The first fictional book you remember reading & loving on your own. What do you think of it now?

Cafe Society
41

Similar story here, and even those books I got from the library were likely recommended by the librarians. So depending on precisely what counts as “on my own”, I can come up with a few possibilities:

1: When I was a little kid (well below the “recommended reading level”), my mom had a copy of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH that she was reading for herself, when it suddenly disappeared from the bathroom. It was a few weeks before she realized that I had taken it to read it myself. She’d never actually recommended it to me, but hey, it was there.

2: I devoured every Danny Dunn book I could find from the library. I think this would have been after NIMH, and I’m pretty sure that Mom didn’t start me on the series, but as I said, it may well have been a librarian who did.

3: At some point I was prowling through one of the back rooms of the house, and found The Hobbit on a bookshelf back there (of course, every room in the house has bookshelves in it). Nobody had ever recommended it to me, and it was in the midst of a bookshelf of hundreds of other books, and Mom herself hadn’t yet read it at that point, so I think I can safely say that I discovered it on my own, by any reasonable standard.

The first two, I haven’t re-read since I was a child (though I really ought to, and would dearly love to get ahold of the Danny Dunn books). And for the third, I don’t think Skald needs to ask what I think of it.

42

Second-graders are actually 7-8 years old. I was a somewhat precocious reader, though.

43

I can’t even tell you how much those books meant to me. (Her others are okay but not quite up to snuff - either that or they aren’t fringed with joy in my memory!) I was born in 1980 but probably ran into them at age 9 or 10 as well. Sigh.

The first “real book” I remember picking up on my own, although I’m sure I read many before then, was Black Beauty. I specifically remember having to ask my mom what a “part” in a book was, since that one has IIRC both chapters and “parts” separating the phases of that poor horse’s life. I read it again recently and still liked it, but it’s so nakedly manipulative!

ETA - as for the “on your own” facet - I dunno, it’s hard to tell. Early on my mom taught me that you were pretty safe picking the books with the big silver or gold stickers on them. :slight_smile: She was a retired teacher and we went to the library all the time and got stacks and stacks of books, but mostly I picked them out for myself.

44

For me, it was Joseph Wambaugh. He wrote Los Angeles Police Stories. My first memory was The Black Marble; then The Choirboys. I’ve been a fan of police/detective stories ever since. Somewhere around that time was The Godfather too. I think I was in 6th or 7th grade when I read these. I see a lot of good books that above that were also good (A Wrinkle In Time!) but to the OP’s request, the first one I remember LOVING was Wambaugh.

45

There are a couple.

Stuart Little still blows me away. It probably reduced me to tears as a child; I honestly don’t remember. But it did shatter my worldview that a story had to have a certain, inarguable resolution.

The second book I don’t remember the name of. It was a book about a kid who cares for a raccoon throughout the raccoon’s life (It wasn’t ***Rascal ***by Sterling North). I remember the feeling of the book sticking with me for a long time. All I remember now was one part of the book where the kid’s brother cut his thumb off mowing the lawn, and they got the thumb wrapped up in a handkerchief and got thumb and kid to the hospital. Also the last line of the whole book was ‘[Protagonist’s name] picked up the box and carried it away.’

46

I was coming in to say this. I had a handful of these books and I read mine and the library’s several times.

At my kids’ school last week, they had a reading day where the parent can come in and read, so I read Encyclopedia Brown to my daughter’s 5th grade. It is kind of quaint and it’s definitely a product of its time (the tough kids were all in “gangs” and solving a mystery cost a mere quarter), but I had fun reading it and the kids had fun trying to guess the answer to the mystery. It’s also funny that as soon as Encyclopedia figures out the perp is lying, they immediately fess up to the crime and it’s over with.

47

The first one that comes to mind is Dr. Doolittle by Hugh Lofting. I read several in that series. I can still picture where they were on the shelf of the public library, but I don’t remember how old I was. I’m pretty sure I was reading them before the Rex Harrison movie came out, so I might have been eight or nine.

