Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
I’m thinking that for tonight’s Medium Cool, it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane… and talk about some of the first “chapter books” we read during our formative years. At my house, with 3 sisters as the only kids, we read Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Vicki Barr, and Cherry Ames.
I still remember Trixie Belden giving her chores “a lick and a promise” before she could go out on her adventures, and I have no doubt that my love of mysteries has a lot to do with Nancy Drew. Girls having adventures – Nancy investigating her mysteries, Vicki Barr was a flight stewardess, Cherry Ames was a nurse; those were our role models. We had all the books in each series, and I still remember when my mom made us donate our whole Nancy Drew series to the library as we got older.
With all girls in my family, I’m not too much up on the “boy” books other than The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown. I’m sure there were more, right?
Did any of you cross the gender lines with any of the adventure books you read? Gendered books: good or bad?
What were you reading when you were pretty little? Did the early books have an influence on the person you became?
If you had kids, what did your kids read at this stage? Any thoughts to share on that?
What about these days? Are there still “girl books” and “boys books”? Are there new adventure series that (hopefully) aren’t so clearly delineated by gender stereotypes? Do the old books hold up well at all, at least in capturing a moment in time? Or do they seem awful now?
Programming reminder: Since so many of us seem to have been influenced by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, let’s plan to talk about the book on Feb 12. That gives us about a month, in case anyone wants to re-read the book, read it for the first time, or listen to the audio version. For audio book peeps, The Autobiography of Malcom X is available on YouTube for free. The narrator seems good, too, which is always important to me!
Okay, here we go.
Baud
No love for The Three Investigators?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I remember reading the same books you and your sisters read. I also read Noel Streetfield’s “shoe” books: Ballet Shoes, Circus Shoes, etc.
I also read the Black Stallion series, which has a boy central character. Generally, I think girls will read books with boy characters but boys sometimes hesitate to read books with girl characters.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I don’t know that one. Can you say more?
edit: Okay, I googled, and now I’m mad that I didn’t know about those books
edit 2: Holy cow, 43 books in The Three Investigators series. That would have been awesome because we were 3 sisters.
AliceBlue
I was a Nancy Drew addict. I would be on a shopping trip with my mom, she would buy the latest Nancy Drew for me, and I would be halfway through it by the time we got home. I still have the books.
SiubhanDuinne
Loved Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames, but my favorite “nurse” series were the Sue Barton books (Helen Dore Boylston).
Others I loved, and read over and over again, included the “Maida” series by Inez Haynes Irwin (Maida’s Little Shop, Maida’s Little House, Maida’s Little School, etc.); the “Patty Fairfield” series (Carolyn Wells); and the stories about a different Patty, by Jean Webster (Just Patty, and When Patty Went to College). ETA: I own these books and revisit them periodically. Comfort food for the brain.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I had never heard of the Shoes series.
So the shoes must have had adventures? Were the books good? Same characters in all the books?
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Yes, I adored Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. It’s another one I read again every few years as an adult.
FelonyGovt
I read all the Bobbsey Twins books. I don’t remember much about them, other than that they were boy and girl twins who were kid detectives.
I also remember reading children’s books by Phyllis A. Whitney. I wrote to her, asking why she didn’t repeat characters, and actually got a response! Unfortunately her letter is lost to the mists of time, along with my Beatles memorabilia.
Mike in Oly
I ignored the gender norms of my day and read all the Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew. I think The Boxcar Children predated them. I then moved on to Beverly Cleary’s books, then on to Judy Blume, before finding sci-fi and fantasy in my early teens. Nancy Drew was always my favorite tho.
WaterGirl
@AliceBlue: We were so sad when our mom made us donate the books. We would sometimes go visit the books at the library. Not that we were reading them anymore, but somehow we missed them.
eclare
I loved Nancy Drew books, but my favorite investigator books were Encyclopedia Brown.
The childhood book that probably had the biggest impact was Charlotte’s Web. It was the first book that I read that was sad, I bawled for hours.
Paulb
The Bobbsey Twins was a similar series, written by several authors, concluding in 1979, having reached a total of 72 books.
I read some of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries and found them entertaining, but didn’t go out of my way to seek them out. Where I crossed the gender line is that I enjoyed reading the Anne of Green Gable series and books by Louisa May Alcott. Other than Little Women, I think Anne holds up a bit better.
Hitchhiker
The Bobbsey Twins were all I had until I discovered libraries when I was about 11 yrs old. My family (I was one of 8 kids) didn’t really do books, and I have no idea how or why the Twins books appeared.
What I did have was weekly newsmagazines. I read about Marilyn Monroe’s death in Life when I was ten. Also vividly remember seeing images of the young Kennedy children under Jack’s desk, and a graphic story about the Nazi camps when I was just old enough to read.
I made up for it with my own kids! They grew out of childhood with Harry Potter, one book at a time, in something similar to the way I grew through adolescence with the Beatles, one album at a time.
West of the Rockies
I loved The Hardy Boys (my name is Frank, so he was my favorite). Then I started on Nancy Drew stories. The Secret of Red Gate Farm (with a scary cult as I recall) was my favorite ND.
I’ve read a few Hardy Boy books recently. They are highly formulaic and have no character development. Aunt Gertrude is mostly a shrew. But they were great YA books for a young kid.
Any Tom Swift fans here? He’s a bit insufferable with his excellent-at-everything character. Good books for kids though…
Kathleen
I read and reread Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, Vickie Barr. There was also a series of biographies which were orange books illustrated with silhouettes and titles that featured the name of the person and descriptive tag line such as “Amelia Earhart, Kansas Girl”. I devoured those bios which included Juliette Lowe, Jane Adam’s Louisa Mae Alcott, Susan B Anthony to name a few. My mom also enrolled me in a book club that published series of books about Presidents. I have so many fond memories of reading when I was a child.
eclare
@SiubhanDuinne: I reread James and the Giant Peach. Auntie Spiker and Sponge!
