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

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I checked "Sweet Valley High" although I only read one of those because I read a ton of "Sweet Valley Twins." Fascinating exploration of a completely alien culture.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I forgot that "High" and "Twins" were separate series. They sort of blend together into a mass of blondeness in my mind.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

That's a frighteningly apt way of describing them. :-)

Maybe my tolerance for Simon R. Green's addiction to the descriptive phrase "tall, dark, and no longer handsome" actually dates back to the endless descriptions of the Wakefields' blondness and their Pacific-blue eyes or whatever it was.

[skirmish-of-wit.livejournal.com]

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

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Now downgraded to size 4 (http://gawker.com/#!5004617/random-house-proudly-promoting-eating-disorders).

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I managed to completely avoid those, although I seem to recall that most of the non-geeky girls in my school seemed to eat them up like hotcakes. (I'd pretty much abandoned YA by the time they started coming out, and had long since learned that non-genre "realistic" stories about girls my own age usually read to me like dispatches from a somewhat alien-but-in-a-really-boring-way alternate dimension. I'd branched out from F&SF and was in a bit of a mystery/thriller phase at the time -- lots of Dick Francis and Robert Ludlum and sundry forgettable Cold War spyfests -- just as alien, but with lots of exciting sex and violence!)

[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.

[tanyahp.livejournal.com]

I am somewhat ashamed at the number of those books I read. In my defense, I am a twin who grew up in SoCal, so the culture was not so foreign. Their barbie-lifestyle, on the other hand, I think lowered my IQ and self-esteem by several points.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't read much Sweet Valley High, but I read a lot of Sweet Valley Twins.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Huh.

On perusing Wikipedia, it seems I only ever read 'High', not 'Twins'. Weird. (But I seem to have only read the first 20 or so High books. Which took about 45 mins each.)

[skygiants]

Same here! I think I remember checking them out of the library at a certain age because my parents had this idea that for every lot of ten library books or so I should get at least one that wasn't sff, and the Sweet Valley Kids books were an easy way to comply with that rule.

[genarti]

I totally read a random assortment of both High and Twins (and occasionally Kids), because I was still in the stage of reading pretty much anything fictional and not grindingly depressing that my middle school library had. I didn't start focusing specifically on genre stuff till high school, IIRC.

I will admit that I liked them mostly because a) they were a quick read, so I could check one out and bring it back the next day (or even at the end of the day), and b) I loved goody-two-shoes characters and older sister characters as a kid, so when you pair that with the fact that the goody-two-shoes older twin had my name... yeah.