Not long ago I downloaded a copy of it and started rereading it. It held up pretty well for me, but I’m not sure that today’s kids would get into the Englishness and old-fashionedness of it.

Perhaps earlier were the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books from the school library. I also took out Beverly Cleary books from there.

One thing about my elementary school age reading was that the school library was divided up into sections by grade. The teachers and librarian did NOT want us going into the shelves that were “too old” for us. My mother wrote a note and put an end to that restriction for me. My mom later volunteered in the school library for a total of about twelve years until my younger siblings were out of that school Then she got a job at the public library and worked there for maybe 20 years. The younger of my two sisters became a librarian and now works at the middle school that my daughter attends.

48

As a kid, I was a voracious reader (I read an entire set of World Book Encyclopedias). But as far as novels are concerned, the only ones I remember are the ones I hated, usually having to read them for school (like Silas Marner).

But I always wanted to be an architect, so eventually a friend of mine recommended *The Fountainhead. *It solidified principles about architecture that I already had, but couldn’t adequately verbalize. I had assumed that the author was a man; I thought “Ayn” was some kind of English name. Years later, when I actually met Rand, I told her about thinking she was a man. She laughed and said it was the highest compliment she had ever received.

*The Fountainhead *is still one of my favorite novels.

49

Of course, SOME of the old mystery solutions don’t work any more. I remember one where Encyclopedia knew who the guilty party was because he gave a phone number as something like “ZE6-9834,” and in those days, there was no Q or Z on a phone dial.

Today, most kids don’t remember dials on telephones, much less that there usen’t to be a Q or Z.

50

I forgot the, “What do you think of it now?” part.

I re-read it recently on a whim. I enjoyed it. Still quite interesting as a story, even if it was written at a lower reading level. I skipped several pages as a child, and skimmed them as an adult. Don’t remember what it was now - think it had to do with the protagonist’s home life. It dragged a bit, and I wanted to get to the space travel part.

I’d read a fair amount before this book, but I think this one kicked me into high-gear, so to speak.

51

Lloyd Alexander’s fantasy series (maybe called Prydania or something- I remember one of the books was called “The Black Cauldron”), Watership Down, and Brian Daley’s Han Solo series (starting with Han Solo at Star’s End). These were the first books I remember reading, and I enjoyed Watership Down and the Han Solo books so much that I used to read them once every year or so from when I was about 10 to about 17.

52

I don’t remember the name of the book or the author. And I’d read books before that, but the first book I read that set a fire in me was this book I found about the Knights of King Arthur and the Round Table.

Oh my god. Fantasy. Adventure. Knights! Real live heroes!

Now all these years later I am far more cynical and jaded, obviously. I know that knights, real knights, were nothing like those in the stories. But that book gave me a burning desire for fantasy and sci-fi and I’ve never really understood why it’s a derided genre and why so many people think it’s low-class and stupid. It’s what you make of it and I have never ever lost my love affair with it.

And I still secretly get a thrill in my heart when I think of knights.

53

Those were mine, too. I remember reading Farmer Boy in 2nd or 3rd grade and feeling SO PROUD of myself because it was the longest book I had read on my own to date. I used to pretend that Laura was with me as I rode my bike around the neighborhood or went to school, and I would imagine showing her all the modern things around us and how she would react. I would also pretend to be Laura and make my teddy bear be Almanzo and pretend he was sick and feed him imaginary chamomile tea.

I also remember wondering why the books were in the fiction section when they were clearly non-fiction, and the answer I came up with was because of the dialogue – I couldn’t remember what my friends and I talked about an hour ago, so how was a grown lady going to remember conversations she had when she was little?

54

The Chronicles of Prydain.

55

Another one I found on my own very young and love, which could have been the first: At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald. I don’t remember how old I was, six, seven? just that I was young enough so I didn’t understand, that first time, that the land back there was the land of Death. Maybe that is why I’ve always loved works that have a way out of this reality into a better one, and only those left behind think that a death has occurred. (Wells: “The Door in the Wall”, Twilight Zone, “Willoughby”.

I wonder if MacDonald’s beautiful, female North Wind as Death was one of the inspirations for Neil Gaiman’s female Death in the Sandman series.