SiubhanDuinne
Does anyone else remember “Nancy and Plum” by Betty MacDonald?
WaterGirl
@FelonyGovt: We read the Bobbsey Twins books, too, but I had forgotten all about them.
H.E.Wolf
I owe one of the Trixie Belden books a debt of gratitude for teaching me how to [redacted] with the aid of carbon paper, which has come in handy in a couple of instances.
IYKYK. :)
West of the Rockies
I used to love reading these books in a hidden spot with a snack–a chunk of string cheese or a box of Boston Baked Beans. I could make such fare last for an hour.
Kristine
I read all the Trixie Belden books that the Port Charlotte library had. I crossed over to adventures of two brothers who traveled with their dad. I don’t remember the boys’ names, but one story involved the Abominable Snowman, while one set in the Congo included saving an injured gorilla. I started reading adult SF at 12-13, Asimov’s robot stories.
I loved the Marguerite Henry Lipizzan book about the boy who became a riding master.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Encyclopedia Brown. All the Judy Blume books.
FelonyGovt
@Paulb: Well, if the Bobbsey Twins books continued through 1979, I guess I didn’t really read “all” of them. 😀
SiubhanDuinne
@Hitchhiker:
Nan and Bert! Flossie and Freddie!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: No, books took place in different settings. In “Circus Shoes,” the kids were orphaned and went to live with their uncle who worked in a circus. In “Ballet Shoes,” the three girls (Pauline, Pertrovia, and Posy), took ballet classes. As I recall, Posy became a professional dancer. Same with the rest of the series: tennis, theater, etc.
WaterGirl
@Mike in Oly: What were The Boxcar Children books about?
The Beverly Cleary books look fun. I think I want to read the first five.
Penty
My grandfather had a bunch of the old Tom Swift books.
Kathleen
@Paulb: I found an Ann of Green Gables book at a used bookstore which was autographed by the author. I lived those books. I also loved and reread Little Women. My mom bought me a beautifully illustrated book which I still have 60 plus years later.
eclare
@WaterGirl: You never read the Ramona books? They were great.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mike in Oly: Boxcar Children books are still around. A friend of mine writes some of them. They’re work for hire that then gets published under the same pen name.
PaulB
Not exactly episodic, but my parents had a large collection of “Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.” I went through every volume at a young age. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I realized what “condensed” meant, at which point I had to go look for the full versions so that I could see what I had missed.
West of the Rockies
Anyone remember The Tuckers series by Jo Mendel?
billcinsd
While I read Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the one’s I most remember reading as a youngster were Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie
WaterGirl
@Mike in Oly: OT, but all my cactuses are in full bloom again. I wish yours hadn’t frozen in transit.
eclare
@West of the Rockies: A box of baked beans?
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: I was so mad/sad when they created the Nancy Drew TV series a couple of years ago, and it was too creepy for me to watch.
eclare
@PaulB: My parents did too! Like you, I then found out what condensed meant.
Wag
@West of the Rockies: Fellow Swiftie here. Stared my love of sci-fi, then graduated to Asimov and Heinlein, then Herbert. And of course Star Trek and Star Wars. Looking back it is hard to reconcile the obvious racism and sexism present in the Swift books with the open an accepting universe of Roddenberry, but America evolved, and so did those of us with a heart. Tom Swift was a product of his time, as was Spock.
patrick II
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I also read The Black Stallion series. I thought they did a great job with the move too. Mickey Rooney made a great old horse trainer.
WV Blondie
Oh, my! What memories this brings back. Everyone’s mentioned most of my favorites. Did anyone else ever read Thornton W. Burgess’ series of books, “Mother West Wind and Her Children?”
They were like folk stories about woodland animals – why the bluejay has such a harsh cry is one I still remember.
WaterGirl
@H.E.Wolf: I don’t know. :-(
Memory Pallas
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I especially liked the Shoes book (maybe Dancing Shoes?) where Vera has no aptitude for Music Hall-style hoofing, but is discovered and cast in a movie and becomes a child star.
WaterGirl
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I have never read a Judy Blume book. What are they about?
WV Blondie
@eclare: It’s a kind of candy. I had them when I was pretty young and we lived in Massachusetts.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Interesting! Thank you for that.
SiubhanDuinne
I think my all-time favourite series, though, is the series of books about the Melendy family, by Elizabeth Enright: The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two. Just a terrific, interesting group of kids, and wonderfully written. They’re set during the 1940s and early ‘50s, but hold up really well.
hells littlest angel
The Hardy Boys books are so old that the first three have this very month entered the public domain. (This includes only the original editions, with all their racism and other problems, not the revised ones.)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Memory Pallas: I think Ballet Shoes was the original, and then the rest came along. We got all our books from the library, and they had a bunch of them.
WaterGirl
@Kathleen: Little Women made a lasting impression on me.
sab
I loved the Dana girls ( Jean and Louise) and I liked the Hardy boys. I didn’t much like Nancy Drew, and later when I found out that Carolyn Keene was actually a penname for a man I figured that my problem was that she didn’t actually seem relatable as a girl. She was trying too hard so she was too old and ‘girlish’ for her age.p, more like a particularly obnoxious twenty something than a teenager.
I didn’t know the Shoe books were a series. I loved Ballet Shoes.
JPL
@AliceBlue: How wonderful that you still have all the books. I would walk to the library to get my Nancy Drew fix.
Both of my sons loved Encyclopedia Brown.
WaterGirl
@eclare: What’s a Ramona book?
