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

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I was obsessed with James Herriott from about age nine on, and ended up working in a veterinary hospital in high school as a result. I got to observe surgeries and everything. But it eventually convinced me that I liked the narrative of medicine better than the practice of medicine.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I wanted to be a marine biologist after years of reading and watching Jacques Cousteau, and spending almost every weekend at the beach. That dream died in an extremely unpleasant fashion in junior high when we took a school field trip to spend the day out on a boat with folks from the UH marine bio department, and I discovered that my tendency to motion sickness on land translated to VIOLENT NON-STOP SEASICKNESS on open water. *shudders at the memories*

And oh, the meeses remind me of a few more favorites -- The Wind In The Willows, the Narnia books (Reepicheep was a particular favorite), and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. Also Watership Down, which was another one of those books that I read and reread endlessly.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I loved all the rodent books. Watership Down is stil one of my favorite books ever.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I finally reacquired that one recently, after not having read it for at least fifteen-odd years; it was every bit as wonderful as I remembered.

(Were you back in the states in time to be traumatized by the animated movie?)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I flipped through a book-of-the-movie, with stills, and had nightmares! Hence I have never seen the actual thing. I gather that the gassing of the warren, which is plenty horrific in the book, was rather Holocaust-like in the movie?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

It's all on YouTube, if you're ever feeling sufficiently brave and curious! I wasn't at all traumatized by seeing it at age 9, but I'd specifically asked to see it because I loved the book so much, and bloody-minded geeky child that I was, I approved deeply of it for being so faithful to the story. (I've never been terribly squeamish about blood or movie violence or predators, mind you; YMMV.) The scary/bloody bit that made the biggest impression on me was towards the end when Bigwig and General Woundwort are fighting -- both Fiver's premonition of the warren's destruction, and the actual imagery shown when Holly is narrating the tale of what happened, is creepy-looking but sort of semi-abstract/symbolic rather than a straightforward realistic portrayal of what happened? Whereas Bigwig's fight was very realistic, savage and bloody and all playing out in real time (and Bigwig was one of my favorites, and Woundwort was a seriously scary mofo both in the book and film) -- that was a bigger deal to me emotionally, in a scary-but-thrilling way, than the vaguely psychedelic portrayal of trees turning into menacing shadows over blood-colored fields or ghostly tormented rabbit heads swirling around in blocked tunnels like smoke. But I can totally understand how younger kids in particular, or ones who hadn't read the book, might have been totally blindsided by what they expected to be a cute kiddy cartoon about bunnies -- and the first scary scene, Fiver's vision, comes in the first fifteen or twenty minutes! And all the rest of the potentially distressing bloody stuff -- attacks by cats and dogs and rats and owls, snares, rabbits biting and clawing each other, the roadkill hedgehog -- is right up there realistically on the screen, no Disney-style Bambi's-mother-dying-offscreen coyness here. It's not all death and bloody trauma, of course, the quiet peaceful scenes are there too, and there's some utterly gorgeous art -- but viewers who get deeply distressed by things like documentary footage of predators hunting are probably best off skipping this.

Here's one non-traumatic scene, the bit where the rabbits find Kehaar, if you want to check out the animation style safely: