Your Favorite Books From Childhood!

[Gloriana]

I was inspired InsatiableCuriosity's thread about disappointing reads. I noticed a couple of us recalling childhood books and I thought it deserved its own thread!

Also, I was just wondering if any of you remember 'book fairs' coming to your school as a child?

When I was little we would get these handouts in the classroom that were 2-3 pages (almost thin as tissue paper) and it was all books that could be ordered. I'd bring it home, I'd decide which 3-4 books I wanted, then I'd bring in my order form and check from home. Then, like 2 weeks later the 'book fair' would arrive and set up in the school library. I'd go up to the table and there would be this big packet of books just for me

I have such fond memories of that and I still get happy flashbacks when I get a bundle of books in the mail. Any of you remember anything similar as a kid?

Ok, without further ado: What were your favorite books as a kid? As a teenager?

When I Was Little:

*Little House On The Prairie Series (I still read the entire series every five years or so)
*Anne Of Green Gables Series.
*The Secret Garden.
*The Witches & The Grinnygog.
* ANY ghost stories I could get my hands on.
* Choose Your Own Adventure Books (I still have them and they're still awesome!)
*Ribsy
*Superfudge

When I Was A Teenager:

*Catcher In The Rye (Go ahead, mock me, it's okay I can take it)
*The Liar
*H.P. Lovecraft Books (I only read these because my older brother said they were over my head and I wanted to prove him wrong, ha)
*Edgar Allen Poe (esp. Murders In Rue Morgue & Telltale Heart)
*The Hobbit
*Letters From A Nut 1&2 (It was like the written version of The Jerky Boys prank phone calls)
*Shakespeare (Hamlet, Taming Of The Shrew, Othello.)

 

[Aquarelle]

1. Book fairs were the BOMB!

2. I also love Catcher in the Rye. Still do.

3. My favorite childhood books:

and last but not least... the Berenstain Bears not this book specifically; any of them!)

 

[KLessard]

-The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
-The Moorchild (Eloise McGraw)
-Emily of New Moon (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
-La Vraie histoire du chien de Clara Vic and its sequel, Bibitsa ou l'étrange voyage de Clara Vic (Christiane Duchesne)
-La 42e soeur de Bébert (Christiane Duchesne) (a francophone Québec author who has won the Governor General's award several times)
-The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan)

Books I wish I had discovered as a youth, but only read later:

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
-Freak the Mighty (Rodman Philbrick)
-The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
-Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

I grew up in Québec (Canada's French-speaking province) and didn't have access to all those great classics. (I didn't read English as a child). Francophone literature isn't so rich with youth literature. But I was blessed to see many good film adpatations of these books when I was young.

 

[mmhmm]

i grew up reading enid blyton. and judy blume.
oscar wilde's happy prince and other tales is probably my favourite.

 

[Such Irony]

I liked Beverly Cleary's Ramona books and Judy Blumes Fudge books. I was a sucker for books about younger siblings who often did humorous things that got them in trouble.

 

[Patches]

The entire Animorphs series.

 

[Lethe]

When I was 17 - now: I stopped reading fiction novels. (Except for Thank You for Smoking, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1984 and the Harry Potter series). Lol. My list contains mostly non-fiction, short stories, plays, poems or excerpts from books. Being forced to read "'The Grapes of Wrath" in my junior year nearly killed any joy I had left for classroom books.

Though if I had more time, some of the classic novels I'd like to visit includes works from Victor Hugo, H.P Lovecraft, Alexandre Dumas and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I tried reading Austen in high school (and middle school as well), but I still find her novels *boring* to this day. I want my reading to be an experience, not a long, long narrative. Getting married isn't precisely my opinion of excitement.

When I was 16 and younger:

*To Kill A Mocking Bird
*Harry Potter Series (again)
*The Crucible
*A Doll's House
*Macbeth
*The Scarlet Letter
*The Great Gatsby
*Lord of the Rings Trilogy
*Call Of The Wild
*Cyrano de Bergerac
*The Metamorphosis
*Grendel
*Beowulf

When I was 11 and younger:

*The Clue (and Clue Jr.) Series
*Goosebumps
*Holes
*The Velveteen Rabbit
*The Wayside School Series
*Where The Red Fern Grows
*Harry Potter Series
*Shel Silverstein's Poems
*A Christmas Carol
*The Dollhouse Murders
*Behind the Attic Wall
*The Brother (Sisters) Grimm Fairy Tales
*Greek Mythologies
*The Wringer


... And more mystery, horror or thriller novels I don't remember the title of.

When I was 6 and younger:

*Goodnight Moon
*The Nutcracker
*The Lorax
*Oh, the Places You'll Go!
*Where the Wild Things Are
*The Curious George Series
*The Dragon Series (Dav Pilkey)
*Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
*Martha Speaks

When I Was Little:

*Little House On The Prairie Series (I still read the entire series every five years or so)
*The Secret Garden.
* ANY ghost stories I could get my hands on.
* Choose Your Own Adventure Books (I still have them and they're still awesome!)

*High Fives* I especially loved the last two.

 

[Totenkindly]

My first favorite book was "Are You My Mother?"

