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What Books Did You Enjoy Reading While a Pre-teen?

Mal12345

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I mean real books and not comic books. I read my share of the latter, for sure. I was a dinner table reader. The nice thing about comics is they would lie down flat on the table to give me some entertainment at meals.

As for real books, my reading classmates and I thoroughly enjoyed the Three Investigators detective series, with Pete, Jupiter, and some other boy. I couldn't get enough of those books. Unfortunately, the ones I was missing were checked out of the library. These were somewhat spooky mystery stories, such as "The Mystery of the Screaming Clock," which kind of scared me at that young age, but the stories always ended with a natural explanation. Yes, that does sound like Scooby Doo and the mystery bus, only with more literary substance.

I've never read a single Hardy Boys mystery. Those seemed to me more like the typical gift from a well-meaning Uncle which sat on the shelf and never got read.
 

Nicki

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I liked reading realistic fiction books on the lives of school girls like me. I loved The Baby-sitters Club, The Clique series, etc. I was also absolutely obsessed with the Harry Potter series though! I would read literature analysis essays, fanfics, and I would scour forums and communities for interesting material about it.
 

Lark

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Diary of Adrian Mole, Diary of Mr Bean, ghost stories and horror stories.
 

Ivy

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Loved the Diary of Adrian Mole! I read a lot of Babysitter's Club too, Aleda. I also loved Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown (those might've been a little earlier than preteen, can't remember for sure), and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was also into ghost stories and mysteries/unexplained/paranormal stuff but not really other kinds of horror stories.
 

Lexicon

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A lot of Stephen King (his books practically raised me, haha). Some Dickens, and old fairy tales laying around my grandparents' house (it's like an antique shop in there). C.S. Lewis' shit. I liked the 1st book in The Box Car Children series. Enjoyed Animorphs, too.
I remember enjoying a book we had to read as an assignment in school, Hatchet. Read it over several times on my own.

I also read my brother's comic books, mostly old Batman stuff.

:thinking: probably some other things too, but mostly Stephen King. I read some R.L. Stine, but obviously once you've sullied your psyche with King's material, 'horror for kids' is kind of a joke. Needless to say, the boogeyman had no effect on me after all that. I remember one of my teachers criticizing my mom for letting me read King's stuff, but I'm glad I wasn't sheltered, in that regard.

My mom didn't really pay attention to what I was reading, she was just happy I was glued to a book instead of the TV set. For all her craziness, I'll give her this- she taught me to read when I was 3- I sort of attribute that early start to my ability to escape into books the way I do. It's like a film reel in my head. Blurry, dreamlike, but voices are present. Pretty cool.


Oh! And I fucking LOVED the series, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.

The art in it was wicked cool (actually, it still is).



*edit* I forgot to add- I also occasionally liked reading the encyclopedia for fun. They were stored on the bookshelf in my room, so they were kinda calling to me when some random thing crossed my mind and I wanted to know how it worked.
Pretty sure I learned about human reproduction that way.
And through Stephen King books, of course.
 
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Rail Tracer

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Hmmmm, around that age was the Pokemon craze... it has all been overtaken by the Pokemon craze... and all I seem to remember the most is that damn Pokemon craze.

Other than that.........

My teacher did get the whole class into Harry Potter. She even bought the books for 5 students (including me) because we were such good students. So during the 5th grade, she read to the class the Sorcerer's Stone. In the 6th grade she (we had her again since we chose her to be our de facto teacher) read part of the Chamber of Secrets. Since I was given the book, I pretty much finished Chamber of Secrets myself. I think most people know about the popularity right now, so.

Don't think I can forget Goosebumps either, there is a few interactive ones where I had to flip to certain pages based on where I wanted the main character to go...well... it was mildly interesting. There was a lot of Goosebumps because my older siblings had them when they were reading them.

There was a collection of ghost stories I've also read. This one being the one I remember the most is that a person was looking for his stolen leg... because of it.. he kept haunting the place. I don't remember where the it came from, it might of came from a collection of ghost stories.

Other than that, I read mostly (many times overlapping with other genre's) fantasy, adventure books, and sometimes horror.

Oh! And I fucking LOVED the series, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.

Ohhhh snaps, I think that was the book!!!!! I'm looking through it and the big toe sounds awfully familiar to the ghost story I am referring to.

EDIT: Typos... was was....
 
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Lark

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Loved the Diary of Adrian Mole! I read a lot of Babysitter's Club too, Aleda. I also loved Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown (those might've been a little earlier than preteen, can't remember for sure), and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was also into ghost stories and mysteries/unexplained/paranormal stuff but not really other kinds of horror stories.

I read all those anthologies of cheapo paranormal/unexplained stories which were cheap paperback bargain books. I think Colin Wilson was the one who was produced most of them.

The choose your own adventure books, including the fighting fantasy books by ian livingstone and steve jackson and all the spin offs, like the blood omen series, the classic monster series (frankenstein, dracula), I loved them and to be honest they had a lot to do with my becoming interested in reading and kicking off a whole process of becoming self taught through books. My favourites were Freeway Fighter, Demons of the Deep, Deathtrap Dungeon (everyone knows it), Firetop Mountain, the snow witch books (I knew she'd be a vampire or something) and finally Vault of the Vampire. I liked the trickster character in Blood Omen.

Its hard to believe that those books were more popular than computer gaming at one stage and were only to disappear from view with the rise of consoles.

The choose your own adventure ones I remember one in which you were trying to survive a mountain after an air crash and send help for your brother and another which was in a haunted western town which had lots of bloody knives and one scene in which a guy stabs an indian with a big bowie knife, although it sets it all up and its terrifying, or was at the age I was reading it, then says the character realises its not so scary because they are ghosts and they are just repeating a scene from the past but that scared me even more, freaking ghosts, man, freaking ghosts! :laugh: There was one about a travelling freakshow in a fantasy backdrop and another one about robots.

