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

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

You left off The Babysitters Club!

As I said above, I loved the McGurk Mysteries, by E.W. Hildick. I don't remember much specific about them, really. They had alliterative titles, and it was a group of kid detectives rather than a duo or trio. They were funny and enjoyable, and I read a bunch of them. One of my favorite things, though, was one book that had a sort of fantasy element to it, and one of the characters was stuck in a cave, and the entrance was blocked by a boulder, and it turned out the magic word was his last name, Rockaway, and it BLEW MY GODDAMN MIND because DID THE AUTHOR KNOW HE WOULD DO THIS WHEN HE NAMED THE CHARACTER THAT?!?!

E.W. Hildick also wrote these awesome Ghost Squad books about GHOST DETECTIVES. They're able to communicate with their human detective friends by typing on a computer.

Did you ever read Edward Eager's books? Half Magic? Seven Day Magic? Magic by the Lake? Knight's Castle? They were about magic. Except when they were about knights. Who were magic.

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

My family still teases me about the depths of my attachment to Trixie Belden. I have all my old copies, too.

I was rather embarrassingly pleased to find out a couple of years ago that someone else has written more Malory Towers and St. Clare's books. I haven't read the Malory Towers ones yet (I think they're about Darrell's sister Felicity), but the St. Clare's ones (which fill in the years Blyton skipped) aren't half bad.

[zdenka]

Besides a lot of the things people have mentioned, I grew up on Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas (the latter in translation). I remember that I wrote a book report on Scott's The Talisman in fourth grade, wherein I claimed the dog was my favorite character. (But the dog doesn't die!)

Speaking of dogs, Albert Payson Terhune. And I was horse-obsessed at the usual age and read everything I could find by Marguerite Henry. I also first read Louisa May Alcott around fourth grade, I think.

[giandujakiss.livejournal.com]

I must say, I'm disappointed by the poor showing Three Investigators is making in this poll. I was obsessed. As were my classmates - we even set aside a cubby where we put all of our copies so that we could borrow each others' books, because no one had the whole series.

Oh, there was the Anne of Green Gables, obviously, and because I was a good Jew, the All of a Kind Family series.

Oh, not a series, but if the theme is kids' detective books - Harriet the Spy. She was awesome.

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

I think I forgot to check Nancy Drew, although I read a bunch of those. Trixie Belden was more interesting for some reason.

I also read all of Frank L. Baum's Oz books, and Lloyd Alexander's series that includes The Black Cauldron. Oh, and Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series.

ETA: Oh, and the British one about the horseback riding club. ... that's all I remember about it, other than it probably inspiring my first ever fanfiction. *cough* ^_^;

Childhood books

[pingback-bot.livejournal.com]

User kyuuketsukirui referenced to your post from Childhood books (http://kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com/1392042.html) saying: [...] has a fun post about English-language books you read as a child [...]

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I read a fair amount of random Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew / Bobbsey Twins (yes, the old ones) / E. Nesbit / Encyclopedia Brown / Great Brain / Black Stallion / Marguerite Henry as a child, but my real favorite juvenile series were Tove Jansson's Moomin books, Jerome Beatty's Looney series, and Rosemary Sutcliff's historical fiction. I also adored Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Egyptian books (The Golden Goblet and Mara, Daughter of the Nile), and Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music (although none of the other Pinkwater books in my childhood library seemed to have the same whimsical magic). Or going a little younger, I had several picture books from this Hawaiian publisher's "Island Heritage" series, and read the other ones at school libraries/friend's houses, etc., and loved them all -- I had the first three and read them over and over again. Momotaro was my particular favorite for its incredibly detailed illustrations (even the animal companions had their own lamellar armor!), but Puapualenalena with its slyly charming spotted magic dog and spooky 'uhane was a very close second.

But most of my real obsessive childhood favorites were actually things that were technically far too old for me, YA and adult books -- I read all the James Herriot books over and over, and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, non-fiction by Jane Goodall and Jacques Cousteau, a couple of the earliest "Star Wars" novelizations, and several volumes of turn-of-the-century English translations of Hawaiian legends.

[ejmam.livejournal.com]

My aunt had copies of The Rover Boys, and a bunch of Horatio Algers. Also Battleship Boys and a few other WWI type clean American Boys Have Adventures kind of books.

And after the dead dog books, I read the Red Pony!