Frankensteinbeck
I read the Miss Bianca books by Margery Sharp. They don’t much resemble the movies, since in the books Bianca’s an incompetent but extremely goodhearted aristocrat, and Bernard is a brave, humble, burly and handsome working class mouse whose coarse whiskers make Bianca go weak in the knees.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Are the boxcar books about orphans who ride around on trains?
eclare
@WaterGirl: OMG you have never read Judy Blume? Her books were solace for every awkward middle-schooler. I remember her book Forever, with its depiction of sex, passed around all of us in 8th grade.
Srsly, read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. So good.
WV Blondie
I also remember a series about a Jewish family in New York, set maybe in the ’50s? With a thoroughly WASP upbringing, that was how I first learned about Judaism.
schrodingers_cat
I must have read all the books in the Nancy Drew series. I did read some Hardy boys books but I didn’t enjoy them as much as Nancy Drew.
Before that it was Enid Blyton books, The Famous Five, The Adventurous Four, The Naughtiest Girl series.
Loved them all.
Amar Chitra Katha comic books {Immortal Picture Tales) which covered Indian history and mythology
Also Sane (Sa ne’) guruji’s books in Marathi Shyamchi Aai (Shyam’s mom) , Teen Mule’ (Three children) and Sati
eclare
@WV Blondie: Ah…thanks! I was trying to picture a kid eating cold baked beans out of a box.
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: I have never heard of The Tucker books. What were those about? They look pretty serious.
WaterGirl
@eclare: You have had the “baked beans” candy, right? Peanuts with a candy shell around them.
SiubhanDuinne
Also remember, with great affection, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, by George MacDonald. I also read and enjoyed his At the Back of the North Wind, but it never grabbed me in quite the same way the two fantasies about the Princess did.
schrodingers_cat
@billcinsd: Same here!
Starfish
@WaterGirl: Ramona was one of Beverly Cleary’s main characters. There were several books about Ramona and her sister Beezus. There was also Henry Huggins and all the Mouse and the Motorcycle books.
I was a completionist when it came to the series. I kept notebooks of which ones I had read. I read most of Beverly Cleary. I read a lot of Nancy Drew. Did her friend Bess need to lose those five pounds all the time, or did she have an eating disorder? What was going on there. I read some Hardy Boys.
I also read The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins, and Sweet Valley High.
eclare
@WaterGirl: Nope! Never heard of them. Like a Jordan almond but with a peanut?
SiubhanDuinne
@WV Blondie:
Maybe the All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor? Five little stairstep Jewish girls living in a NYC tenement. They were wonderful stories.
ETA: But they were set in the early 20th century, not the ‘50s, so I’m probably guessing wrong.
WaterGirl
@WV Blondie: I have never heard of the Mother West Wind and Her Children books.
But the name Thornton Burgess is so familiar to me. I wonder why.
Starfish
@eclare: My mom really wanted me to read “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” so I very much never wanted to read it. After reading it, I need to know, “Why did maxipads have belts?”
Shana
@eclare: I loved reading the Ramona stories with my daughters – they came out too late for my childhood. I reread them in order a few years ago and marveled anew at Cleary’s ability to distill childhood the way she did. I loved when Ramona went down to the basement and took one bite out of all the apples stored for the winter because the first bite of an apple is always the best. And then her mom had to make tons of applesauce with the partially eaten apples.
I loved the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. They’re the childhood and early adulthood of the author, somewhat fictionalized starting at age 5 in very early 20th century Mankato MN – renamed Deep Valley in the books. Truly charming. There’s even a Betsy-Tacy Society based in Mankato and they’ve bought “Betsy’s” and “Tacy’s” houses.
WaterGirl
@WV Blondie: For some reason, it was fun to shake that particular box of candy.
PaulB
All-of-a-Kind Family, perhaps? That’s one I remember fondly.
Two other series I enjoyed were the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and the Wrinkle In Time series.
I got started in science fiction with the YA books by Robert Heinlein, and in fantasy with the Chronicles of Prydain, in addition to the Wrinkle in Time.
JPL
Judy Blume’s book Are you there God? It’s me Margaret has been adapted for the big screen. I have a feeling that as many adults will see the film, as children.
J
interesting questions! As a boy, my preference was unsurprisingly for boys’ adventure series, the Hardy boys and Tom Swift, with phases in which I read in the sub-genres of sports car stories & baseball stories. But as an addict to genre fiction, I was only too happy to read Nancy Drew books when no Hardy boys were available. The books I most treasured and which I still dip into, however, usually involved boys and girls pulling together: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons stories, Noel Streatfeild (esp, The Growing Summer, US title Magic Summer), Elizabeth Enright and the like. The Mysterious Benedict Society books, which my nephew and niece turned me onto, are a more resent example.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I was into fantasy back then. My first was The Hobbit, Followed by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Shortly thereafter followed by (and I can’t remember which came first) the LOTR and The Chronicles of Narnia. After that it was the Earthsea Trilogy and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series. Also The Dark Is Rising series.
Also The Once And Future King, which is great and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Singer series. Also some adaptation of the Robin Hood legend and Steinbeck’s Arthurian legends, which I love Steinbeck but The Once And Future King was the better telling by far.
I was not into mysteries back then so never read Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys. The one non-fantasy series I recall reading was The Great Brain books.
WaterGirl
@sab: I liked the Dana girls, too, but i had totally forgotten about them! But I see that they are also by Carolyn Keene, who wrote the Nancy Drew books.
eclare
@Shana: I read Betsey, Tacy, and Tib books! Loved them, my mother introduced me to them.
I also loved the Little House books. Not sure how those hold up.
