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

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I forgot to list those! I read a bunch of them.

I wonder if the small family in Joan Aiken's Armitage stories was meant to lampoon the Borrowers at all.

Dammit, I forgot Aiken, too! Stupid memory.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I read the first book many times, and the second book a few times, but I never read any further in the series and I can't remember why. Maybe there wasn't any real reason.

As an adult I also read Philip Jose Farmer's Oz book, which is an entirely different sort of experience.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

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!

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

More things I forgot:

The Borrowers books

Joan Aiken - I read a bunch of her short story collections and the first five or so of her alt-hist series. I haven't read the latter in a long time but the short stories hold up pretty well. I remembered some of them as rather bleak, and surprisingly they still are. Particularly "Hope."

[roadrunnertwice]

Gordon Korman's "Bruno and Boots" series! (And pretty much everything else he did, with special props to No Coins Please and Who Is Bugs Potter.) I didn't know at the time that "boarding school" was a fully-fledged kidlit genre, and I still haven't read it widely, but in retrospect B&B were firmly in it, over in the prank/hijinks-centric end of the pool.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, and yes. I read all ...5?... of the Murray books. Years later someone gave me a copy of Wrinkle and I was so excited to read it again...but the Suck Fairy had whacked it hard with her wand in the intervening years, and it was preachy and hard to take seriously anymore.

On the brightish side, even though the Suck Fairy had thrown in extra anti-communist and overtly pro-Christian rhetoric, Camazotz was still satisfyingly creepy.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

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

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I mostly liked Encyclopedia Brown, but you could totally tell that every so often the writer had gotten blocked and had gone looking through trivia books until he found a fact that he'd turned into that particular chapter.

Is The Witch Family the Phyllis Reynolds Naylor series with the sister who was under the spell of the creepy neighbor? Um.. Witch's Sister, Witch Water, and The Witch Herself, if I remember correctly. Oh, no, wait, you said "Not in series." Must be something else. Anyway! The Naylor books were excellently spooky.

Oh, and what about The White Mountains? with the Tripods and the caps... those were good too.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Oh I read a ton of Oz books. Though around the time they went underground with... Rikitink? and met the onion people and the gnomes, I think I gave up. There were too many peoples to keep track of.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

OK, so!

I actually only read one of the Famous Five books, but I was very very fond of it. And since it was clearly a UK Book, I appear to have thought they would never import more, for some reason, and never looked for more. (I should fix this now.)

The Borrowers: Ridiculous and treacly but entertaining. The Littles were an inferior lot, newer and not as interesting.

Danny Dunn, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. Very fun. I see Encyclopedia Brown had an HBO series. (I mean. It had an HBO SERIES. What?)

Robert McClosky wrote some YA things (Homer and the Doughnuts was my favorite), which were made much better by the addition of his art.

Pippi Longstocking (which aren't exactly unknown, but I never see them anymore. Wiki tells me I have many more treats in store.) I loved because Pippi was so damn ridiculous. (I just recently bought Robia The Robber's Daughter; never read it before. Yay.)

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle.

Anything at all by Robert Lawson, including those silly biographies-masquerading-as-animal-autobiographies. (My favorite of those was Mr. Revere and I. My favorite in general was Mr. Wilmer. In which he can talk to animals and gets a job in a zoo.)

RL Stevenson, mostly out loud to/with my mother.

Thorton Burgess, Albert Payson Terhune, Marguerite Henry (my mom had a correspondence with her when younger; also went to pony penning), Walter Farley, some guy who mostly did younger books about horses with great drawings, etc. (Speaking of younger books, Bill Peet. Bill Peet also wrote a memoir about Cappybaras.)

And now, speaking of dog books, I am trying to remember the book I recall which was a hotel for dogs, but is not Lois Duncan's. I /thought/ it was Mr. Jolly's Hotel for Dogs (which is by Beth Brown), but the cover Amazon has is all wrong. Anyway, the one I remember is green, and had an ex-army person opening a place up in I think Switzerland. Adventures ensue.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I will go look for them again and re-read them IN ORDER. Gasp.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and I meant to add, Jean Webster. Who was seriously at one point into the eugenics movement and Dear Enemy sort of looks at it half approvingly. NONETHELESS, Daddy Long Legs (its prequel) /is still/ really fun.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

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.)

[metron-ariston.livejournal.com]

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.

[ealgylden.livejournal.com]

I literally just yesterday re-completed my Sunfire collection. My original copies are long gone, and for years I've been replacing them (it took so long because I vowed "no copies over $5!" Eventually I had to raise it a bit because some of those suckers are pricey these days...). And at last, at last I found a copy of Kathleen, in good shape and not insanely pricey! Yay!

(I feel like I should be ashamed at how happy I am to have them all again, but I'm totally not. Hee!)

[metron-ariston.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I remember really, really wanting a Poot!

[ealgylden.livejournal.com]

Most of mine have been named already: Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley. L. M. Montgomery. Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander (Vesper Holly more than Prydain, even if I was a bit beyond the target age when she began). Mary Norton's Borrowers and James Howe's Bunnicula. Edward Eager and Sydney Taylor were massive with me; I've read more copies of Half Magic, Knight's Castle and the All-of-a-Kind Family to pieces than I can remember.

And Betsy, Tacy and Tib. Maud Hart Lovelace. None of the later books with them as teens and adults were in print when I was a kid (though the minute they came back in I pounced on them), but I read the first four over and over. Oh man, I loved Tacy. Tacy and Anne were my sisters in red hair.

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I finally reacquired that one recently, after not having read it for at least fifteen-odd years; it was every bit as wonderful as I remembered.

(Were you back in the states in time to be traumatized by the animated movie?)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Oh oh oh! Did you have the 50's hardcover with the four-color printed cover? That's the version I kept dragging home from the library, somewhat worse for wear as it was about 25 years old by the time I glommed on to it. I'm happy to have the paperback just for the sake of readability, but if I ever come across the hardcover in decent shape I don't think I will be able to resist snapping it up for nostalgia's sake.

The Amelia Peabody books I'd picked up at some point in my teens, I think, without knowing it was Mertz writing under a pen name; I don't think I found out they were the same person until I stumbled across something about her online, and then I laughed for days at how perfectly it all made sense.

And waaah, plotty long Thutmosid melodrama sounds like an utter delight! DO WANT. ;_;

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Like!

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Like!

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

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

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I even had the Misty and Stormy resin model horses from Breyer! (And the Breyer Black Beauty, although I often pretended he was the Black Stallion because the Farley books were more fun than Anna Sewell, but I thought the BB mold was a lot prettier than the official Breyer Black Stallion mold...)

[rosefox]

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