Describe a book you read and liked as a kid but can't remember its title

Cafe Society
1

So I saw the movie thread but didn’t spot any book thread…if this is a repeat please let me know.

I don’t quite recall any movies I remember the plot too but can’t remember the name, but there are a few books I would like to read again but for the life of me can’t recall the name or author.

Feel free to put in your own book plots that you are having trouble remembering the author/name and maybe we can get some of these solved.

For mine, I’ve looked all sorts of places online trying to remember the name or author, even on websites dedicated to just assembling vampire fiction, and have had no success.

The story is a vampire book (obviously) about a woman who is in a lonely marriage and goes to a drama club/theatre group. She gets a crush on a man who attends the group and dreams about him at night. Turns out he’s a vampire, and sensing her crush he comes into her room one night and turns her. She of course flips out and the book is about her experiences as a vampire and adjusting to her new life.

Few points I remember:

Vampire hair and nails grow overnight and have to be cut each morning.

Aspirin robs a vampire of their powers/strength because it thins the blood.

She’s able to talk to inanimate objects, like a roulette ball, and ends up getting rich because of it.

She’s able to fly.

She joins a band.

There is one scene where she or another vampire kills a man on a beach during a party, burns his body, grinds him to ash, then scatters the ash over the water.

At one point she revisits her husband after having just disappeared after she was turned, only to find he’s remarried. She doesn’t talk to him, just watches them through a window.

I’ve googled various aspects of what I can remember but for the life of me I can’t find the name of the book. My google-fu is usually pretty good…if anyone can help with this I’d be grateful. I was a pre-teen when I read this book so it’s probably utter crap, but I’d like to re-read it anyway and find out.

2

I don’t know the book but I’d lay long odds that you will have an answer withing the hour. There have been tons of “ID the book/movies” threads on this board, and on the occasions I’ve asked I’ve never been disappointed. Good luck.

3

OK, here’s one. It’s about a very poor girl in an area like Appalachia. At one point she and her classmates catch their teacher under the sink putting slugs in their lunches so that they will be forced to eat the more nutritious school lunch instead of the lard on white bread they brought in. In another passage, she has taken out a school library book and treasures it until she accidentally drops it in a mud puddle. She’s so distraught over what happened, but can’t bear bringing it back like that, so she throws it into a pond. Help!

4

Here’s another: I’ve posted it before but I’ll try again. I read it in third grade or so…so it’s a young reader book.

Sci-fi
The protagonist is a baseball player. Regardless of the gravity, he has uncanny hand-eye coordination and ability to see where an object will land.

A war breaks out.

The enemy has a single eye…on an eyestalk I believe.

The ships, when a hole is punched through them, are equipped with guns the crew can use to fire an expanding rubber ball to plug the hole.

The protagonist and an enemy are stranded on them moon I believe. The enemy is injured. Turns out their eyestalk can normally fire a powerful laser. The protagonist…with his uncanny baseball senses can tell a piece of rubble is going to land on his enemy…even in the low gravity…so he saves his enemy and then wakes up in a hospital where his brother tells him that he (the protagonist) stopped the war basically by saving that enemy. Turns out the laser is actually a communication beam and the war was started by mistake

5

When I was 5 or 6 years old – around 1974 – I loved reading a book that contained a number of short stories. It was very elementary stuff; I’m guessing the target age range was 5 to 8. There were lots of illustrations, large-font type, and no “big words.”

I’m sketchy on the details, but I recall one story was about a cat (or kitten?) that was kicked out of his home. He was wandering around one day, lonely and cold, when he saw some fish in a pond. He got his paw stuck in a fishing line, and the fisherman (it may have been a boy) pulled in the fish and the cat. The fisherman took the cat and fish home. The last illustration was the cat sitting in front of a warm fire inside the new owner’s home, and the cat (or the boy?) was eating some of the fish that was just caught.

One of the other stories was about a family that went out on a lake in a rowboat. The boat started taking on water and sinking. It was later discovered someone had forgotten to install the plug in the drain hole.