[weirdquark]

Babysitters Club, Boxcar Children (I tried a few but only liked the first one), Encyclopedia Brown, Mrs. Pigglewiggle. The Anastasia books, the Little House books, all of the Oz books that my library had, the Anne of Green Gables books. Also those teen horror books by people like Lois Duncan, R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike. (And other similar books by other authors, maybe -- I don't remember names or how I found them. Or when, but certainly before high school.)

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Freddy the pig and the Babysitters' Club (two separate series).

Marguerite Henry's horse books, which mostly did not involve the horse dying and were thus Much Cooler than the various dead dog/dead teen books.

Diane Duane's Wizard books.

Diana Wynne Jones, pretty much everything she wrote.

Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Heinlein, and Orson Scott Card.

Timothy Zahn.

Katherine Kurtz and Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey.

[cmattg.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, now that I think of it - does anyone remember Cat in the Mirror?

[larryhammer]

I inherited/was handed down, from some elderly relative, a half dozen of the original Bobbsey Twins books. They were, indeed, very old-fashioned, but I read them voraciously and even reread some of them. I especially remember the episodes of chestnut gathering, as I was Very Aware, growing up in the mid-Atlantic, that the Chestnut Blight had killed all chance of doing anything like that myself. There was also a rather astonishing sled-race that lasted several minutes, and I couldn't conceive of what kind of hill they were going down (and trudging up!) that let all that conversation and strategy take place.

On tic about them that began to wear on me, though: the habit of titling chapters after some dramatic event from the previous chapter. This struck me as not Playing Fair At All -- titles are supposed to indicate the current contents.

Adding to the list of the unpolled: I adored Edward Eager, and read, though with growing queasiness at the over-the-top moralizing, the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books.

---L.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Henry and Midge! I haven't heard them mentioned in a long time. I loved them when I was a kid (partly because my best friend was a girl and I got teased a lot about it). My memory of them holds up pretty well, but I'm a little afraid to see how well the real books do.

I might have read some Danny Dunn, but honestly nothing but the name sounds familiar.

I read a fair amount of Blyton for an American child, probably because we lived in Europe for two years and presumably were buying UK books. I read some Famous Five, maybe one Secret Seven, and a lot about four kids, one named Frederick but called Fatty, one maybe called Pip, and I forget the others.

Other stuff:
Encyclopedia Brown - many
All-of-a-Kind family - many, possibly all
Prydain - all, but only one other Alexander (Time Cat)
Narnia - all
E. Nesbit - most
Edward Eager - I think I missed one
Alvin Fernald - several, which might have been all
Heinlein juveniles - all but two
Little House - maybe four
Oz - only the first two

[wiredwizard.livejournal.com]

Tolkien from The Hobbit through to Return of the King (I read it too much I think - by age 12 I could recite the whole thing as a campfire store at summer camp), C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, Agatha Christie, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, James Herriot, Sherlock Holmes (much to the shock of my 4th grade English teacher), and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on.

[anime-heart.livejournal.com]

I remember getting up at dawn one summer to read more of Swallows and Amazons ... my library had the whole series. I was utterly enthralled with the idea of having an island and your own sailboat.

[pocketmouse]

We had Cherry Ames and maybe one or two of the others on the shelves at home, but I didn't read them.

Other books I read:
-Wrinkle in Time series
-Magic Cauldron books
-Narnia
-The Hobbit (I read that in third grade; I don't remember when I read LotR)
-Shakespeare (I read MacBeth in 6th grade, and I know it wasn't the first time I'd read it)
-Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle

I read a lot of books from my mom's office -- I remember she had a big orange book of Ukrainian folk tales, and a big white book about Native Americans that I'd skim through for the stories.

The ones I read over and over...

[gelasius.livejournal.com]

Other series: Babysitter's Club (Jessi!), Encyclopedia Brown, Edward Eager's Magic series (I think I read Half Magic and Knight's Castle at least fifty times each), Lloyd Alexander's books (Prydain Chronicles and the Vesper Holly series), Swallows & Amazons series (Titty!). Books: The Girl With The Silver Eyes (misfit telekinetic girl!), Follow My Leader (recently-blind boy and his guide dog!), Wren to the Rescue (which I somehow didn't realize was a series until I was a grownup), Songmaster (which got me started on Orson Scott Card when I was about nine). And probably a bunch more I'm forgetting. :)

[em-h.livejournal.com]

Other series books that stand out: Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, and Edward Eager fantasy books. Also Laura Ingalls Wilder. Madeleine L'Engle's Time trilogy.