56

Alice in Wonderland, and I love it even more now that I’ve read Martin Gardner’s annotated version and get the obscure and esoteric jokes.

57

I had the problem that some people have mentioned where my mother was a teacher so I can’t recall which books I was directed to by her. I remember reading Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys, A Wrinkle in Time, The Indian in the Cupboard, My Teacher is an Alien and many more in elementary school. I know I had read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by the time I was 8 because when where at my grandparents house when my grandmother died there was a painting of a boat that I thought was going to come alive like the book.

I do remember I found and read The Hobbit myself (3rd grade, age 8-ish) because the book just looked really cool. My dad has the hard back version that has the runes around it and comes in the hard sleeve. I also read Jurassic Park that year, but I heard of it because they were filming the movie so I don’t know if that counts.

Both are still awsome, btw.

58

There is no one book I can point to and say “that’s the first book I found and read on my own”. My parents always encouraged reading and read a lot around me. I had free access to the school library and went to the city library every few months. I know that I read a lot more than most of the kids in my homeroom, and that it was frustrating that no one ever wanted to talk about books.

I can point to several books and series that I know I found on my own, probably starting around third grade, and then continuing on.

Encyclopedia Brown - loved at the time, but was only occasionally able to figure out the mystery. Every now and then, I’d come across one that irritated the hell out of me (Sally solves the case Encyclopedia can’t, because she realized the bank robber was dressed as a woman when he sat on the wrong side of the restaurant table? WTF?). Looking back, they were age appropriate with strong characterization for that type of writing, but there’s really nothing to bring me back to them. (There’s also another similar series, only the main character is an inventor, and his little sister has an upturned nose, freckles, and is named Daphne. Anyone recognize it?)

A Wrinkle in Time - I’m with Skald. The Murrays felt like long-lost family, and I empathized with Meg the way I never had with another protagonist. I think I must have read the cover off the library copy, and then I discovered that Madeleine L’Engle had written many more books. I started with the Murray family books, found her non-fantastical juvlit, and worked my way into A House Like a Lotus and The Arm of the Starfish when I was in high school. When I went back and re-read her collection in my early thirties, I was amazed at just how much of her worldview I’d absorbed. Everything from the numinence of good in everything from the subcellular to the interstellar scale to the music mentioned to the ordinary, everyday hassles of family and school. I still love her.

I also read a lot of Apple paperbacks from Scholastic Press. It seems to me that there were a lot more one-offs under that imprimatur than now. Everything offered currently is a series and usually connected to a tv show. One that sticks out is The Girl With the Silver Eyes, which I’m astonished to find is still in print and available on Amazon.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, The Girl Who Owned a City was the first post-apocalyptic story I ever read, and I think it primed my tastes for a lifetime more. I didn’t notice it as a kid, but when I went back and read it as an adult, the paean to Ayn Rand is painfully obvious and not very well thought out. There’s a mention that Lisa finds a book in the library that explained how people and cities all worked and gave her the answers she needs to keep her band of survivors together. I wondered what it was when I was a kid. When I got a bit older, I figured it had to be Plato’s The Cave or some other similar philosophical work.

I know I also read Doctor Who novelettes, D’Auliere’s Greek and Norse mythology, and an indiscriminate metric ton of everything else. My other main source for fiction was comic books, and that started with X-Men #172, which is a wonderful place to start.

59

The first book I can remember picking out for myself, and loving, was I, Houdini by Lynne Reid, which I got at a school book fair. It’s about an escape artist hamster (I owned a hamster at the time, and I’ve always been a fan of animal books – xenofiction, as TV Tropes would call it). I still own it. Haven’t reread it lately, but I expect I’d still enjoy it.

This was the book that taught me the word “sheer”.

60

The Big Joke Game was one of my favorites too…I believe I mentioned it on the boards at one time or another. I haven’t read it since I was about 11 - I’d be curious how it holds up. Will have to check out Here Lies the Body…can I assume that $144.22 for a paperback copy, that it’s out of print as well? :wink: