Apparently, boobies.
My 2c on a few books that have been mentioned.
Narnia – The Calormenes are not all bad, but Lewis’s distaste for Islam certainly shows through to me as an adult in a way it did not when I was a child. As someone upthread mentioned, it’s kinda offensive. It’s also lazy writing. Definitely a mark against the series IMHO.
A Wrinkle in Time – Like others, I enjoyed this book very much when I was a kid. I was disappointed when I reread it a few years ago (I have not seen the movie)–there’s this whole “We are so smart and so persecuted and misunderstood because we are so smart” theme that rubs me the wrong way. I still liked the scene with IT at the end in which we do learn that there is something greater than intelligence, so that helps make up for it. The second in the series I didn’t like as a boy, and it didn’t do anything at all for me when I tried rereading it a couple of years ago. Not a good book, then or now.
–I did like Phantom Tollbooth when I read it a few years back. Could’ve wished for more active female roles–there’s Rhyme and Reason, who appear only at the end, and not a whole hell of a lot else–but the book remained fresh and interesting to me at any rate.
–I thought Animal Farm held up extremely well.
I was never much for science fiction or fantasy, so can’t speak to Heinlein, Clarke, etc.
Two books that haven’t been mentioned that I would NOT recommend rereading, if indeed you read them as a child: Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince and The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. Especially the first, which struck me as having half the wisdom of your typical Hallmark card and boring besides. Loved them both way back when but when I reread them as an adult I couldn’t see why.
When I was in middle school, I shared my copy of Forever with my friend. My mom received an angry phone call from my friends mom and I was accused of giving “filth” to her innocent daughter. It was not the only time my mom received such phone calls. She also got one for Clan of the Cave Bear, among others.
Not sure if I have any interest in rereading “Clan of the Cave Bear”, but I have fond memories of the Judy Blume books I read in elementary/middle/high school.
Books worth revisiting include The Once and Future King by T.H.White (and it is good to read this with the modern autobiography H is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald, which references White’s falconry attempts). The Earthsea trilogy has two later additions which are in a more adult vein and well worth reading. Most things by LeGuin are well worth reading, particularly The Left Hand of Darkness, a masterpiece.
Bambi has just been newly translated (the common English translation is from 1928, by Whittaker Chambers of all people). Even read in the old translation, it is clear to me as an adult that it was not meant to be a children’s book at all, but an allegory for adults, both a meditation on being a member of an oppressed minority (he was an assimilated Jew in Austria), and on the relationship between humans and wild animals. The furious argument between the hunting dog and the fox which he has trapped is memorable. It isn’t just Bambi’s mother who dies, there is a lot of tragedy and sadness in it.
It was Disney who made it into a dumb happy forest full of baby animals. As a child who was immersed in 19th and early 20th century literature like Wind in the Willows, and much Kipling, Milne, and Robert Louis Stevenson, I found the Disney versions to be loathesome, saccharine cheapenings of books of depth and subtlety. It took about forty years before I could bring myself to watch anything by Disney.
I remember Maya being surprisingly (and realistically) violent, with speaking characters having their heads bitten off, mass bee/hornet combat and so on.
Those are his two best novels, IMHO, although CoL&D is a lot weirder and more macabre than you remember.
Where Zelazny really shines, though, is in his short stories.
Wrong attic, wrong light.
I suspect it’s in there because of a bare butt or two. Silverstein thought butts were funny and for some reason thought kids would agree.
Huh. The fifth graders in our school district all read Phantom Tollbooth and study it as part of a multi-week unit on figurative speech. It is…not well loved.
In part that’s because the curriculum hammers the book into the ground. But in part, I just don’t know how well it holds up. The humor in it which may have seemed sly and subversive in the 1960s comes across to modern kids as hopelessly hokey and cornball. The almost complete lack of female characters, especially ones with agency, is rough–as is the absence of characters of color. Its moral lessons have all the subtlety of a Mack truck.
I’ve tried to get our schools to transition to a modern book with figurative language, such as the phenomenal Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, but no luck so far.
As for some others:
Watership Down is one of my all-time favorites. El Ahrairah is pretty much up there with Peter Pan in terms of modern deities; and General Woundwort could frankly kick Darth Vader’s ass; and Fiver’s weirdo prophetic fits are so, so good. I love this book. It’s certainly flawed: the female rabbits barely have names, much less agency, and apparently Richard Adams had to vastly misrepresent actual rabbit behavior in order to impose his sexist ideas on their society. But if you can roll your eyes at that foolishness and then keep reading, it’s so good.
A Wizard of Earthsea certainly reads dated; but it also really holds up. Like Watership Down and A Wind in the Willows and The Book of Three, it makes a great read-aloud for the right kids.
Speaking of: The Book of Three and its sequels are quite good. Again, there are regrettable gender stereotypes; but Eilonwy certainly has agency by the bucketful.
Heinlein? I’m definitely not a fan. There’s really nothing he does that isn’t being done better and more interestingly by more modern authors, in my opinion, and the gross baggage he drags along just isn’t worth it. Others obviously disagree, but that’s my take.
Disagree. There’s the platonic ideal of an example of the adjective based on the author’s name becoming misunderstood, turned into the opposite even. Because there is nothing platonic in the sense the word is used and understood today about Plato’s politics and society in Republic. I believe Rome was much closer to our modern western society than Athens, but many people seem to disagree and value Athens (or ancient Greece in general) as more noble, pure or whatever. I strongly disagree with them in turn.
