Heinlein’s juvenile science fiction
Narnia Chronicles
Chronicles of Prydain
Harry Potter
Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Anne of Green Gables
Velveteen Rabbit
Wind in the Willows
Winnie the Pooh
A Wrinkle In Time – by Madeleine L’Engle
Not yet mentioned favs:
The Shoe books by Noel Streatfeild (Dancing Shoes, Theatre Shoes, Ballet Shoes, and so on)
Amelia Bedelia
Encyclopedia Brown
Stuart Little
The Secret Garden
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Besty-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace
Matilda
Judy Bloom books
Charlottes Web
The Boxcar Children books
The Hatchet
Holes
Tuck Everlasting
Maniac Magee
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Looking at some of these I keep thinking… man I should dig out some of my old pals again. I’ve been reading new stuff I found in the children’s section (Inkheart, The Amulet of Samarkand)
FriarTed The Velveteen Rabbit is my favourite tale. I use quotes from it in my sig at various places I visit.
I also read a lot of fairy tales (old versions and rewritten. Politically Correct ones are so much fun!) and even now I sit and read to my son some of these. He’s only 6 months old but it’s never too early to start! He already has about 7 or 8 books that are his, mainly really simple ones but a couple of really nice ones that I admit I picked up because I wanted to read them too.
Has anyone read the Pendragon books by MacHale? They are so good! I bought the first one because I heard that they are better than Harry Potter. I wouldn’t say they’re better. They’re very good, and they’re very different. I stayed up until 2 this morning finishing the fourth book, and lulled myself to sleep by mentally composing a letter to the author urging him in the strongest possible terms to get writing!
And I’ll echo some of the others; I love the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace, anything by E.L. Konigsburg, E. Nesbitt, etc. I also enjoy the Walter Dean Myers (anyone read Monster?) books, Gary Paulsen, and Karen Hesse.
Someone on this board who I am eternally grateful to although I don’t remember his/her name sent me to http://loganberrybooks.com/stump.html . This site put me back in touch with a kid’s book I had read long ago that had kind of haunted me ever since, only I didn’t know the name! It was A Candle In Her Room, by Ruth M. Arthur. You should get a lot of good recommendations there.
Another book I stumbled across on my own was Twin Spell, by Janet Lunn Swoboda. There’s nothing like coming to the slow realization that you are reading something you once read twenty-five years ago…it’s eerie, to say the least, to see what you remember, what sort of things stuck in your child’s mind.
I guess I’m not too original, since pretty much everything I’m into has been mentioned. I read all 8 of the Anne books every year, in sequence, usually in the fall or around Christmas. I also love Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles Of Prydain and The Arcadians. Ever since I read HDM, I’ve been reading Pullman’s other stuff. Count Karlstein is a goodie.
I still enjoy my Beverly Cleary books, especially my favorite: The Mouse and the Motorcycle.
Some others:
*No Flying in the House by Betty Brock. It’s about a little girl who is actually a fairy, but doesn’t know it until a cat tells her that she’s a “half fairy”. The most charming part of the book is she has a guardian named Gloria, a little white dog with attitude about three inches tall and three inches long.
*Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville. He wrote a lot of those “My Teacher is an Alien” books. This book is part of a short series where these children find their way into a mysterious magic shop (the other one is Jennifer Murdley’s Toad). Basically a kid buys a dragon egg and cares for her when she hatches. He names her Tiamat.
Bruce Coville! Good one, Rabid Child!
And I can’t believe I forgot Lemony Snicket. The kids and I have listened to them all on audio tapes. The ones read by Tim Curry are incredible.
I use the booksleuth forums at Abebooks.com - I’ve checked out Loganberry books, but I like being about to post in a forum environment - both to try to find the books I’m looking for and to see if I can help other people find theirs.
I like the Anne of Green Gables books and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books (which is fun because I live in easy driving distances of most of the places she lived). I also like Robin McKinley (especially her Damar stuff) and Meredith Ann Pierce.
I like the Anne of Green Gables books and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books (which is fun because I live in easy driving distances of most of the places she lived). I also like Robin McKinley (especially her Damar stuff) and Meredith Ann Pierce.
Another Heinlein juvenile and PTerry’s “Children’s books” reader here. And I have severa; autographed books by Shel Silverstein. Prized possessions, those.
Some YA books I enjoy which haven’t been mentioned yet:
The Mad Scientists’ Club - Bertrand Brinley
Henry Reed Inc., Henry Reed’s Babysitting Service, etc. - Keith Robertson
Homer Price - Robert McCloskey
The Twenty-One Balloons - William Pene du Bois
Mr. Revere and I, Ben & Me - Robert Lawson
The Three E’s for me! Elizabeth Enright (the Melendy family series, Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away), Edward Eager (Half Magic and others) and Eleanor Estes (the Moffats, Ginger Pye and Pinky Pye, and The Witch Family).
There’s also a series that I wonder if anyone besides me remembers. Judy Bolton. Not to be confused with Nancy Drew. Judy solved mysteries, but there was a lot of personal drama and moral dilemmas woven in, though not enough drama to be soapy and not enough morality to be preachy. Also unlike Miss Drew, Judy didn’t always make the right decisions, and she had a temper. Not that she was surrounded by saints, either: some of the conflicts between her and her friends/classmates/acquaintances could get downright “Mean Girls”-esque! And the illustrations were dope.
Furthermore, the series was not stuck in time. Judy started out at age 15 or 16. She continued on through high school and eventually graduated. She got engaged. He turned out not to be the right guy. Her childhood friend became a lawyer and hired her as his secretary. He was the right guy, and they got engaged, then married. He went to work for the FBI and she became a private investigator. They also solved the “when are you going to have children?” dilemma by taking in a smart and smart-mouthed orphan girl.
Can you tell I read these books to death? Unfortunately, a lot of them “went in the auction”. My mom convinced me that I didn’t need to hang on to “those kid books” when their value on the common market was so great. I have managed to snag a few copies at used-book stores, and there was a half-hearted attempt in the '90s to reissue them. For some reason, though, the publishers stopped after three volumes. Probably because I’m the only person who was interested!
Lately I’ve been working on tracking down the old “Danny Dunn” series by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. (Found 5 so far.) Some of them were fairly forgettable – and some of them I still enjoy today, 20 years after I last read them …
Winnie the Pooh = happy childhood memories for me.
The Hobbit = especially great for reading aloud to kids.
Terry Pratchett = a master at work.
Here’s an fascinating one.
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is published in both an adult and a children’s version, is the sixth novel to win the Whitbread Book of the Year since 1985. It has already won numerous children’s and teenage fiction awards and was initially entered for the Children’s Book Award as well, but was withdrawn by the publishers in preference to the Novel Award. (Whitbread Book Awards rules stipulate that books may only be entered in one category.)”
As the title suggests, it refers to detective work inspired by that of Sherlock Holmes. But the storyteller is an autistic teenager.
This must have been a tremendously difficult book to write, but it is a great achievement. I had never read a book like this before.
“Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect–perhaps admire–him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney”
I still enjoy the books that I loved as a child, though I must admit that I don’t know what I ever saw in Judy Blume. Oh, and some of the things in Enid Blyton’s books are so decidedly un-PC that they actually shock me at time, such as all the books containing dogs named Nigger, or the Famous Five’s obsession with sending the boys off to defeat the evil, lazy and criminally-inclined Gypsies while the girls cooked their dinner for them. Seems ridiculous that Noddy books were persecuted for some small details while many of EB’s other books were so chock-full of words and concepts that have fallen out of favour that finding stuff to censor would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