Memory Pallas
For me,all of the Cleary books, Encyclopedia Browns (and did anyone else love Homer Price?) were purchased from Scholastic through my elementary school. The classics came from the library. In third grade I was exposed to fantasy – Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles – and Science Fiction – John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy – and have spent my life looking for other books that grabbed me like those did.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: I’ve never read one, so I don’t know
Shana
@WV Blondie: All of a Kind Family – the kids were all girls, set in the early 20th century lower east side of NYC. As a little jewish girl where so many of the books were so Christian it was a pleasant change to find them.
WaterGirl
@Frankensteinbeck: How did I miss the Miss Bianca series? They seem like they would be interesting.
prostratedragon
I blazed a trail through the Thomas Hughes room at the main CPL for my early “chapter” reading. The ones that have stayed with me most were the Regional Series books by Lois Lenski(*), and a couple from Marguerite De Angeli(**); I also read Marguerite Henry’s book about the Godolphin Arabian horse, leading me to think of “Marguerite” as a good author’s name. Like others, I also read newspapers and magazines early on while tackling longer material. I terrified my mother once by asking her questions about the school fire I was reading about in the paper. I think my folks had a discussion that night that resulted in not hiding things like daily news from me. A side note along those lines: for that time, the folks were sort of helicopterish, but there were things they did with us that could lose parents custody today — like letting me ride the CTA downtown to the main library after school when I was about 10 or 11.
(*) Among others Flood Friday, Bayou Suzette, Strawberry Girl, and Judy’s Journey.
(**) Bright April, The Door in the Wall, Thee, Hannah!
Frankensteinbeck
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Jebus. Insert the Miss Bianca books in there, and that’s almost exactly the list I started reading with, in that order.
West of the Rockies
@eclare:
Candy-covered peanuts. A nickel a box back in the day.
davecb
My aunt sent me “The Boy’s Own Annuals” from Britain, which were understandably boy-centric, but I also read Nancy Drew detective stories and one with a boy- and girl-twin detectives
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: I too liked Dana girls but I didn’t read as many of them as Nancy Drews. They weren’t that many in school’s library.
WaterGirl
@eclare: Never. I will try to pick that one up.
jackmac
I read the Hardy Boys in my long ago youth (1960s) and they must have contributed something to my lifelong love of reading. But I’ve racked my brain to recall exactly what I may have liked. The only impressions I come up with is how dated and predictable they were.
But I can’t be too harsh. I can probably trace today’s love of detective and mystery stories back to the Hardy Boys. In fact, a couple of Sara Paretsky’s books are currently on my nightstand and I’m looking foward to cracking them open. The late Sue Grafton was also a favorite. Sadly, her Kinsey Milhone ‘alphabet’ series never made it to ‘Z.’
Amir Khalid
I read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series all the way to the end, which was Jo’s Boys. Enid Blyton’s massive oeuvre had a few book series that were set in girls’ boarding schools, and tracked a particular class as it advanced through the years. She also wrote a kid detective series, The Five Find Outers.
PaulB
@Memory Pallas: “We will follow Homer Price. He can help us, ain’t that nice!”
I just remembered that I loved the Freddy the Pig series and read most of the 26 books in that series.
eclare
@JPL: Yes, I will see that movie.
WaterGirl
@WV Blondie: I learned about Judaism from the Chaim Potok books, which I loved. But that was much later.
schrodingers_cat
I didn’t get the racism in Blyton’s books when I was child but didn’t much like Kipling’s orientalism in the Jungle Book even as a child.
West of the Rockies
@Wag:
Yeah, a lot of stuff in these book series doesn’t fly today: casual racism, fat-shaming, etc.
HumboldtBlue
@eclare:
Yeah they were.
I read most of the Hardy Boys and prolly a dozen Nancy Drew books. Our house was filled with books and reading material. I think my parents subscribed to a dozen magazines as well. Life, Time, USNWR, Popular Mechanics, Natl Geo, Commonweal…
Oh, and all the Little House on the Prairie books.
When I was 12 or so, my older sister gifted me the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes, and I will still read those today. I was also given some Kipling, and I can’t recall the titles, but the one that followed the boys from school to overseas postings was damn good.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: That’s Naughtiest Girl series, they were fun. I found the Little Women and Good Wives kinda boring as child. When I reread them in my twenties I liked them better.
Frankensteinbeck
@WaterGirl:
As British mid-20th-century children’s books by a writer who specialized in how British culture at the time was so destructively stupid about sex and social class, I don’t think even her mouse books got much traction in America. Almost nobody goes and reads the original books after seeing a Disney movie. How many people have read the fever dream that is Pinocchio, or the psychotic nightmare that is Peter Pan?
eclare
@prostratedragon: My parents let me take the bus to the downtown library when I was about your age! I felt so grown up.
schrodingers_cat
I was an avid reader in two languages English and Marathi. Somehow Hindi always gave me a headache.
Feathers
I went to early elementary in Ireland, so Enid Blyton was my gateway drug. Famous Five, Secret Seven, the Adventure books. When I came back to the States I read Nancy Drew, but never was into the Hardy Boys. Loved horses, so all the Black Stallion books, Black Beauty, and the Marguerite Henry books Misty of Chincoteague and beyond. When I was in Ireland, there was a horse protagonist book I loved, Moon Filly. Upset as an adult when I learned that it was part of the Silver Brumby books, a long running Australian series.
I also got reading books of an older generation – Booth Tarkington is someone I remember reading my way through and enjoying. Got reading Agatha Christie when I started babysitting. I’d leave bookmarks in the books at the end of the evening and come back to them next job.
It’s amazing how strong the pull of those books is. My mother gave a shopping bag of those books, which I had brought back from Ireland and kept good care of, to one of my younger cousins, over my objections. I never saw them again. Asked my cousin about them later, They were OK was his answer. Grrr. Still hurts four decades later. Parents, don’t to this. I have maybe five of them left.