I read a magazine, commodore format, regularly and I still love when I find UK publishers who copy some of the style or tricks of their reviews, its such a nostalgia trip.
 

Cellmold

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I just read Terry Pratchett, still do in fact, Terry Deary of Horrible Histories fame, bit of Enid Blighton and occasionally the Goosebumps series, but that wasn't a favourite.
 

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I read a magazine, commodore format, regularly and I still love when I find UK publishers who copy some of the style or tricks of their reviews, its such a nostalgia trip.

We had a Commodore and subscribed to a magazine called Loadstar which was so freaking exciting to get every month. I have never had as much fun with a computer as I had reading and playing with Loadstar.
 

Ivy

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I read a magazine, commodore format, regularly and I still love when I find UK publishers who copy some of the style or tricks of their reviews, its such a nostalgia trip.

We had a Commodore and subscribed to a magazine called Loadstar which was so freaking exciting to get every month. I have never had as much fun with a computer as I had reading and playing with Loadstar.
 

Lark

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I just read Terry Pratchett, still do in fact, Terry Deary of Horrible Histories fame, bit of Enid Blighton and occasionally the Goosebumps series, but that wasn't a favourite.

I think I was in my late teens to early twenties when I read Pratchett and actually think he's for older or adult readers really.

The Goosebumps books were like the RL Stine Point Series, like point horror, point mystery etc. when I was a kid, anything which seemed either to be a "campaign" book, like for cultural reasons the government/school/library would really like you to read whatever, or commercial putsch, like we at the marketing division of publishing corp think you should really be into this hip, new, cool fad that all your friends will be reading, totally put me off. I know. It was prejudicial in my decision making and I probably missed out on some good reads as a result and experiences growing up that other people shared.

It was a bit of a hipster thing to do too when I think about it but I thought I was really resistant to peer pressure and all sorts of things which were probably exaggerations too.
 

Lark

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We had a Commodore and subscribed to a magazine called Loadstar which was so freaking exciting to get every month. I have never had as much fun with a computer as I had reading and playing with Loadstar.

We used to just buy the magazine, which meant that occasionally if they were in short supply you missed a month or had to share a copy with friends, the thing about commodore format is that it had such a following that long after the games system became defunct the fans kept it alive with subscriptions and wrote their own games for the cover cassette, the programming and coding sections sort of took over as the reviews, previews and gaming solutions sections dwindled.

They had a cast of "characters" like "The Mighty Brain" which was supposed to be a sort of commodore related wiki idea, "roger frames", who bought budget games, and some writers who would do lists or top tens of everything, those sections were usually losely related to games but sometimes the most readable. I liked the pluses and minuses icons, "thrill meters", ratings out of five or ten and warnings, like is the game a multiload, seperate ratings for sound, graphics, gameplay, story, accompanying manuals or materials, they even talked about cost too back then, attacking games for having the audacity to charge fifty quid or more (seems quaint nearly now).
 

mintleaf

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The majority of Madeleine L'Engle's fiction (A Wrinkle in Time especially), Avi, the Dear America series, the Charlie Bones series, some series about fairies, American Girl books, Patricia Reilly Giff, Nancy Drew, the Amelia series by Marissa Moss, and Margaret Peterson Haddix.

There was also this book called Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, which is still one of my all-time favorite books. I'd probably hate it if I read it again, but it was perfect for where I was at the time, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone in that age group.
 

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I forgot about Madeline L'Engle! I LOVED those.
 

cafe

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I didn't really start reading for fun until I was ten or eleven and my teacher read us The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So I read the Chronicles of Narnia and the Wrinkle in Time books and Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventures. I didn't grow up in a reading family so my access to books was a little limited.
 

Lark

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I didn't really start reading for fun until I was ten or eleven and my teacher read us The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So I read the Chronicles of Narnia and the Wrinkle in Time books and Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventures. I didn't grow up in a reading family so my access to books was a little limited.

What are the wrinkle in time books like? They've been recommended to me before and I've not read them yet.
 

cafe

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What are the wrinkle in time books like? They've been recommended to me before and I've not read them yet.
It's been a long time since I've read them, but they are kind of trippy. If I remember right, they are a combination of Arthurian legend, weird science, and teen angst. I found them pretty absorbing.
 

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I was a voracious reader with a teacher for a mother, so I was fed a steady diet of books from the moment I first learned to read... most notably

- nancy drew books... read at least 100 of them
- those illustrated classics books that are abridged versions of classic literature... especially loved anything mark twain or about pirates (though I also read the real versions of tom sawyer and huckleberry finn before reaching my teens)
- scary stories to tell in the dark and such... actually looked that series up the other day for nostalgia reasons :)
- all of the american girls books that were out at the time... my aunt worked at a living history museum so I have an autographed copy of Meet Addy that I received before it was in the stores
- dear america/little house on the prairie and other assorted historical fiction... my favorites being Caddie Woodlawn and Thimble Summer
- any book on space that I could lay my hands on... I wanted to be an astronomer for a while
- National Geographics- I blame them for my desire to travel everywhere!
- the encyclopedias and dictionaries
- fairy tales and other such stories

and pretty much any other printed word I encountered... I had a nerdy streak as a kid :nerd:
 

Ivy

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Oh man, how could I forget Little House? I was OBSESSED with those as soon as I could read. Before I could read, actually- my mom loved them and read them to me a lot. My mom loved reading aloud and read to us way past the point where we could read on our own, it was just special time with her.
 

wolfy

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Charlotte's Web springs to mind. And Choose your own adventure types of books.
 
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