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

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

How did you people leave out Roald Dahl?

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

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.

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

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.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there were four or five, I think.

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

[coraa.livejournal.com]

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.

[zdenka]

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

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

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.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

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

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

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.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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.

[hakuen]

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.

[eruthros]

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.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

WOW.

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

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

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

[angharadd.livejournal.com]

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.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

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.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

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

[ursula]

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

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

"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.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

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