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.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I loved Babysitters Club so much. That and Three Investigators were my favorites and I would stalk the bookstore to see if new ones were out yet.

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

One day I was stuck at a relative's house and bored out of my mind, and I picked up Mary Ann Saves the Day, and I was hooked. I read the crap out of that series. I don't know whether the librarians ever looked at me funny, a young boy reading about a bunch of girl babysitters.

[gelasius.livejournal.com]

<3 Babysitter's Club. My friends and I would take on the characters as aliases, and I was Jessi because I was one of the young ones and I did ballet. Her plot line with the deaf kid got me to start learning sign language. :)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Loved Edward Eager. Half Magic was my favorite, where wishes come half true. The bit where the cat can half-talk and begins spouting gibberish is still really funny.

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Half Magic was fucking brilliant. I loved how they had to wish for twice of everything.

And that time they wished to go to a desert island and ended up...in a desert.

[larryhammer]

"How much is twice as much as never having to learn fractions?"

---L.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

My daughter and I just read that together (at bedtime) last summer, and we laughed like crazy at parts (the cat being one of them).

[gelasius.livejournal.com]

I think it was Half Magic that has one of my favorite bits ever about how different adults interact with kids -- something about a) the annoying adults who try to pretend they're kids, b) the annoying adults who try to pretend the kids are also adults, and c) the awesome adults who know kids are kids and adults are adults and that doesn't mean they can't get along.

[skygiants]

My favorite part about Knight's Castle is how it is one hundred percent self-insert Ivanhoe fanfiction, in all flavors and varieties. "And now we ship Ivanhoe/Rebecca! And now we redeem Brian de Bois-Guilbert! And now we cross it over with E. Nesbit! And now we write AU futurefic in which Ivanhoe goes into SPACE!"

[genarti]

Oh my god the Ghost Squad! THANK YOU. I have been trying to remember the name of that series for ages, and all of my friends just look at me blankly when I start rambling hopefully about ghosts communicating with humans by typing and cold touches to their shoulders, and trying to find out the mystery of their deaths as a background side plot, and the incredibly creepy image of those old ghosts with grey holes eaten away in them. I loved those books.

[mari-redstar.livejournal.com]

...Hey, was that the one where there was a girl ghost who could read shorthand, and accidentally found important clues about a dude ghost's death by reading some other guy's shorthand diary over his shoulder? Because if not, I'm really wondering what that was from. And whether it cued off my recurring adolescent interest in learning how to write shorthand. Which never got anywhere, because I kept finding shorthand systems that distinguished between thin and thick lines, which is difficult to pull off with a mechanical pencil.