Childhood nostalgia poll

[rachelmanija]

Please reminisce, fondly or not, about any of these, or other books read in childhood, especially if they seem to have, deservedly or undeservedly, vanished from the shelves. I'd love to hear about non-US, non-British books, too.

[Poll #1720139]

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

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.)

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

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

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

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

You left out Alvin Fernald and the McGurk Mysteries.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I never read them. What were they like?

[sanguinity]

Other series: Willard Price, [Noun] Adventure.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

ZOMG I LOVE THE MCGURK MYSTERIES.

[angharadd.livejournal.com]

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).

[pseudo_tsuga.livejournal.com]

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

[oursin.livejournal.com]

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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

[nextian.livejournal.com]

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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

And what did you read?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

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.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

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.

[lanerobins.livejournal.com]

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

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

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.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

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.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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.