The first one I can honestly remember, as standing out from all the books I read, was Tom Sawyer. I remember a scene in which it describes Tom’s discomfort on a hot Sunday morning sitting in church. One line read “It was a relief when the benediction was pronounced and the service was over.” I ended up learning to follow my own church’s liturgy because I looked for the ending, the benediction, and would turn pages saying to myself “Okay, we have this and this and this and then it’s over.”
The first fantasy I read was the Hobbit, closely followed by the Ring trilogy. A book called The Great Pyramid Mystery stands out, and the first sci-fi I can remember and name was a book titled The Happy Planet. This was in the sixth grade, for most of these titles. I still have a copy of The Happy Planet, and reread it a couple of years ago, (I’m 58 now) It was aimed at kids the age I was then, and to me it holds up surprisingly well.
I read so many books as a kid I can’t even tell you which ones came first. I remember getting a set of the Chronicles of Narnia books from my aunt and loving those. I still have and still re-read that set, and I intend to get my nieces a set of their own when they’re old enough.
Phantom Tollbooth was another favorite, I recently downloaded it to my Kindle. Still love it too.
I remember really being into the Little House books as a kid, but I don’t care for them so much now. Not sure why.
Encyclopedia Brown, Homer Price, Henry Huggins, Pippi Longstocking, Hardy Boys. No clue which came first. All were available in our school library, from Scholastic Books or both. I haven’t read any of them since.
I think the first novel I read on my own would be a kid’s book called Clues in the Woods.
It was about three kids, two boys and a girl, who try to solve a mystery about who’s stealing their grandparents’ garbage. Anyway, that’s how it starts. It turns out that there’s a family camping out in the woods pretending to be Indians. The parents are ‘teaching’ their own two kids how Indians lived. How that involved stealing garbage I don’t remember, but I doubt the book would be published today. The big finale was the whole bunch of them eating fish baked in mud.
Strictly meh to me now, but even then I remember feeling a little resentful that kids’ books always seemed to be set on a farm. Kids’ books back then were never set in the city, unless it was about some transplanted farm kid yearning to go back home. It got so tedious that I mostly read MAD magazines when I was young.
Mine was either “Voyage to the Mushroom Planet” or “David and the Phoenix”, sometime during first grade. I recently re-read “David and the Phoenix” and it’s held up well. I’d read “Voyage to the Mushroom Planet” again if I could find it.
I still like The Big Joke Game, but I still like board games, & I’m shallow.
I hope you’re teasing about Here Lies the Body, I used that link cause it had a picture of the cover. You can get a paperback for a penny & $4 shipping.
I still don’t have all the Trick books, but it’s good to have goals.
The first 2 fiction books I ever remember reading were-
Escape to Witch Mountain
Some book about a scientist who was going to go to Venus and some kids came along. There were some creatures that were smalll and glowed and needed to stay together or they would die. Venus was pretty much a water world. Some bad serpent thing (named Ka?) had come to Venus to ‘defile it’ like he did to Earth a long time ago.
I haven’t read either of them as an adult but I imagine I would think the first was ok but the second was junk. At the time I loved em both and what created my love of Science Fiction.
{Would love to know the name of it something like Rendezvous with Venus? Google is no help on this}
The Mad Scientist’s Club by Bertrand R. Brinley. I read it when I was still in the single digits. The concept of kids accomplishing things that adults couldn’t really rocked my world at the time.
Today? The writing isn’t that great, and the tech is somewhat dated, but it is remarkable how well a lot of what they were doing holds up. I still have visions of pranking a lakeside community with a remote-controlled sea monster.
I was in third or fourth grade when I got a copy of that from Scholastic. Loved it then, but when I tried rereading it a few years ago I had to force myself to finish it.
The Scholastic book program was great - I bought a bunch of their books, ordered through the school. The Forgotten Door, The Hound of the Baskervilles, A Wrinkle in Time, and I know there were several others. Just four or five years ago my daughters were bringing Scholastic order forms home from school all the time…
ILL! I do it all the time - for me, the literary equivalent of “comfort food” is going back and rereading books I read when I was a kid. I’ve heard some libraries charge for the service, but ours doesn’t and I can order up to three at a time.
I think I must have been about 11-12. I did very well in school, but had a short attention span. Whenever we had the opportunity to order Scholastic Books in class I went straight for the joke books - they were short and it didn’t matter that they didn’t have any pictures in them. My classmates were all into the “Little House” books, but I didn’t understand how they could enjoy them without pictures!
Anyway, I was about the age of Margaret at the time, and I think I sat in a recliner & read the WHOLE book in one sitting. I must have been there HOURS! But I SO related to the book and characters. And Judy Blume wrote about stuff that I was thinking about but couldn’t say out loud. (Girls concerned about getting their periods! :eek:)
I’ve read it again recently, particularly after seeing a play called, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Karen Carpenter.” HILARIOUS! Anyway, it was more sentimental than anything else. I hear the book has been updated since it was first written. Modernized. But it still takes me back.
To anyone who identified with this book, if you find the play near you, you MUST see it. No matter how small the venue! I saw it in the basement of a Mexican Restaurant where they normally put on drag musicals.
C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower books are the first I can remember finding and devouring on my own. I can still remember buying them off a carousel display stand in Winston-Salem when I was in the 4th grade.
ETA: What do I think of them now? - I re-read them once every 18 months or so. (The same books as a matter of fact.)
Like most of the SDMB, I was an early reader, so it’s hard to narrow down a “First Book/Novel” - I had copies of *Heidi *and Black Beauty, and the local library had the Baum Oz series and I read all of those multiple times.
My first science fiction book was probably Star Circus by Alice Lightner Hopf - I found a copy many years later and re-read it. I recall it being a decent juvie - with some creepy aliens - hmm… maybe I should read it again!
One of my first “grown up” novels was Brittania Mews by Margery Sharp - I’d read her Miss Bianca children’s series and my grandmother had a copy of this novel. It was a bit advanced for me (British class struggles, adultery, etc) but I remember enjoying it - another novel I might have to check out again.
Another favorite childhood book that I have re-read as an adult: The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes. I re-read it back in 2004 as an adult and posted a review the following over on GoodReads - it reads in part “The story was still enjoyable to read as an adult, with some of the little touches (such as Malachi) becoming clearer. Pen and ink illustrations are scattered through my copy (and I think through the library hardback as well) and add to the deliciously spooky atmosphere. Originally published in 1960, the story has aged very little; it’s not nearly as dated as the Ramona series, perhaps because most of the action takes place in the witches’ world.”
Roger Zelazny’s “Nine Princes in Amber.” This was the first book I recall re-reading immediately after finishing it, and I’ve read the original Amber series three or four times over the years and still enjoy it. Corwin waking up in the hospital not knowing who he is or where he is, but certain he’s being kept there, still one of my favorite openings to a book. The series is also why Deirdre is one of my favorite female names.
When I was 4 years old I got Lassie: Adventure In Alaska, because I was sure that was a wooly mammoth on the cover, and I FREAKING loved wooly mammoths. I prolly read that book about 900 times before I was 5 years old.
I still love it, as evidenced by the fact that I still own it forty-mumble years later, but I do think the plot devices are a bit obvious, the subplots are strained and the metaphors don’t dance quite as nimbly as they did for my pre-K self. The narrative structure is solid tho.
ooh, I love Edward Eager but Half Magic and Knight’s Castle are the best.
a lot of the books mentioned (Wrinkle in Time, Hobbit, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows) were read to me.
The earliest ones I remember reading myself are either the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books or Pippi Longstockings. also early on was Ginnie and Geneva and sequels.
