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

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, my bad...looking back to the critical essays where I first heard about the depiction of Indians in those books, it seems that my memory had conflating the Scotts' talk of massacres and Pa's reminiscing of childhood games where he imagined stalking "wild animals and Indians". In my muddled memory's defense, I should note that when I was little, family friends who knew I was a big reader but didn't grok my tastes frequently gifted me with "classic" girly books from their own childhood -- that's how I ended up with that copy of Farmer Boy in the first place; and I'm pretty sure my mother never read them, she never mentioned any familiarity with the series and it was only just starting to come out back when she was a schoolgirl on the rez, so she probably wasn't forewarned as to how Indians were portrayed in the books. So when I first came across Native academics discussing the issues with these books, I read those essays with an increasingly queasy feeling that I'd dodged a bullet there. :/