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

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

My Teacher is an Alien series! IT WAS THE BESTEST.

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh man, definitely.

[grrlpup]

Scott Corbett wrote a series with The Limerick Trick, The Lemonade Trick, and some others. They featured a magic chemistry set and had the same 1950s styling as Danny Dunn and Alvin Fernald. He also wrote a series I loved about a boy who started a detective agency in a treehouse.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I got hooked on the Three Investigators when we were living in Singapore, and I had free access to a used bookstore that took everything back in trade, so I was constantly cycling books in and out like it was a library. They were great - I envied them the secret hideout in the middle of the junkyard.

I also got hooked on a series that was delightfully cheesy and very faux-James-Bond-for-kiddies. They were the Race Against Time books, where mysterious Uncle Richard shows up to babysit and ends up dragging his nephew along on grand spy adventures all over the world...and they have to foil the bad guys and get back home before the parents do. Uncle and nephew both have super-advanced spy watches that act much like Batman's utility belt. I don't know that I've ever run across anyone else who remembers them.

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

I can't believe no one's mentioned Lurlene McDaniel as part of the Dead Teenager category! When I was 11 I read every book of hers in the library: Six Months to Live, and it had sequels! Was one of them Six More Months to Live? That's can't possibly be the actual title, right? There was one called I Want to Live, though. And either she or someone very similar also wrote books about kids with runaway siblings who went off to The City and Lived On The Streets and also Got Hooked On The Drugs and even Stole Things Sometimes.

Oh, Lurlene McDaniel. So much melodrama in such short books!

I also read pretty much all of Agatha Christie's oeuvre when I was in junior high. Then I discovered Dorothy Sayers, and the world got immeasurably better.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's actually I Want to Live. ;)

Other actual titles by the Writer of DOOM:

A Time to Die
Don't Die, My Love
Please Don’t Die
Mother, Please Don't Die
Why Did She Have To Die?
If I Should Die Before I Wake
Someone Dies, Someone Lives
Sixteen and Dying
Baby Alicia is Dying
She Died Too Young
The Girl Death Left Behind
When Happily Ever After Ends

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Antonia Forest's Marlowe series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Forest) got me through adolescence, though they kept coming out until I was in my 20s.

[sovay]

Tom Swift. (The really old ones, or the vaguely updated ones? The newer ones have kick-ass women.)

Both. And should really re-read some of them; the older ones are titled things like Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle (1910) or Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible (1930), but nothing will ever beat Tom Swift and His Subocean Geotron (1966).

Other books or series. (Describe!)

I don't even know where to start; I read everything that wasn't nailed down and some things that were. So—Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Eleanor Cameron, E. Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild, Laurence Yep, Lois Lowry, Esther Averill, Louisa May Alcott, Inez Haynes Irwin, other people who came up in conversation with rushthatspeaks a couple of weeks ago and I've now forgotten. Did anyone other than the two of us ever read the Freddy the Pig books?

[dorothy1901]

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

*raises hand*

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I've commented on some of the series and books I read that people have already mentioned. I could probably list more, but am a bit brain fried at the moment.

I mainly wanted to comment on the Bobbsey Twins books. I semi-actively collect them. I'm completely fascinated by the way they rewrote the exact same stories multiple times between 1904 and, well, now. I've got editions published in each decade of the 20th century with the earliest being an original 1904 printing of the first book. Unfortunately, it's a bit harder to always find the exact same volume. That's where I need to work on filling in.

I started down this road because I remember being very confused about the way some things happened in the books my mother gave me that had been her childhood copies (changing social mores FTW!). As I got older, I found the changes more fascinating. Probably because I'm just weird that way.

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

Before I was five, my favorite book was Little Toot, which could have been subtitled The Brave Little Tugboat. This book changed my LIFE.

Favorites ages 5-10:
Oz books (all the Baum ones)
The Twenty-One Balloons
Everything by Edward Gorey
Everything by Shel Silverstein, including his books for adults such as Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book
Charlotte's Web
The Borrowers series
Lord of the Rings
Narnia series
Stuart Little
The Phantom Tollbooth
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth <== awesome! original illustrations a must.
Little Women (but my ignorance of Christianity made some of it incomprehensible)

After ten, I started reading my parents' books: E.M. Forster was a favorite.

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

Ooops! Didn't realize the focus was on series, in which case I must tout the wonderfulness of The Borrowers series by Mary Norton, which may no longer be well known.

[cschells.livejournal.com]

Narnia, Susan Cooper, Sherlock Holmes, the Saddle Club, several western/frontier books (orphaned children surviving in the wild with the help of local tribes), Laura Engels Wilder, Louis l'Amour, some dog books where the dog doesn't die (I think one was called "Stormy"), The Indian in the Cupboard books, The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy! Summer Pony/Winter Pony (little girl gets to keep her pony in the garage--could anything be more cool??), The Black Arrow (?), the Lamb edition of Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, the Swiss Family Robinson, Boxcar Children, The Door in the Wall (probably the book that most shaped my future)...
Thanks for the opportunity to reminisce!