Did bond with Kate from Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge over the fact that they were her entry into mystery reading as well.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Frankensteinbeck: I forgot about A Wrinkle in Time…that was in there somewhere too but the Miss Bianca ones I’m not familiar with.
eclare
@jackmac: I also loved the Kinsey Milhone books. It is so sad that Sue Grafton did not get to write “Z”.
prostratedragon
@Shana: I read a couple of the Betsy and Tacy books. They, or at least some, were illustrated by Lois Lenski.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Yes, the Ribsy book in the image I posted up thread looks fun, and all the mouse and motorcycle ones.
West of the Rockies
@WaterGirl:
The Tucker books featured a big family with multi-themed domestic challenges and such: planning and taking a vacation, moving to a new house, etc. It wasn’t exactly a mystery series, but they were kind of sweet (orvso I thought at eight).
Old Dan and Little Ann
@WaterGirl: Fun,silly stories with a bunch mixed in involving coming of age topics. My mom had me read “Are you there God, it’s me Margaret” because I had 2 older sisters. The problem was I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and it all went over my head. It’s about periods.
PaulB
I can’t believe I forgot about Edgar Rice Burroughs. I devoured his Tarzan and Barsoom series.
Starfish
Though my son read some of the
old people seriesbooks his parents read like The Boxcar Children, the things he liked when he was the youngest included The 13 Story Treehouse series after the The Day My Butt Went Psycho series. That was a charming phase in elementary school when people asked me “So what is your child reading,” and I said “Zombie Butts from Uranus.”Right now, he is older and wiser and tearing through Neal Schusterman books.
WaterGirl
@eclare: Different kind of candy shell. The candy coating was reddish brown, and not as hard or as thick as the coating on a jordan almond.
VenusFT
@WaterGirl: It’s a series that starts with the children running away after their parents die and living in an abandoned boxcar
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl:
Now I am remembering a book on our bookshelf when I was a kid that was clearly an old book in a pale greenish color with his name on it. Title was something something by Thornton Burgess.
edit: It’s slowly taking shape.. something something World of Thornton Burgess.
Shana
@eclare: My husband started reading the Little House books with the girls but didn’t get very far. I think he found them pretty un-PC in the attitude toward Native Americans and tried to play down the books so they didn’t finish them.
James E Powell
I don’t remember a lot of titles from my earliest, post-Dr Seuss reading, but I read all the time. I vaguely remember a book or maybe books with a kid who lived on Walnut St & called it Tunlaw.
My first reading obsession started after I saw the Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty. I read the trilogy, then went for fiction & non-fiction about the age of sail. In particular, I loved the Horatio Hornblower series. Two Years Before the Mast. I read Typee & Omoo, but did not get through Moby Dick until 50s.
Read every baseball biography I could get my hands on. They were all hagiography. I read a series of football novels by Tex Maule (what a name!) where each book was named for a position: The Quarterback, The Running Back, etc. They were always on Los Angeles Rams.
An early influential book was Off My Chest, a memoir by Jim Brown. It was my first clue that all was not well between white & black people.
Feathers
@Frankensteinbeck: I read all of the Rescuers books. As well as The Borrowers series. They were so much better than any of the film adaptations, even the Studio Ghibli one.
Also just remembered The Egypt Game, which was a big hit among my friends and sparked a period of us all getting interested in ancient Egypt.
piratedan
while I started with the Hardy Boys, my parents and grandparents never crossed over and provided the other gender equivalent. I enjoyed the Encyclopedia Brown books and thanks to scholastic, I started getting able to make my own choices which led to the Wrinkle in Time series and then I was a frequent visitor to the library trying a bit of everything.
While I was the primary reader in the family at bedtime, the boys were introduced to the heroes of Redwall, Harry Potter and the Akiko series by Mark Crilley; as well as, the Piers Anthony Xanth books….
Frankensteinbeck
@Feathers:
I don’t remember them well now, but at the time I loved the Borrowers books. I read those and the Littles. I think I read The Egypt Game, but it’s only ringing a faint bell.
zhena gogolia
Lots of memories in this thread. I loved Trixie Belden. I like to read children’s books now to see if they hold up. Witch of Blackbird Pond is great. Another one I loved was The Secret Language. I read it recently and thought, “this is about a lesbian relationship.” Then I looked up the author and I think I’m right. I missed that undercurrent when I was a kid.
JPL
@eclare: I loved that she decided not to move with the ages but kept using her index cards. Like you I wish she had been able to finish.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
A truly amazing endeavor that made Hindu mythology and Indian history accessible to me growing up in the U.S.
My brother got quite a few for my niece and nephew, when they were younger.
***************
As far as chapter books go, the one that sticks out to me is Lloyd Alexander’s “The Book of Three”. My third grade teacher had us read it. It was the first long chapter book I remember reading.
In fifth grade, I read the entire series. The last in the series felt like it dragged a bit in the middle, so I peaked ahead to the end and read the last couple of paragraphs. I wondered how the ending was even possible. Got me to stick with reading the entire book, which picked up pace and kept me captivated until the end.
JPL
@WaterGirl: Loved Jordan Almonds in the day, but now I would probably just chip a filling.
WaterGirl
@jackmac:
I used to read everything by Sara Paretsky and also Sue Grafton, and then somehow I stopped.
This is the first I have heard of her death, and now of course I am crying. I see that she made it to ‘Y’.
Yutsano
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
EDIT: There was Encyclopedia Brown and Bobbsey Twins in the past but for certain the very first YA book was the Frizz.
jackmac
@prostratedragon: My wife loved the Betsy-Tacy books and once made a pilgrimage to Mankato, Minn., the hometown of author Maud Hart Lovelace and check out the inspirations for some of the books.