Apparently I read this book / wanted it read to me over and over, so much that my copy was falling apart. My parents got tired of it and somehow managed to conveniently "lose" the book.

... whereupon a family friend bought me a new copy for Christmas that year.

Somehow everyone remained friends.

 

[Phantonym]

Oh, I was a total bookworm as a kid. I remember a book I turned into a cabbage when I was 6 - The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf. Read that over and over again, always carried it around, what a weirdo.

Books by Astrid Lindgren were always my favourites. Karlson on the Roof; The Children of Noisy Village; Ronia, the Robber's Daughter; the Pippi Longstocking series; The Brothers Lionheart; etc.

Later on I couldn't get enough of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Tarzan and the Martian series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Dracula by Bram Stoker. The Three Musketeers and the sequels by Alexandre Dumas. The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper. Books by Karl May with the characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Anything by Agatha Christie!!! Basically, I read anything with a hint of adventure, thriller, crime, mystery. Good times.

In my teens I expanded my interest on to works by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare...stuff like that.

I was and still am into the classics a lot and even though I read anything that piques my interest, I always turn back to the classics. Oh, this is great, it brings back so many wonderful memories. Now I want to start reading those books all over again.

 

[Ingrid in grids]

I read (and loved) the whole Tomorrow, When the War Began series. I also loved anything by Roald Dahl - his books were the first I remember reading.

 

[Kasper]

i grew up reading enid blyton.

Same!

The Famous Five and Secret Seven were books I ate as a wee tot.

 

[Aquarelle]

Favorite "chapter books":

[/IMG]

(the whole series)

 

[LastTangoThenParis]

The first book I ever read was one of fairytales by Oscar Wilde. I also had some beautiful books of Irish folklore that I ADORED. Those are pretty much what I read from five through to seven or eight.

 

[sui generis]

I liked Beverly Cleary's Ramona books and Judy Blumes Fudge books.

Me too. Loved Ramona, loved Fudge.

Also:

All of the Amelia Bedelia books, really, but I remember this one most clearly.

All of the Berenstain Bears books, too, but especially this one.

When I got a little older, I got into the Baby-Sitters Club and other similar series, like the Gymnasts and Bad News Ballet series.

 

[Vasilisa]

So many good ones have already been listed. I also especially loved The Secret Garden and later Shakespeare.

Here are some of mine.

Graeme Base's beautiful books

Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books

The Alice books

I have an unending love for folktales and fairytales that began when I was small. Here are a few of my favorites.

Afansyev's collection of folktales

Animalia by Barbara Berger

Jane Yolen's stories

 

[Gloriana]

I've never heard of so many of these. I don't care if I'm an adult, I'm checking 'em out! Some of them look fantastic.

 

[Xenon]

This is bringing back memories. Let's see...I loved the Fudge books too, the Berenstein Bears...I remember a series of picture books with titles that began with "Let's Talk About...". They were all about certain types of behaviour in kids and why kids shouldn't engage in said behaviour. Let's Talk About Whining. Let's Talk about Being Selfish. Let's Talk About Being Lazy. Let's Talk About Stealing. I loved rereading these, even though they never led to any improvement in my behaviour. :devil

I liked Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach...).

Anyone read Gordon Korman? He might not be that well-known outside of Canada, but he wrote novels at a junior high reading level, mostly involving young people getting into wild schemes. He had a series about a couple of guys at a boarding school called MacDonald Hall. I loved these, my brother and cousins did too.

When I got a little older, I got into the Baby-Sitters Club and other similar series, like the Gymnasts and Bad News Ballet series.

Oh yeah. I read all of these. I also liked a series of books about young competitive ice skaters called "Silver Blades".

I had a huge collection of both Babysitters Club and Babysitters Little Sister books. I recommend this page to any former Babysitters' Club fans:

BSC Headquarters

It's the blog of a librarian who decided to reread some Babysitters' Club books. She gives her opinions and summaries as an adult. She particularly loves to snark on outfits, Karen Brewer, Stacey and the fact that everyone looks far older than 13 on the book covers.

Oooh, I also remember a series of books called "Survival". They were like choose your own adventure books, only each book was about surviving in nature as a certain animal. The titles were like, "Survival: Could you be a Mouse?" or "Survival: Could you be an Otter?". I remember books for deer, fox, squirrel.... In most of the possible endings, you'd end up dead. I think it was my fourth grade class that we were introduced to those. The kids liked them so much, we'd all hoard them in our desks instead of returning them to the class bookshelf.

 

[sui generis]

I thought of a couple more...

 

[EffEmDoubleyou]

The world atlas, especially the section in the front about the solar system.

I was a weird kid.

 

[Tallulah]

Lots of Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss when I was a little kid.

The Ramona books, lots of Judy Blume, the Betsy-Tacy series, the Taffy Sinclair series, Madeleine L'Engle, all the typical pre-teen stuff. I remember going through a Trixie Belden mystery phase, too. Read lots of classic literature between 8th and 9th grade. Lots of biographies throughout high school.

And I used to read our set of World Books for fun, too. I kind of miss physical encyclopedias. There was so much I'd learn about because I turned past a picture that was interesting, then I'd read the article.