“One had an iron neck. Another could swallow the sea…”
He could hold it in his mouth, not swallow it. And when he was too tired to hold it any longer, he let it go and drowned the boy who was gathering fish off the sea floor.
This is the book I had. The cover still gives me the willies!
Oh yeah, I would’ve pounced on that for sure!
The entire Oz series. There may have been books before that, but these captivated me.
Not including children’s picture books or books that were read to me, I’m almost certain the first novel length book I read all the way through on my own was The Great Airport Mystery, #9 in the Hardy Boys series. I read a whole bunch of other Hardy Boys books after that, but that was the first one.
I remember that.
From Then to Now
A Little Golden Book by J. P. Leventhal
Undermined any literal Bible interpretation tendencies I might have developed right at the start.
Mine was “The Tall Book of Make-Believe,” with its wonderful illustrations. I still own the book, though it’s a little worse for wear after all these years.
Pretty obscure, but you can basically tell the plot from the front cover.
We had it from the library, and I LOVED this book. I read it. And read it. And read it again. And loved it so much that finally, rather than bear the heartache of being unable to read it yet again, my parents photocopied the entire damn thing before they sent it back to the library - which was kind of a big deal in 1974.
Of course after that, I never read it again.
The photocopy was knocking round the house for the rest of my childhood - which is of course how I remember the story in the first place - and for all I know it’s still somewhere in my parents’ house, 46 years and 6 moves later.
I had a paperback when I was maybe 10 or 12 that I think was titled Strange But True. It had short, scary stories that were supposedly true. A guy picked up a hitchhiking girl that was wearing a lavender dress. She asked to be dropped off by a cemetery. When he looked back she had disappeared. He went searching for her and found a tombstone with a lavender dress draped over it. Of course, the tombstone was that of a young girl that had died some years before.
I read that book a million times. I still have it somewhere.
If you want to read more of the story, Seanan McGuire’s Ghost Roads series tells stories from the POV of the hitchhiking ghost. Start with Sparrow Hill Road.
Library hold placed.
I’m convinced that Strange But True is the cause of 68.5% of all tweenager nightmares…
I did not like reading. In large part because anything I could read was boring. Dad reads me Robert Lewis Stevenson, and you expect me to stumble through this garbage baby stuff? Hell no.
My parents bribed me with some sort of prize chart. Part way through, I had a book about mammals. My Big Book About Mammals, which I may be misremembering because searching on that title doesn’t return anything familiar. This was the first book I actually wanted to read. I got out of bed and sat by my night light to read more.
ETA obviously not my first book ever, but the first I remember.
I have a book that includes the lavendar ghost story called Strangely Enough, by C. B. Colby, which I still have. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20749652-strangely-enough
This is the first book I remember reading, though the copy I had was missing its dust jacket. IIRC, it was bound in plain black leatherette. (Must have been procured at a library.)
The illustrations were correspondingly creepy. This is the first thing I saw when I opened the cover. It was enough to give four-year-old me nightmares.
I don’t recall ever hearing of Helen Hoke before today. She apparently wrote a number of such books designed to scare the daylights out of small children. I’ll have to see if there are any at the Toronto Library when the lockdown is over.
Green Eggs and Ham. Or maybe The Cat in the Hat. Not sure which one was first. My mom taught me to read before I went to kindergarten.
Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler. My elementary school had a book nook in the classroom. Kids could check books out. It wasn’t big enough to call a library. I’d guess they had maybe 30 donated books.
I started reading the Hardy Boys about the same time. I think the book nook had a couple. My parents bought me several.
That’s it!