@prostratedragon:
eclare
@Shana: Yeah, that’s what I wonder about, the treatment of Native Americans and worship of “manifest destiny.” That family definitely took land.
Fahrenheit -460
Rick Brant was my favorite. Reality-based science/adventure, and they were written by one excellent author (not a syndicate). They went out of print in the 60s but fortunately my public library had them…
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: OT you probably hate The Jewel in the Crown but I’m watching it while doing PT and it has this amazing actress Zohra Sehgal. Do you know her?
Almost Retired
Does anyone remember the Happy Hollisters?
WaterGirl
@Frankensteinbeck: Huh. Maybe America wasn’t ready for that yet.
schrodingers_cat
@gene108: ATK has its flaws but it got me reading about Indian history and mythology. That and Chandamama. Did you get Chandamama in the US?
Ishiyama
@PaulB: I also loved the Freddy books – then my Mom gave me a copy of Animal Farm to read. Gender-crossed children’s books? Edith Bland (E. Nesbit) comes to mind. And Madeline.
Ishiyama
@Almost Retired: Yes – showing my age. The Happy Hollisters at Cape Canaveral.
Josie
I read all the series books–Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, etc., but the book that stands out in my memory is Black Beauty by Sewell. It gave me a window into the life of animals and affected me tremendously. ETA: Just remembered the Albert Payson Terhune books about dogs. Great stuff.
Additional ETA: My granddaughter is in second grade and is reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So Exciting.
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: Interesting. So maybe not quite as serious as they appear from the cover.
Shana
@Feathers: The Borrowers! So fun.
@jackmac: I did that too, so much fun since so much of it is still there.
Falling Diphthong
My daughter adored The Famous Five, a British series about four cousins plus a dog who have tons of adventures on their boarding school breaks. They were always discovering secret tunnels. This led to an argument about who decides if a child goes to boarding school, the kid or their parent.
prostratedragon
Also read all the Little Women and Little House books. Even at the time, there were things about the relations with “Indians” in the latter that I couldn’t get with. Taught me that just because one may like many things about a person, that doesn’t mean they’re always right.
I remember going on a biography kick around 4th or 5th grade. It would take hypnosis for me to remember very much, but the ones about Emma Lazarus, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, and the cowboy and rancher D.W. “80 John” Wallace made a strong impression.
WaterGirl
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I had no idea. I have two older sisters, so maybe I didn’t have the same angst as some girls did?
Steeplejack
@eclare:
I’m laughing because I just read a survey of books by presidential candidates through the years, and someone was quoted as saying that Mike Pence’s book So Help Me God should have been called Are You There, God? It’s Me, Mike Pence.
Ishiyama
@Frankensteinbeck: And the Borrowers was rendered in anime not so long ago. Arrietti, 2010.
WaterGirl
@PaulB: Wow, so many series that I never heard of.
(Your Paulb with a lower case b threw me for a loop earlier, I wasn’t sure if that was you or not.)
DesertFriar
My wife loved Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys when she was a kid. Our kids when they were younger (2 boys 2 girls) loved Nate the Great and Hank the Cowdog books.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: I loved the Jewel in the Crown. Obviously it is from the British POV but somehow it doesn’t feel gratuitous. Great acting all around.
I have seen her in some other stuff. She is pretty good.
eclare
@Steeplejack: ROFL!!!!
Spanish Moss
What a fun topic! I think the Burgess books were probably my very first chapter books, but Nancy Drew was my hands down favorite. After reading all of the ones in the library, I saved my allowance to buy my own, it took me a month’s worth to buy one. They were hardbacks and I saved them, but had no luck in getting my sons to read them. 🙁 I read the Hardy Boys too but liked Nancy Drew better, perhaps because I am female.
I also read The Borrowers, Marguerite Henry, Trixie Beldon, The Bobbsey Twins, The Three Investigators, and Sherlock Holmes.
jackmac
@WaterGirl: I always cringed when reading a Sara Paretsky novel whenever her character V.I. Warshawski was beaten up by some evildoer. But I otherwise enjoy the books, especially her spot-on characterizations of Chicago. I’ll also confess to enjoying the late Robert Parker’s “Spenser” series. They’re not intellectually challenging, instead are a fun, undemanding read late at night. The Spenser series might even be considered a Hardy Boys for grownups!
Ishiyama
@Josie: The Black Stallion, Walter Farley. Big Red, Jim Kjelgaard, White Fang/Call of the Wild, Jack London
West of the Rockies
@Yutsano:
I understand that the title for the movie was changed to Mrs. Brisby because the studio was warned of a possible lawsuit by the Wham-o Frisbee corporation.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Nothing from the Captain Underpants series?
Stacib
@WaterGirl: OMG, I was wondering when someone would get to Beverly Cleary. I read every single one as a kid – multiple times. You have to adore Otis Spotford.
Josie
@Ishiyama:
Oh gosh, yes. All of these
Auntie Anne
@PaulB: Hello, fellow Reader’s Digest Condensed Books reader! Me too!
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: oh good. I’m enjoying it so now I won’t feel too guilty. I can’t resist young Tim Pigott-Smith
WaterGirl
@VenusFT: Wow, that’s a serious story line to start a book for kids.
West of the Rockies
@WaterGirl:
Oh, completely different series. The series I’m referring to were by Jo Mendel.
eclare
This is a great thread, lots of book recs.
PaulB
Finger slipped on the Shift key and I didn’t notice until after I posted. There actually is another PaulB who stops by and posts here occasionally, so you do need to look out for duplicates.
I just remembered another series: the Magic series by Andre Norton (Steel Magic, Octagon Magic, Fur Magic, etc.). I loved those and then went on to her YA science fiction stuff. As an adult, I still love her Witch World series
Also, the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, which was just a trilogy at the time (and probably should have remained so).
