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

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

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.)

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

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.

[genarti]

Oh my god the Ghost Squad! THANK YOU. I have been trying to remember the name of that series for ages, and all of my friends just look at me blankly when I start rambling hopefully about ghosts communicating with humans by typing and cold touches to their shoulders, and trying to find out the mystery of their deaths as a background side plot, and the incredibly creepy image of those old ghosts with grey holes eaten away in them. I loved those books.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, Eleanor Estes! I don't think I read the one you mention but I know I read some of the Moffat books.

[chomiji]

The Egypt Game was a near-obsession of mine at age 10. And I got our teacher to read it aloud chapter by chapter (she used to read to us after lunch recess, as a way of calming us down), and was thrilled when most of the class loved it too.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Great story. I too recall The Children of Cherry Tree Farm as numinous - who knows, maybe it really is! (If you're eight.)

I think the Kentucky bluegrass book is Rabbit Hill (Puffin Modern Classics). I remember it as being somewhat numinous as well - I think that herald of numinosity in talking animal books, Pan, shows up at the end.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Folks in the Big House! Yes, that's it! I don't remember anything about it other then the bluegrass and, now, the Folks and the Big House.

It took me years to realize that yes, The Children of Cherry Tree Farm was what I remembered -- I associated the title with my memories, but I was so convinced that there was magic and other worlds in the book that it took me a long time to come to terms with the descriptions I was reading. :) Mind you, rural 1940s England is a whole other world. I shall have to find a copy and reread.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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,

[ajollypyruvate]

It made those stories kinda fun!

Ms. Eleanor Estes. My copy has the older _better illustration. We also read her other books, I just liked that one best.

Ah, Mr. "John Christopher", yes. I have those with my regular sci-fi, instead of with the children/young adult books. They are just that good.

[genarti]

Oh, the Borrowers, yes!

I loved the Borrowers books; even for the bits of the books I didn't like as story, I loved the idea of them. I still say that the Borrowers must have taken my pen, or whatever.

[genarti]

Some that I haven't seen anyone mention yet: the Animorphs series, which I read and loved the first handful of. At which point I realized that the series was already at twenty-odd books (I don't even know how many it eventually got to), looked at my sparse pocket money, and decided that this was a series I'd best give up now. The Valdemar series, which I devoured like sparkly wish-fulfillment candy. Xanth (which I am terrified to ever reread; Piers Anthony's id is a scary sketchy place) and Pern (somewhat ditto, but with more redeeming parts). Tamora Pierce -- the Alanna books were what I read as a kid, but as I've grown up I've continued to read her others too.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

HOW HAS NO ONE MENTIONED ELIZABETH ENRIGHT? I cannot be the only one! Both the Melendy books and the Gone-Away Lake books are still among my favorite comfort reads ever.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

In my case, because I couldn't remember the author or the titles. But I was just thinking this morning "what was that series where in one book the two youngest kids get a series of puzzles to solve, and one of them requires them to find someone with an emperor's name, who is their neighbor Mr. Titus?" Now that I can easily check, I believe this book was Spiderweb for Two.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

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..

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

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.

[ironed_orchid]

That sounds wonderful.

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

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

But. What? The Long Winter!

Man. People. I just don't know.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, one more I haven't seen anyone mention: Kate Seredy. She wrote a small series about a couple of pre-and-during-WWI-era Hungarian kids. (The Good Master & The Singing Tree.)

Also many other books, one of which was a mythologized retelling of the founding of Hungary (The White Stag), another of which was a horse-and-WWII-book. (The Chestry Oak, with an uncontrollable-except-by-the-protagonist horse. Also, he's a prince. The kid, not the horse.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

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.)