6

I’ve been searching for the name of this book for a long time. Prompted by this thread, I did some more Google searching and found it! It’s called Up and Away, and was first published in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

I think I’m going to buy it. :slight_smile:

7

OK, here’s another one. Scientist develops a tunnel-boring machine, capable of carrying a crew underground, and he and several others embark on an expedition under the earth. (I think I recall that they all take the precaution of having their appendixes removed beforehand, in case one of them develops appendicitis while out of reach of a hospital.)

After some days travelling underground, one of the passengers gets claustrophobia and starts walking in his/her sleep, changing the controls to send them back upward…and at the same time, getting them completely lost. Eventually they break through into a cave system, but the tunneling machine is damaged and they’re all left stranded in an unknown cave in pitch-darkness.

They’re saved when a caver, letting a camera down a deep pit on a line, finds that he’s taken a photo of a woman in the dark.

8

Very long time ago, a children’s book about a parrot with either a very short tail or a missing tail, and pirates, and somehow the parrot becomes a hero.

I remember it being printed in black and white and one other color, a sort of blue/turquoise/dark cyan color rather than full color.

9

In the late 70’s, I checked out a sci-fi book from the school library. It had 70’s period cover art of domed cities. There were outcasts living in the mountains plotting to overthrow the despotic rulers of the domed cities. It wasn’t Logan’s Run. That’s all I remember about it.

10

I don’t immediately recognize the story but I did find a gallery of science fiction cover art depicting domed cities. Maybe one of these will jog a memory:

part I

part II

part III

part IV

11

Might be the The Tripods series, the alien “masters” lived in domed cities to hold in their atmosphere. And the human Resistance did live in the mountains.

12

I had a paperback in the late 70s which I loved to read over and over. It was a story about three children, two girls and a boy, who got stranded at Christmas because of heavy snow. They ended up in a farm and had a nativity of sorts in the barn with the farm animals. They got rescued because the boy had a toy aeroplane which he tied a message to and set free. Was a happy, heartwarming story that I really enjoyed, long lost the book though sadly.

13

Maybe it was in the Book Trails series?

14

One of the first sf/fantasy books I got out of our local library was about a guy who gets transported in some mysterious way to another planet, and ends up as a warrior fighting with swords on the side of one of the (very human) aliens.
No, it wasn’t any of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels. I read those several years later and could see the resemblance, but the plots were different.

I feel certain that this book was one of Otis Adelbert Kline’s Martian novels, which were clearly written in imitation of Burroughs. He wrote three Venus novels and two Mars novels between 1929 and 1933 (long after Burroughs had begun his John Carter stories, although he was still writing them at that time). None of the ones I’ve picked up and read in recent years, though, seem to be exactly the same as my memories of the first one. Either I haven’t found it yet, or it’s by some other author, or my memory is faulty.

15

Mine was a SF book I read while in grade school - say the early/mid 70s. The human race had finally gotten together to build a ship to go to Alpha Centauri, and our protagonist was a young man who was in the crew, I THINK he was in charge of a small landing boat. Anyway, they humans get there, and discover that AC is inhabited by other humans, and he and his love interest are invited, eventually, to meet the chief preistess of the aliens, who reveal that they used to live on the 5th planet of the Sol System, before God got mad and teleported them to AC and destroyed the planet thereby forming the asteroid belt.

16

If any of these are driving you all really crazy, there’s a group at **goodreads **dedicated to remembering the names of books. For whatever reason, people are always more obsessed with recovering names of childhood books than something they read a few years ago.

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In all seriousness, welcome back. You are generally good in sci-fi/fantasy threads.

Regards,
Shodan

18

A series of books about a girl named Marcie (I think) who befriends a new girl who moves in next door. The new girl’s family has about 10 children (I think), and Marcie and her go through a series of adventures.

19

Damn it, I know I’ve read this. I’m thinking.

20

In the nineties, I read a book about children flying. There was some child who appeared and taught them how to – it was pretty much like swimming but in the air. And the children used to meet and fly together but they kept it a secret from their parents. IIRC, the child who taught them was a mystery: didn’t go to the school, didn’t have parents, and no one knew where his/her home was.