[algeh]

I can't believe no one's mentioned John Christopher yet! I guess he wrote trilogies rather than endless series, but those were some of the first SF books I read.

I also remember reading a bunch of YA serials in elementary school that haven't been mentioned yet: Sleepover Friends, Pen Pals, and Animal Inn all come to mind as things that my group of friends and I read together.

I also remember liking a mystery series called TACK that was similar to Encyclopedia Brown but about a group of kids instead of just one.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remember Sleepover Friends, I think.

[rosefox]

OZ OZ OZ

[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.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

The main series missing from your list for me are the Norah of Billabong series and the Silver Brumby books (though there is a distinct lack of Alcott, now I think of it, and what about the Green Knowe books and the Dark is Rising sequence?).

Enid Blyton was a forbidden author in our house, but my grandparents had the Faraway Tree, which I loved, and later I stayed at a friend's house for a holiday and she had all the Malory books, or perhaps all the St Clare ones, I can't remember. And in the school series, did you ever read Antonia Forest's Marlow books?

[cinaed.livejournal.com]

Stumbled on this through friendsfriends!

Oh man, other people have read Cherry Ames? This pleases me beyond belief-- instead of reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys series, I read the Cherry Ames series (my mom grew up in the 50s and still has all but six or so of the books).

I love(d) the Cherry Ames books-- female friendships! Cherry being able to date two guys (at the same time, if I remember right) without angst! awesome mysteries! Plus, Cherry Ames had a twin brother, and I, as a fraternal twin myself, loved that. See also: the Alanna series.

Has anyone read M.T. Anderson's Pals in Peril Tales series? They're modern, but definitely a loving spoof on childhood mystery/adventure stories-- there's Lily, the ordinary girl whose father happens to be working for villains trying to take over the world and who has two extraordinary friends; Katie Mulligan, heroine of the Horror Hollow series wherein she solves supernatural mysteries; and Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, a boy scientist whose books went out of date about fifty years ago and builds very bulky, awkward machines and says things like "my good fellow!" Together, they fight the occasional whale or spy disguised as furniture, and endure the flame-pits of Delaware.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

Marguerite Henry, Narnia, most of Madeleine L'Engle, most of L.M. Montgomery, Caroline Cooney's Dance books (actually, half the stuff on that page), Bunnicula, Satin Slippers, and this horse series that I did not remember any details about whatsoever, but hooray for the people at GoodReads and a Google search on "horse series gingham cover."

If there was a horse in it and it was published in the '80s, there's a good chance I read it. I discovered SF a few years later.

[pameladean]

Sue Barton, Judy Bolton, and Rick Brant.

Sue Barton, like Cherry Ames, was a nurse, and the first book starts with her training. These books were significantly less formulaic than Cherry Ames and had what seemed to me much more realistic banter and better humor. Her life actually progresses -- she gets married, has kids who grow older, but she still works as a nurse.

Judy Bolton is an amateur detective who eventually marries an FBI agent. These are about as formulaic as the Cherry Ames books, but, again, things progress, people get older. Cherry got a reset after a while, really.

Rick Brant is the son of a scientist, and with his best friend, a former Marine whom he picks up hitchhiking, I think, he solves scientific or pseudo-scientific mysteries. These are fairly formulaic but I really liked the science and science-fictional aspects of the series; there are a number of plots that involve technology that didn't actually exist when the books were written. The main irritant was that Rick has a younger sister named Barbie. She is inconsistently characterized, being used to ask naive questions when necessary but being perfectly competent and brave when that is necessary. And yet she is always put aside from the action, however capable she has been in her little supporting role.

P.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

The only series I read that no one else has mentioned is the Sunfire romance (http://www.reocities.com/brynahilde/sunfire/) series of ridiculously addictive historical teen romances. Each book had a beautiful girl on the cover, with pictures of the two guys she would have to choose between next to her. You could almost always tell which guy she would end up with because it would be the one she was standing with in those little pictures. I loved historical fiction (Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls being two of my favorites), so these were perfect for a preteen, absurd as they were. I remember especially being into Laura (http://www.reocities.com/brynahilde/sunfire/laura.html), just for the cover -- look at that adorable sailor suit and her cute boyfriends!

(I didn't want to duplicate everyone else's responses, but this is reminding me that I really do need to do a self-appointed project and sit down to write out my favorite books age 5-12 and what I liked most about them, since I'm considering writing some children's fiction and I want to remember what made a book great for me at that age.)

[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!)

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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).

[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]

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.

[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...

[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.