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

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Thank ghu someone mentioned Oz. Man, those were important, although I had to get them mostly from the library. Also Alcott, which I owned.

Also Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which I actually listened to before I could read because Cyril Ritchard read them on a series of LPs with facsimile editions included in the boxed set that my brother had!

Peter Pan, in its various incarnations. How wonderful to finally have the book, in a second-hand twenties edition. Also masses of those old Bobbsey Twins were going cheap at the time. Tom Sawyer! The Jungle Books! and other Kipling. Swiss Family Robinson! Lassie Come-Home! All those Marguerite Henry books, from the library. Every Dr Seuss I could lay hands on (still). Angela Carter's Heroes and Villians (1969) and Alan Garner's Weirdstone although it was years before I found out either of those authors had written more books. Narnia. E Nesbit.

Lots of your choices are way past my time. I moved on from kid books about the time of Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), the works of Paul Zindel and Judy Blume.

I also happened across a copy of Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding in a second-hand shop in the Boston area when I was seven, which was wonderfully weird, and I was way grown up before I found out it was not only from Australia (that much was obvious from the characters) but that entire continents of children had read it, none of whom I met until I went there.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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mechanics from a mix of nature books/documentaries, medical reference books (my mom was a nurse), and the creepily outdated 1950s facts-o-life pamphlets my mom had been hanging on to for when she had kids, and I'm pretty sure I'd come across other sex scenes in fiction at that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

[ironed_orchid]

My parents didn't ban books, but they did sneer, and Enid Blyton was sneered upon in our house.

I read at least one each of the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Trixie Beldon books, but they never stuck.

[ironed_orchid]

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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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. :/

[ironed_orchid]

And now the list of books/series/authors I did read repeatedly and r compulsively as a child (e.g. before highschool)

Swallows and Amazons
The Borrowers
Moomin books
Roald Dahl
Pippi Longstocking and everything else by Astrid Lidgren
Lousia May Alcott
Laura Ingalls
E. Nesbitt
L.M. Montgomery
Narnia books
Tolkien
Susan Cooper
Rosemary Sutcliffe
Barbara Sliegh's Carbonel series
Nicholas Fisk - kids SF books from the 70s
Alan Garner
Nina Bawden - especially The Witch's Daughter, which I read until it fell apart
Elanor Farjeon
Rumer Godden

[cyphomandra.livejournal.com]

Oh, what a great thread. Lots of these (and I am definitely another Three Investigators fan), but just to bump up the non-English quota, the Moomin books (my first encounter with Shakespeare was the Moomin version of Midsummer Night's Dream, which has warped me for all subsequent books), Erich Kastner's Emil books, and ridiculous amounts of Astrid Lindgren. I particularly loved the Bullerby series, which my school library had and I've never tracked down - vivid, detailed stories about a large family in a small village - and the Pippi Longstocking books, but reading The Brothers Lionheart when I was nine may also have resulted in significant mental trauma.

I read so many British books as a child that I was confused about whether my own country had robins (no. Well, not those ones).

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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?}

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Who was your favorite vet? I liked all of them but had a particular fancy for Tristan, unsurprisingly enough.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

"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".)

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing on having read both of the Enid Blyton boarding school series. I didn't read any of the adventure ones and wasn't allowed read Noddy when I was younger, because my mother had heard about the racism. I had plenty of other books and don't feel scarred by having been denied those, definitely!

From my days in the US, there was what I've just learned from comments was the "A Little Maid of" series of Colonial States books, which I remember liking a lot. Also the Native American tribe series I mentioned in my earlier comment. Little House series, though I'm not sure where I read those, and Anne of Green Gables, ditto. (Didn't read all the series as a child.) A little older and I was gobbling down the Beany Malone books, which really dates me. I got them to reread now they've been republished, and boy is it odd. The prose is pretty awful and she reuses material much too frequently, but OOH, she does explore a lot of surprisingly difficult stuff for the time.

In the years in Ireland there were the Enid Blyton boarding school books, and the Noel Streatfield, although they weren't so much marketed as a series, IIRC. And then a lot of the time I just read whatever I saw that was new in Puffin - this was the Kaye Webb era so that almost always worked - or when I was taken into the bigger bookshops in the city centre, whatever I could find that looked appealing in the Oxford Children's Library. That would be where I got some of my Rosemary Sutcliffs, which were big favourites. Then maybe the first three of Joan Aiken's James III series, as those were all that were written back then. (I got to finish those with my kids as they came out.) And E. Nesbit, and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, of course! Ooh, almost forgot K. M. Peyton's Flambards trilogy.