Jackie
@SiubhanDuinne: Loved Nancy and Plum!
Also the Betsy and Tacy (and Tibbs) series.
And The Borrowers :D
Josie
@PaulB:
My father had saved all his old Edgar Rice Burroughs books from when he was a boy and I worked my way through all of them–the Tarzan books, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, etc. They were ready to fall apart, but I treasured them.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: And the young Charles Dance and Art Malik. Swoon.
Kelly
@Wag:
Also my path to sci fi, Tom Swift on to Azimov, Heinlein, Herbert and a bunch of others.
My other thread of middle school reading was nature. Absolutely loved Joy Adamsons “Born Free” books. Was ready to cross the ocean in a balsa raft at 12 after reading Kon Tiki.
Ishiyama
@WaterGirl: Ogden Nash wrote a poem “Mr. Burgess, meet Mr. Barmecide” which is an extended observation on the fact that, while the stories say that predation is natural, it never actually happens, with Nash imagining Yowler the Bobcat as simply never getting a meal.
prostratedragon
@jackmac: Wow. Looking up Mankato, I see they’ve got some of the sites from the stories landmarked. Rail link to the Twin Cities looks like a work in progress.
WaterGirl
@DesertFriar:
Oh, I love the Hank the Cowdog books! We bought a bunch of them for the son of my -ex when he lived with us, which is how I got to know them. I loved Hank.
I think of Hank sometimes when I read Patron’s musings.
kalakal
I was ( still am ) a voracious reader from about the age of 5. The first series I got into was Capt. W. E. Johns’ Biggles books. Johns was a WW1 fighter pilot who fictionalized his experiences as stirring books for young chaps. He wrote dozens of Biggles books up until the 60s as Biggles flew North, South, Upside down etc etc. He fought the Boche, the Nazis, the Red Menace, drug smugglers, arms dealers, and, I kid you not, Giant Electric Centipedes. Monty Python had great fun satirising him and it’s the sort of stuff Michael Palin affectionately took apart in Ripping Yarns. I reread one a few years ago set in Australia and the racism was incredible. The man was born in 1893 and it showed.
Dangerman
Encyclopedia Brown, IIRC. AR, OCD, and kind of a dick, but a fine kid detective.
Pete Downunder
Growing up in the 50s as a nerdy kid I avidly read the Tom Swift jr series (I understand there was a Tom Swift sr series before that but before my time). They were formulaic but the inventions appealed to me. Toward the end they seem to run out of ideas. I learned later they were written by a committee which accounted for the basic sameness. Still, they got me reading until I graduated to Heinlein, Arthur C Clark, Asimov etc.
A footnote: when I came to Australia my future father-in-law introduced me to the Napoleon Bonaparte series by Arthur Upfield about a half caste Australian policeman that are an excellent look at mid century outback Australian life – casual racism and all. Enjoyable for adults and if not in print can be found here in used bookshops.
Ishiyama
@SiubhanDuinne: Spiderweb for Two was the last “children’s book” I read before moving on to adolescent fiction.
scav
My school library was so small and cobbled together I timeslipped into reading the Dave Dawson War Adventure Series at a seriously young age and then spent a good chunk of my adult life trying to find books from it that weren’t at school. Otherwise most of mine have been mentioned: Sue Barton, Sherlock, The Borrowers, Five Little Peppers, Wrinkle in Time, & Nancy Drew / Hardy Boys / Bobbsey a bit but I jumped to Dorothy Sayers and Christie fairly quickly. In general, if it was bound, it was mine.
eclare
@Dangerman: What is AR? Also loved those books.
Omnes Omnibus
I started on LOTR very early and Sherlock Holmes. Didn’t really care for the couple of Hardy Boys books I read. I read all the James Bond novels at my grandparents when I was around 10 or 11. Didn’t care for the Narnia books. Then I discovered Sabatini, Shellabarger, and Kenneth Roberts. Not the usual kids’ fare.
WaterGirl
@jackmac: I grew up in Chicago, so Sarah Paretsky books were especially interesting to me.
I love the Spenser series. I think I read every one the author wrote before he died, and maybe even one that was published after he died??
Sounds like you and i might have the same taste in mysteries.
eclare
@scav: Your last sentence should be a rotating tag!
Dangerman
@eclare: Anal-Retentive. That’s hyphenated, right?
prostratedragon
@jackmac: I was a kid of about 40 when I discovered Paretsky. With you on the beatings —I’d be spending a great deal of time seeing to it that that doesn’t happen again— but her observation of the Chicago social landscape is excellent.
Honus
@WaterGirl: Carolyn Keene is actually a pseudonym used by several authors, male and female, who wrote the Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mysteries.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: yeah I never saw young Art Malik before. Great dimples!
Ishiyama
I also enjoyed the Danny Dunn books, & Ogden Nash’s The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t, which I re-read to my mom this year. Does anyone remember The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet?
dnfree
I was a girl, and I read Tom Swift. I bought one as an adult and was appalled at how juvenile and repetitive they were. Apparently I was unable to detect that in my youth.
Mel
@SiubhanDuinne: Oh, I loved The Princess and the Goblin! My grandmother still had her copy that had been given to her by her parents in about 1916, and we would read it when I stayed overnight. The illustrations were so beautiful.
i loved the Misty of Chincoteague books as well, and every Nancy Drew and Dana Girls book that I could find.
I remember being so excited to get The Nancy Drew Cookbook. My grandmother must have loved me bunches to willingly buy me that after taking a peek at the recipes, knowing that she would be “treated” repeatedly to the culinary horrors inside!