Lots and lots of individual books, of course.

[ajollypyruvate]

I liked some of those mystery series for their having actual facts abut things, though I've no idea (now) how accurate they might have been. The Happy Hollisters, for example, was where I first heard of Lipinzers.

We read a lot of books which, these days, wouldn't be considered "age appropriate", so I'm not counting those and I'm sure many books that I did love I'm likely to forget to include, so these are just some remembered favourites.

Not in series:
William Pène du Bois - started with The Twenty-One Balloons and have loved him ever since. Illustrations are awesome1
The Phantom Toll-Booth - What is not to like?
Edward Eager & E. Nesbit - I liked the way they wrote children and I loved their ideas. Still do. These are some of my favourite children's books to re-read.
Zelpha Keatley Snyder - I haven't read all she's written but she wrote very good suspense mixed with maybe-magic (and sometimes actual magic). The Velvet Room is a favourite, in part because of her description of the lives of the itenarants.
P.D. Eastman - Go, dog, go!
Edward Gorey - The Wuggle-Ump is probably my earliest favourite story. Door knobs and gunny sacks and small children.
Dr. Seuss - oh, come on! (But I hated The Cat In The Hat, I hated Sam, and those stupid Pants With Nobody Inside Them horrified me. But, you know. Dr. Seuss!)
The Witch Family - Excellent story, with good suspense and humour. Ruth Chew has similar stories told in a simpler manner.

Series:
The 'Great Brain' books - I still don't know much about Utah or Mormons but this was my introduction.
The Happy Hollisters - Fun facts!
Encylopedia Brown - Fun facts!
Miss Bianca - Adventure time! And those illustrations...
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Well, it's a bit heavy on the "proper behaviour" side but not too much so.

(And, uh, probably about 1/3 of what's listed here.)

[dorothy1901]

Other series I read:

Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
Rick Brant by "John Blaine" (like Tom Swift, but far more realistic)
The "Shoe" series by Noel Streatfeild (Dancing Shoes, Skating Shoes, etc.)
Freddy the Pig by Walter R. Brooks
Doctor Doolittle by Hugh Lofting
Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
Various E. Nesbit books, e.g. Five Children and It
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald
The "Magic" series by Edward Eager (Half-Magic, Magic by the Lake, etc.)

[skygiants]

EVERYTHING DIANA WYNNE JONES EVER WROTE.

The Enid Blytons I actually remember best are the Magic Faraway Tree books, in which the plucky children climb up into a magic tree that has a different magic land on it every day. Sadly my copy mysteriously disappeared (or perhaps dissolved after I dropped it into a bathtub, also highly plausible.)

Also, these were not super formative for me, but I've been trying to remember them for ages and can't - there was a series I used to read as a kid about teenaged twin ghosts who solved mysteries? I don't know what use the fact that they solved the mysteries served, seeing as no one could see them, but there were definitely mysteries!

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd read the Adventure series, but actually I read the similar-sounding Secret series (http://www.enidblyton.net/secret-series/) instead. The one thing I read which hasn't been mentioned is the Sadler's Wells books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorna_Hill), which I read dozens of times, and are all about girls who go off to learn ballet although they veer off into girls climbing mountains with improbably hunky Scottish doctors and girls going off to the mountains to recover from consumption and so on.

[cofax7]

I read:

the Mother West Wind stories (Thornton Burgess)
Jim Kjellgard's dog books (Big Red etc)
Encyclopedia Brown mysteries
Dr. Doolittle etc
Edward Eager's books
Andre Norton (everything I could find)
Olivia Coolidge
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Eloise Jarvis McGraw
The Little House books
Narnia
Susan Cooper
Lloyd Alexander

Only a few Nancy Drew books: we didn't seem to have them. I didn't read LM Montgomery until I was an adult, and have never read the Hardy Boys.

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

I read Narnia and L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables, Emily, and Pat of Silver Bush) most intensely and proto-fannishly. I only had the first Black Stallion book, but I did love the heck out of it. And I had two of Blyton's Adventure books - The Circus of Adventure and The River of Adventure. (Oh god so racist in retrospect oh god.)

My older brother and I shared our books and, like the huge geeks that we were and are, quizzed each other on minutia of our favorites. Calvin & Hobbes comics and Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series especially. Oh, and around the time I turned nine I got DEEPLY into Edgar Allan Poe. I was a bit of an odd kid.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and even though it was only three books when I started, the Earthsea trilogy.