young, anyone remember "The Surprise of Their Lives?" (by Hazel Hutchins Wilson, per Amazon) There were a brother and sister whose little sister got scarlet fever, and they couldn't go home, and they had to stay at the nasty overly strict elderly neighbor's house, and somehow they accidentally stowed away on a cruise ship...

Oh, and what about Jane's Father (by Dorothy Keely Aldis, per Amazon)? Jane's father was very silly--I think they wound up putting his head in a birdcage at one point. And calomel was the cure-all, which confused me because I'd never heard of it. I thought it must be a precursor to St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin.

I liked Carolyn Haywood's Betsy books too, though it was odd because they started out way before my time and suddenly there was a time warp and they became quite contemporary to my mid-70s childhood.

This happened with Beverly Cleary too--Henry Huggins was a 50s kid with a coonskin cap watching Davy Crockitt and Ramona was a 3-year-old enamored with a Howdy Doody analog. And then when Ramona starts kindergarten she's a 70s kid, and then her father loses his job in the 70s recession and her mother goes back to work around the time my mother does the same...it was sort of confusing.

Edited 2011-03-21 04:13 (UTC)

I remember the Ramona time warp, and Beezus wanting a Dorothy Hamill haircut. My mother had a Dorothy Hamill haircut. it wasn't possible for me with my curly hair, and I wanted it long so I could have braids like Laura's, but I lacked the patience to grow it out, especially since having it brushed HURT. My aunt sewed me a calico gown and a sunbonnet, though. I adored her for that.

I don't remember the Betsy time warp - I suspect my school library didn't have the new ones.

There weren't any more Rumer Godden books about Tottie, but there were other dolls! There were several about the Japanese dolls, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. Miss Plum arrived in her own book, and so did the boy, Little Peach. MOAR DOLL BOOKS.

Another marvelous doll book, NOT by Rumer Godden, is "Hitty: Her First Hundred Years." Get the original, not the later abridged version pitched at younger kids.

I didn't read the two other books you mentioned, but OMG CALOMEL. I only learned about that through Heinlein and that it was MERCURY and TOXIC and used as a laxative. Scary!

The archaic medicines I remember were the quinine in Little House on the Prairie for "fever and ague" which was malaria, and the belladonna Beth took for her fever in Little Women, which I realized years later when working in a natural foods store had to be HOMEOPATHIC belladonna, since homeopathy was very popular at the time (and way safer than calomel, if it came to that) and in homeopathy, belladonna is the go-to remedy for fever with red face! Oh, and in the British books, there always seemed to be calf's-foot jelly and beef tea for invalids. I've figured out the calf's-foot jelly, but even with the help of historical cookbooks, I haven't quite sorted out what distinguishes beef TEA from beef BROTH. It's so weird!

Hitty! I was kind of meh about a lot of the classic girly books -- too much dull domestic stuff, not enough adventure for my tastes; and I wasn't all that into dolls as a kid (if they'd been as customizable and posable as my current BJD collection, it would have been another story...) -- but I really enjoyed Hitty. I was already a bit of a history buff, so I think it was that sense of the depth and passage of time that made that one work for me.

I haven't quite sorted out what distinguishes beef TEA from beef BROTH. It's so weird!

My understanding is that "tea" is just made by simmering boneless meat, with only a bit of salt of flavor, while "broth" is made by simmering meaty bones and may or may not contain additional spices and/or aromatics for flavor: this 1917 cookbook goes into some detail on the beef juice/tea/extract/broth/soup variations.

Not the truncated series offered today...

*eyes this warily* Are they abridged, did they edit them for content (to make them less racist), or do they just not offer some of the books? (I have to say, the racism was the /friendliest/ racism ever. Looking back on it, it's kind of surreal.)

They just quit after By The Shores Of Silver Lake -- I guess they figure that as she becomes an older teen, they're less relevant for the preteen girls who they're targeting them at? They totally slipcase a smaller set now..

But. What? The Long Winter!

Man. People. I just don't know.

"A Little Maid of..." is the series title that has been eluding me forever! They were in the library when I was living in the US (Maryland) and I've been desperately wanting to see how they read now.

Now if someone just comes up with the sort-of-equivalent Native American tribe series, my lost childhood books will all be recovered. (Those I fear will be horrendous, but I guess there's always hope. At least they weren't just books about generic "Indians".)

SUSAN COOPER. She was incredibly formative to me -- I can totally trace her influence in my writing style -- and I have reread the Dark is Rising series so many times in my life.

Little House on the Prairie, yes! I can recognize all the problematic bits of our nation's mythologized history in it now, but as a child I adored them. My longstanding childhood favoritism for the goody-two-shoes characters meant I loved Mary best, but really what I loved was the world, and all the details of things like making latches from a peg and a scrap of leather.

And oh, Lloyd Alexander. Prydain, of course, but also Westmark and a lot of his incidental stuff.

Childhood nostalgia poll

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