ETA Swallows and Amazons, which I can't believe I managed to forget!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

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.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

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.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

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

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Most of my favorites are mentioned somewhere on this thread, but I'm glad pameladean has spoken up for Judy Bolton (Dobbs). I had a ton of mystery books of my mom's vintage: Judy Bolton, Connie Blair, a couple of the Dana Girls. For more recent mysteries, there were a bunch by Peggy Parrish.

I also had some girls' series from my grandmother's childhood: the Polly of Pebbly Pit books, the Meadowbrook Girls, and so on.

I read a bunch of early 1960s romances too, since my library had them - Lenora Mattingly Weber, Betty Cavanna (who I just found out also wrote Connie Blair, under another name). I've been saying for a few years that someone needs to write an updated version of Betty Cavanna romances; in them, yes girl meets boy (though they don't always end up unambiguously together) but they bond through a shared passion: flying, skiing, travel, whatever. She has a mixed race heroine in Jenny Kimura, too, and an expat in Brazil in another one.

I read a lot of Alcott, too - no one seems to have mentioned her. There are also a number of books listed here that I've only read as an adult, after hearing from others who loved them as kids. That includes Noel Streatfeild, Arthur Ransome, Elizabeth Goudge, and the one Enid Blyton I've read to date (not so good as an adult as the others). I did read a couple of L.M. Montgomery's Anne books as a kid, but it was in reading all of the reprints in my twenties that I really fell in love with her books.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

That's the copy of Mara I own, a bit battered after all these decades but with slipcover intact. This (http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B0007DENE4/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_all) is the Golden Goblet I owned. And could again if I were willing to deal with amazon.

Oh look! (http://www.amazon.com/Pharaoh-Eloise-Jarvis-McGraw/dp/B0007E2NJU) A library copy of Pharaoh for a mere 74.50, in rather tattered condition.

[dorothy1901]

Oh hey! I read both of these, and I never realized they were by the same author.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I flipped through a book-of-the-movie, with stills, and had nightmares! Hence I have never seen the actual thing. I gather that the gassing of the warren, which is plenty horrific in the book, was rather Holocaust-like in the movie?

[dorothy1901]

Did anyone other than the two of us ever read the Freddy the Pig books?

*raises hand*

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I re-read Wrinkle and A Wind in the Door not too long ago and I wasn't able to enjoy them nearly as much as I used to. (A Swiftly Tilting Planet I had never liked that much as a kid.)

I suppose it's just as well - if I still liked all my childhood favorites now, I'd have even more too much to read than I already do.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I think I remember McClosky's Homer Price books. Homer had a pet skunk, right?

I don't see any reason why Encyclopedia Brown shouldn't have a TV series. He and Sally are a lot smarter than half the adult detectives on TV.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Lots of mine have been mentioned already, especially the Moomins, Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, Betsy-Tacy, Doctor Doolittle, Alvin Fernald, and Edward Eager.

Also Eleanor Estes, most especially The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode, which I read and reread as a child, checking it out of the library over and over, and even dropping a Coke on it in a Dairy Queen one day, then grew up and forgot the title. True story: years later, when I'm doing an internship at the Shropshire Archives in Shrewsbury, England, and Mom came along to visit, we went out to eat at a restaurant that had a giant wall covered in bookshelves, with books in them. It somehow sparked the memory of the book, and I remember describing it to Mom, then turning around and seeing a copy of the book directly behind my right shoulder! I grabbed it, and after we ate we asked the manager if the books were for sale. He was nonplussed, as no one had ever asked about it, and said we could just have it. I think Mom eventually pressed five pounds on him. XD

When I was a kid, the book was mysterious and numinous and eldritch and all sorts of other mysterious words. As an adult, it was supremely prosaic. But I don't care, and I've still got it. :D (It was about a second generation of kids growing up in a Brooklyn neighborhood, with earlier books being about the first generation.)

Another book that was numinous and otherworldly as a kid was Blyton's The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, and looking at the description of the book, it's not that at all. :) But considering as how at the time I'd read it, I'd lived in Texas and Tanzania, rural England was numinous and otherworldy to me, I expect.

And there are two books that I can't remember the titles of, and don't remember if they're in series or not. One I always think is an Edward Eager book, but isn't: a family in England is in a house that has a magic gazebo built by an Indian prince (who becomes their stepfather, maybe?), and when you get on the swing in the gazebo and jump out through one of the arches in the gazebo, you go into another place - one of the places had the prince and princess dolls that one of the girls had drawn come to life, and another had the boy jump into the head of a giant version of himself and he had to run his body from a control room.

The other book features a rabbit family and is NOT Watership Down - there may be other animals in it as well, and I vaguely remember that the father rabbit was always going on about Kentucky bluegrass...