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

[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?

[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

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I remember Tehanu a lot better, and I don't think it's just because I read it later.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I read a couple of L'Engle books very young, and I barely recall anything about them -- probably another case of like-but-not-love like Prydain. I loved Pippi and Dr. Doolittle, though, and went through Andre Norton like candy. (And I am endlessly thrilled every time I find people online who read McGraw, because I reread her Egypt books obsessively and never met anyone else who'd even heard of them until I got online.)

I never managed to finish The Dark is Rising -- the school library I was using at the time only had part of the series, and it somehow never crossed my mind to look for the rest at the larger public library...it was probably around the time when I was spending more and more time in the adult stacks there, because I could.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

That was the instigator's jacket, and she wore it with the One Ring skirt. Oh, and that fellow in the green jerkin is my ex-husband, and we looked up the Quenya word for "security" and how to spell it in tengwar and appliqued that in white felt on the back of his cloak. And someone was able to READ IT FROM THE AUDIENCE AND KNOW WHAT IT SAID. We figured that was the most epic win of all.

I was responsible for three skirts -- Luthien, Elanor, and the Entwife.

Also epic was the White Tree of Gondor on the back of Aragorn's jumpsuit, done up in EL wire. Due to last-minute alterations, the circuit wound up routing THROUGH his torso. Not ideal!

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, that is one magnificent list of titles.

I definitely read A Time to Die, Mother, Please Don't Die, Sixteen and Dying, and Baby Alicia is Dying, and probably a couple of others. OH LURLENE.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I reread Tombs of Atuan most too! "In my next life, I want to be a dancing girl in Awabath."

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I've definitely never read that one, and I'm not entirely sure how I missed it -- I wonder if maybe the library I was using at that point put it in YA, so I just never even saw it? It is a mystery...

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

WOW.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

It was published much later-- I was in college, I think, and so you would've been too, if not out.

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

I love "Half Magic" so much that I ran out and bought it as soon as I knew I was pregnant.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad to have a name for them, because I really enjoyed them!

I particularly liked that--if I remember correctly--the mysteries they solved were mostly in the reasonably-plausible-for-kids-to-be-solving vein: who broke a window, who stole a toy, that kind of thing. Kids investigating kid crimes, not kids involved in tracking down jewel thieves for some reason. I mean, I read and enjoyed the "kids investigating major adult crimes" type of books to and enjoyed them plenty, but it was a nice change.

[carta.livejournal.com]

omg that book terrified me. I think it scared me into never ever breaking a school rule well into high school.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Yes to both the Boxcar Children and Narnia.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Another +1 for Streatfeild.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Me three!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly--I know intellectually that they were (mostly) written after (most of) the Bobbsey Twins books, but they feel at least as old.

I also remember that they certainly did a lot of traveling. They were an amazingly good-natured family to begin with, but it was particularly notable that, on the sixth week of their European vacation, the four-year-old was still sweet and chipper. ;)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I loved those.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Misty of Chincoteague!

[algeh]

Wait...there's another book that goes with Mara, Daughter of the Nile? I read that thing over and over again when I was a kid, and I have no idea why because it was not much like anything else I was into at the time. Somehow I've never come across the other one - will have to start checking used bookstores for it, I suppose.

[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.

[algeh]

I also loved Jim Kjellgard's books! I didn't find them until middle school, which meant they were way below my reading level, but it was so nice to read dog books in which the dogs tended to live.

[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!