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

[genarti]

Some that I haven't seen anyone mention yet: the Animorphs series, which I read and loved the first handful of. At which point I realized that the series was already at twenty-odd books (I don't even know how many it eventually got to), looked at my sparse pocket money, and decided that this was a series I'd best give up now. The Valdemar series, which I devoured like sparkly wish-fulfillment candy. Xanth (which I am terrified to ever reread; Piers Anthony's id is a scary sketchy place) and Pern (somewhat ditto, but with more redeeming parts). Tamora Pierce -- the Alanna books were what I read as a kid, but as I've grown up I've continued to read her others too.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Animorphs, Lackey and Pierce all started too late for me -- Animorphs in particular came out when I was in my twenties. Pierce and Lackey, it was sort of a closer call -- Pierce's first book came out when I was in my tweens and Lackey's was the year I graduated from high school. I don't remember seeing them around the library I was haunting in the mid-to-late-80s, but if they were being shelved in YA I never would have stumbled across them -- I'd pretty much completely abandoned the YA shelves for the adult stacks by the time I hit middle school, since they mostly seemed to be full of lots of dreary-looking 70s problem novels. I'm kind of bummed about missing out on Pierce in particular, epic fantasy with adventurous girl protagonists is just the sort of thing I was starving for as a kid and I'm sure I would have eaten them up with a spoon. *wistful sigh*

I did read *tons* of Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey as a kid, though, when I was mercifully young enough not to pick up on any of the skeezier sexual stuff. Dragonflight in particular was one of the very first books a really nice librarian handed me when she heard I loved Tolkien and Andre Norton, and had parental OK to check out adult titles. (The other one, IIRC, was one of Michael Moorcock's "Nomad of the Time Streams" proto-steampunk novels, probably The Warlord of the Air.)

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I first ran into Lackey when I was 16, and I was just smack dab the PERFECT age for her/it. (Vanyel. Whaddyagonna do?)

I did miss the Pierce window, though, and I've tried reading them as an adult, and I just didn't get grabbed. (Though I'm told that her first (which is the one I tried to read) is kind of not so good.)

As for SF/fantasy series -- Anthony, McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, CS Lewis, Tolkien, yeah, them. But generally after I was about 12. (For some reason I was skewing younger-era-me in most of my answers.)

"Andalite!" "Yeah, that'd help."

[mari-redstar.livejournal.com]

Animorphs! For a couple of months when I was seven I was convinced that everyone around me had quite possibly been taken over by Yeerks. I slept with my covers pulled up around my ears to block them from crawling into my brain. ...Looking back, I was kind of a paranoid kid.