Thanks! Looks like it was Little My I was thinking of, not Little Echo.
I was given a beautiful book of fairy tales when I was a child.
It was stunning, and then I opened it and read some of them :eek:
These were the genuine, real versions of The Little Match Girl and The Little Mermaid …
I was stunned to find out that they die at the end and that the whole time she was walking around, it felt like knives stabbing her.
I realize death is an important concept to learn, but I was really young when I read these… and I cried and cried 
Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I wanted to slap Goldie–whaddya mean, just going into someone’s home while they’re gone, then eating their food, breaking their furniture, and going up to their bedroom and falling asleep on their bed? Even as a child, I found this behavior unspeakably rude and annoying!
I am probably going to be the only one who thinks this but I absolutly HATED all things Whinnie the Pooh. My babysitter loved the books and read them to me all the time. I couldnt stand them, still can’t. But oddly enough I found a old copy of A.A Milne’s poem book When we were very young and I loved it.
Heh, the google ads are offering Real Bearskin Rugs, for you to vent your dislike upon.
I love the Moomintrolls! I am a Moomin fan, and unrepentant. They’re not well-known, so if you haven’t read them and have kids, I recommend reading one so you can see if you like it. They’re classics.
I hate The Little Match Girl! Someone should write a sequel where they find her abusive father and beat the crap out of him.
Oh yeah, add me to the list of Giving Tree haters.
Either I have a very selective memory, or I was a real chucklehead as a kid, because I can’t think of a single kids book that I really remember disliking – including any of the ones mentioned that I’m familiar with. I thought “The Giving Tree” was sad, but still pretty touching. And what’s wrong with the Berenstein Bears?? I thought they were great – and I don’t remember them being particularly conservative either. (I’ll grant a possible exception for the drug one mentioned in the OP, since I hardly remember it.) Teaching kids to be polite and clean up their room and that going to the dentist isn’t so bad seems pretty non-partisan to me. (I will admit I’m rather surprised to see the sex books, though…)
One thing that did bother me about the Bears (well, after I heard my dad complaining about it to my mom) is that Papa Bear was always the blunderer while Mama Bear was the wise one who put things right again.
The Pooh books bored me a bit (I think parents like to read them to kids more than kids like to hear them), but I didn’t really dislike them…
The Peterkin Papers. Hopefully, no one has ever even heard of them, as they have deservedly slipped into a forgotten abyss. Even worse than Amelia Bedelia, whom I also hated. Even as a child I was insulted to have stupidity held up as entertaining so I could feel superior to a pack of fictional lackwits. Bleh.
Kind of morbid, I suppose, but the book Seven Alone, also made into a movie, really bothered me. It tells the true story of the Sager family, seven children who were orphaned on the Oregon Trail but completed the journey after their parents died. The book had a happy ending in that they were adopted by Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife, Narcissa, in Walla Walla, Washington. The end.
The book was assigned reading for my fourth (fifth?) grade class. We had travelled to Walla Walla on a trip a couple of years before and I knew what happened to the Whitmans. The book’s happy ending doesn’t mention that three years later the two boys were killed when Indians murdered the Whitmans and several others and burned the mission, one of the girls was mortally wounded in the attack, and the other three were taken captive and repeatedly raped. (They were later ransomed.) I thought this sucked as there were surely other true inspiring stories of kids in the pioneer days that didn’t have a godawful hidden afterward.
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, and the rest of the Narnia series: even as a child I hated the clumsy Christ allegory and the heavy-handed didacticism {although I may not have known the word “didacticism” at age 10}. I do remember thinking, “If I wanna read about Jesus, I woulda stayed in Sunday School.”
The Bible Story was a (horrendously overpriced) series of books we were encouraged to buy in elementary school (I went to a conservative Christian academy). Even as a very religious kid I disliked them and was glad my parents didn’t buy them.
The drawings were outdated even in the 1970s- they all looked like 1950s housewives (think Donna Reed doing housework in lipstick, pearls and a hijab) and way-too-cleanshaven guys, Christ was downright Nordic (and even as a kid I knew he would have been dark), and worst of all they cut out a lot of the stories. I got particularly irritated reading their take on Moses: having read the actual Bible for class I was hoping that this kid’s version would cast some light on some of the weird bits, like why God sent Moses to pharaoh and then tried to kill him before he got down the mountain, or why He had Moses implore pharaoh to “Let My people go” but then He hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and other such oddities.
Not only did they not shed light on these issues, they omitted them altogether! Basically they took out all that wasn’t warm and fuzzy and spinnable and repackaged the most un- 1950s American nuclear family book in existence into a 1950s American nuclear family book.
Odd story: not long ago I had a dental appointment and the waiting room had the current incarnation of The Bible Story (and the sale cards- the things are over $400 now). I browsed through one to see if they’d updated the artwork. It was the exact same with one exception: they had gone back at some point and colorized some of the “extras”, making some previously white characters black. Jesus and Moses and all of the stars are still white metrosexuals of course, but at least now there’d be a black or Asian face in the crowd, all smiling big shiny teeth like everybody else of course. And you can only imagine how dated the Donna Reed Hebrew tent wife looks today.
I was very disappointed one year to receive as a secret Santa gift the Little Golden Book of God. I knew, before I unwrapped it, that it was a book. I was soo happy that it was a book. Then I opened it.
Blech. Totally not as cool as my other Little Golden Books.
Then, nearly two decades later, this redeems it!
Really, I loved the Berenstein Bears-I had a whole slew of 'em when I was a kid. The values weren’t “conservative”, but common sense-don’t be a greedy little brat, don’t steal, don’t cheat, be polite, brush your teeth, do your homework.
Seconded wholeheartedly.
And Enid Blyton - anything by Enid bloody Blyton:- “Unless you’re white, English and middle-class, forget it. The best you can hope for is ‘quaint foreigner’ and we’ll all laugh at your accent. Mostly you’ll be the bad guy and have rings run round you by a bunch of smug white, English and middle-class brats. And their scabby mutt”
At least she got it for your kids, who, at the age of two, might be expected to have some sort of Oedipal complex anyway. But to get it as an adult, the Incest with Mommy book is just… creepy.
I was actually hearing the music when I read that!
For balance, give the kid a copy of Ayn Rand’s ANTHEM.
Re PETER PAN
and you don’t think that’s valuable information for girls to have in advance?!?!
Hey, don’t be hatin’ Arthur S. Maxwell & the Seventh-Day Adventists! 
Sheesh! Where did you go to school? There wasn’t even a [i’Classics Illustrated* version of War and Peace (not that I recall, anyway). I eventually read it on my own at 19. Partway through I noticed there was a for-credit course on it, so I signed up and got credit for what I’d already done.
as for the Berenstain Bears, i didn’t discover them until I was grown up. But I’d seen the other cartoon books linked to above when I was younger. I’m sorry I never bought any. But because I encountered them first, the Bears never creeped me out. Our daughter likes them.
She also likes The Giving Tree, which I never read until now, and I have to admit I’m not fond o it. Don’t let it keep you from Silverstein’s other woerks – the guy is seriously but interestingly weird.