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

[angharadd.livejournal.com]

I LOLed hard at dead dogs and dead teenagers categories XD My childhood fell on the first years after Ukraine became independent, so my childhood reading was a mixture of Soviet books about pioneers who fought the nazis and died by scores, and US-ian books some church group translated, where little girls acted as paragons of virtue and also died by scores:) There were also books by Gerald Durrell, Jane Goodall and some other stories about wildlife preservation (where animals died by scores).

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I loved Gerald Durrell. I probably would have loved the Nazi fighting, too. Did any girls get to fight?

[angharadd.livejournal.com]

They did! From what I remember, those books were pretty much equal-opportunity gender-wise when it came to fighting, and would have been a great read if they cut out the propaganda. (The girls fighting might have been a part of the ideological message as well, though: in post-war times, the inhabitants of the occupied territories - that is, mostly women, children and other non-combatants - were mostly depicted as collaborators, there were very real legal repercussions etc., so those childrens' books sort of provided a model for how those people should have acted: that is, die heroically rather than try to survive.)

Gerald Durrell is awesome! I still remember lengthy passages from many of his books by heart.