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

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

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

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

Me too, with Trixie Beldon. In fact that first book where (I think) they're looking for Jim, I found incredibly emotional. Though I have no idea why now.

[grrlpup]

And he invents things! I tried his Automatic Bed-Making Machine with middling success.

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

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

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

Don't forget their "perfect size 6 figures"!

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

He wrote a few sequels (e.g., Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator), but nothing I'd call a series.

[grrlpup]

They sure were happy. I liked them because one was named Holly, like me, and she was a tomboy with pigtails.

[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.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Things I forgot but have been reminded by other posts:
The Great Brain books
Roald Dahl
A Wrinkle in Time and the two direct sequels (I haven't read the other Murray books)

[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.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

No, but Roald Dahl books became a series of their own. Just to see what he'd write next.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Truth.

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

Yes to all of these except Diane Duane. Cam Jansen! I used to practice my photographic memory skills because of those books, except even as a dorky 10-year-old I didn't say "click."

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

And me! Kids travelling in time, hurray! So also Hilda Lewis, The Ship That Flew, and Uttley's A Traveller in Time (though I never cared for Mary Queen of Scots even as a kid.)

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I read the Prydain books around 4th grade or so -- I don't remember how old I was when somebody gave me a set of the Narnia books, but it was definitely while I was still in elementary school, and all the religious allegory sailed *whooooosh* right past me. But I did always find The Last Battle and The Magician's Nephew a lot less satisfying than the other books.

(I didn't pick up on any of the religious or autobiographical elements in Tolkien the first few times either, since I started reading those so young -- it was really fascinating going through those all over again in my teens for the first time after I'd read the biographies and some WWI history and so forth.)

[daidoji-gisei.livejournal.com]

Lois Lenski! I loved her books and gobbled up my elementary school library's supply. Then I started rereading them.

I credit her with starting my love of sf/fantasy/anthropology, because learning about how people in other cultures/times live is fascinating.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I remember distinctly lining up in elementary school after recess, talkin about The Last Battle with a friend. I can't remember the exact words now, but the translation into current patois, would be, I believe, "the fuck was that?"

(Same here, only it was my twenties.)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

There was also eventually Sweet Valley Kids, and I think Sweet Valley University. And I'm pretty sure that the historical books created my love for sweeping epics.

[chomiji]

Noel Streatfield!

+1, definitely.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah ha, same here -- in fact I'm really not sure if I ever even read the third one, if I did it didn't stick in my head at all. Tombs of Atuan was the one I reread the most, the ending was a little flat and disappointing but I loved all the stuff leading up to it enough to forgive that.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I also adored Eloise Jarvis McGraw's Egyptian books (The Golden Goblet and Mara, Daughter of the Nile)

I read and reread those endlessly. The high point of my twelfth year was discovering an actual aimed-for-adults novel of hers, called Pharaoh, that now sells for umpteen dollars a rare copy and is no longer in the library system.

There were two other ancient Egypt books, The Lost Queen of Egypt and A Camel for a Throne. Have the first, and the second sells for umpteen dollars a rare copy and is no longer in the library system.

I was older when I read Rosemary Harris' Moon in a Cloud trilogy, but that had a pretty good Egypt in it too.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Eee, you used the canon heraldic devices! *hearts* And the Uruk biker jacket is EPIC win. XD

[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.

[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.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I reread them both (but especially Mara over and over for years, and would have kept it up if I hadn't changed schools and lost access to the library that had old copies of them; so I spent decades hunting for copies of my own until they came back into print. Those books, and Barbara Mertz's non-fiction, were pretty much the major basis of my childhood obsession with ancient Egypt; discovering as an adult that Mertz had written a lengthy series of mysteries about Victorian Egyptologists filled me with utter delight, all the more so as I read them and recognized some of the hobbyhorses from her non-fiction.

I've never laid eyes on any of McGraw's adult Egypt books -- are they as wonderful as the juveniles?