Fully agree on both counts.
Agree too. I did not think it was a great literary masterpiece, though it was readable, as a historic document it is more than interesting. But it did not feel like a children’s book at all to me. That is more or less what I meant when I called it an earnest book. Perhaps I should have added that I have now read the book, but still have never seen the movie. Don’t think I ever will. The only Disney movie that I remember seeing as a boy was Fantasia, and there I only liked the scene with the sorcerer’s apprentice. The rest was just boring to little me.
That is true too. But many fairy tales are horribly violent. Now I wonder why nobody has mentioned the Grimm Brother’s Tales yet: Is it more a German thing, not so much in the USA? Those are violent and cruel! I re-read them about 20 years ago, when I got hold of a beautiful new edition (with pictures, yes). I did not know them all and they were readable. Full of anachronisms, of course, but, like Bambi, an interesting document of times long past.
Way to ruin what I thought was a mildly clever play on words, thanks a lot 
*
* The emoji is supposed to be ‘pouting man’, but I don’t see it
Most folktales are grisly. It is only with the advent of the modern idea of childhood as a protected and entirely different than adulthood period of life that the grim and even terrifying moral fables were reshaped to be happy harmless little jollities. The stories were originally for everyone, not just children.
There is a series of charming picture books featuring tomten, Scandanavian rural gnomes who watch over farms. But if you dig a little, it seems that tomten were originally the eternal ghosts of the original owners of farms, who judge the current inhabitants and reward or punish as befits their care of the farm and its animals and plants. Not particularly cuddly in fact.
What did you expect, this is the Dope! 
And yes, it was a clever play on words, granted, but incorrect. I could not avoid setting this record humorlessly right.
Everyone in America knows of them, and knows the basic plots of several, but that’s a result of them being subject to countless adaptations and re-tellings. The originals themselves are hard to come by, this side of the pond.
Then there’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which is a whole other story.
Back in the 1970s I was quite fond of Farnham’s Freehold and Time Enough for Love, but I cannot guess how they have held up.
I still have and sometimes read Heidi, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Black Beauty, Wind in the Willows, Kim, Jungle Book.
I read the Narnia books as a tween, and enjoyed them (especially when I realized what they were really about - it was the first time, I think, that I ever noticed a literary technique in a work of literature). But as I got older, I came more to agree with J.R.R. Tolkien, and dislike allegory. Lewis, especially, was heavy-handed. I much prefered his “Space” trilogy.
When I read Brave New World, after having read 1984, I thought that Huxley’s vision was more likely to come to pass. Since the world government drugs the populace into complaceny with sex, rampant consumerism, and, well, drugs (soma). I thought that pleasure would sell better than misery, which is what Big Brother offers.
Nowadays, I’m not so sure. Right-wing rhetoric anymore sounds an awful lot like the Two Minute Hate and there do seem to be a large number of people for whom the idea of a boot in the face
is extremely appealing; so long, of course, as they’re wearing the boot.
Back in the mid-90s, the Chicago Reader ran an issue about classic childrens’ literature. One of the essays was by a young father, who noticed something when he was reading The Wind in the Willows to his children. He noted that the novel was a love letter and evocation to the English countryside, and to the traditional English class structure - Mole is a solidly middle-class gentleman, Rat more of the hearty yeoman archetype, Badger the typical English eccentric, Toad the spoiled immature aristocrat. The lower classes are there, too - the hedgehogs that Badger shelters when they get lost in the wood, the carolers who come to serenade Mole at Christmas.And the novel lovingly evokes the English countryside; the farms, the rivers, the fields, the roads. But where, this father thought, was the city? He concluded that Grahame wrote the city as the Wild Wood, a dim, dangerous, scary place, home of the stoats and weasels - the ungrateful, dangerous lower orders who break through and seize Toad Hall, the ones who don’t know their places and have to be routed and beaten by the right-thinking folk of the country. After which the stoats and weasels are quiet and peaceful and never give the River Bankers any trouble again.
I still love the quiet charm of the language, but now I can’t help noticing the classist attitudes that underlie it.
Good lord. I’ve never encountered anyone who remembers Alvin Fernald, Superweasel! I especially loved the second one, which explained cryptography and how to use some basic codes. Very cool when I was eleven
My introduction to the topic too. 
According to Wikipedia, Hicks kept writing them until 2009! Sadly, he died in 2010.
- The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald – 1960 (illustrated by Charles Geer)
- Alvin’s Secret Code – 1963
- Alvin Fernald, Foreign Trader – 1966
- Alvin Fernald, Mayor for a Day – 1970
- Alvin Fernald, Superweasel – 1974
- Alvin’s Swap Shop – 1976
- Alvin Fernald, TV Anchorman – 1980
- The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald – 1981
- Alvin Fernald, Master of a Thousand Disguises – 1986
- Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure – 2009
I’m glad you said this, because as I mentioned upthread I tried reading it as an adult and found it completely dull and didn’t finish it. I was worried with all the people praising it that there was something wrong with me!
Now I remember what surprised me about Maya: it was almost not anthropomorphic at all. Every species of insect that came up in the story behaved like that species should. They talked in human language, of course, that was the inevitable breaking of the fourth wall, but they were not human. That was good.
And if you have seen the cartoons: in the book there is no Willy.
Really badly and meh. Parts are classic, parts are trash.