Starfish
@WaterGirl: Captain Underpants was popular, and my child is standoffish and would not read things that were popular with his peers. I wonder where he got that from. 🤔
WaterGirl
@Ishiyama: Ha!
Anastasio Beaverhausen
Our father was career Air Force and in the late 60s we lived in Japan (Okinawa.) We occasionally went on vacation to Taiwan, where the international copyright laws were less than strictly enforced. I distinctly remember buying Hardy Boys mysteries for, oh, a dollar. Read them cover to cover in a day or two. And up until my forties I could elicit a chuckle by telling someone that a particularly tricky problem sounded like a “Frank and Joe Hardy mystery.” No more. The yutes these days, they don’t know from books!
munira
I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and then Little Women and Little Men and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and finally pretty much anything I could get my hands on. And that hasn’t changed.
dm
@West of the Rockies: I read the 1960s version of Tom Swift. I remember … Tom Swift and his Anti-gravity Kite (taught me that a kite needed a string to anchor it against the wind). I think he had an Atomic Airplane, too.
I say “1960s version”, because there was an earlier incarnation from much earlier in the century — Tom Swift and his Electric Horse, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Victor Appleton III or (IV or V) did Tom Swift and his Social Network in the dawn of the 21st Century.
Around that time, the Beverly Cleary (was Henry Huggins the one with the uncle with the donut machine?) books.
And around that time The Rescuers (Miss Bianca mouse and her friend Bernard) — this was long before the Disney movie (which I’ve never seen).
Than Matthew Looney’s Voyage to the Earth. Lunar society decides to explore the Earth (a hostile environment, its atmosphere laced with poisonous oxygen). They land in the most habitable place they can imagine — Antarctica. Young Matthew sees a penguin, but no one believes that the Earth can sustain life. Illustrations by Gahan Wilson.
… And I read A wrinkle in time repeatedly, but retain none of it. Never saw the film, nor read any of the sequels.
After that, every science fiction book in the local branch of the public library. Most memorable were giant collections of short stories, then James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels. I consumed everything by Blish and Asimov. Somehow, I never really got into Heinlein
Hesitated over starting Tolkien for ages. Then ran to the library to get The Two Towers the minute I finished The Fellowship of the Ring.
Ishiyama
@Dangerman: Three Cheers for Alison B.!
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
Definitely didn’t get them here.
Amar Chitra Kathas weren’t really available in the U.S., when we moved here in 1977 and growing up in the 1980’s. I think we brought a few with us when we moved. My older brother was reading them. We visited in 1980 and brought some more back with us.
Mel
Madeleine L’Engle’s novels (A Wrinkle in Time, etc.) – many winter afternoons with those as good company,
WaterGirl
@Honus: I was aware of that the Nancy Drew series was written by various authors, male and female. I was responding to sab because I thought it was interested that she liked one series by Carolyn Keene but not Nancy Drew because Nancy Drew was written by a man.
It had been so long since I had learned that Nancy Drew was written by various authors of both genders that I didn’t feel like challenging the “written by a man” part. :-)
Good to have that information confirmed.
WaterGirl
@Ishiyama: I have never read any of those. :-(
Josie
We had a room in our house that contained a desk, a love seat and three walls of books. My parents never limited what I could read and I read my way through almost everything there. I never walked into a real library until I was in high school and needed to do research. Strangely enough, I became a librarian and, of course, continued to read with my students and my own sons. I can’t imagine a life without books.
Sheila in nc
Most of my faves have been mentioned. Nancy Drew, baseball biographies, Elizabeth Enright, Boxcar Kids, Prydain, etc. Also loved poetry as a kid. Took the same anthologies out of the elementary school library so many times, they forced me to pick something else. Then the fun of having a kid and discovering both new kids books and also rediscovering one’s own favorites through their eyes. New kids book I loved was Tuck Everlasting.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Gosh, I have no idea! :-)
Ishiyama
So many books mentioned that I loved. So many more that I could name. This could last all night, even just sticking to what I read in elementary school, as I have thus far. I read The Hobbit in Fifth Grade because Jeannie Gurda talked about it at Show & Tell. LOTR followed quickly.
kalakal
I devoured anything with pirates which I can blame on R L Stevenson Treasure Island may very well be my favourite book ( or Kidnapped). Sabatini’s Captain Blood ( and the Errol Flynn/Basil Rathbone film) was/is a special favourite.
It’s odd but I still remember the books that got me into genres
Fantasy I blame on E Nesbit and her Psammead books – 5 Children and it etc
SF is the fault of Arthur C Clarke – A Fall of Moondust.
For detective stories Conan Doyle is the guilty party, I still adore him and from the 30s, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham.
For horror Sheridan Le Fanu – Carmilla, Uncle Silas
Hitchhiker
@Josie:
My granddaughter is two, and it’s my fondest hope that I get to see her reading my favorite books some day. The very thought of it makes me cry.
Sheila in nc
Also want to speak to the Alcott commenters. Most know Little Women and that series, but I get more these days out of the lesser known ones like An Old Fashioned Girl and Eight Cousins/Rose in Bloom. AOFG in particular is a scathing picture of the way girls were raised in the 19th century and cover a lot of what we would recognize today as feminist issues.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mel:
Oh, yes! Little Princess Irene pouting in her chair. Curdie leading Irene through the mine shafts. Grandmother Irene in her moonlit turret room with her gorgeous long silver hair.
Starfish
I feel like the Moomin books deserve to be mentioned in this thread.
kalakal
@dm:
Oh, I loved those
eclare
@Hitchhiker: That is so sweet.
Omnes Omnibus
Completely off topic but entirely awesome: CAIT O’RIORDAN JUST FOLLOWED ME ON TWITTER!!!!!
dnfree
@Dorothy A. Winsor: When my youngest daughter was in sixth grade, in the 1990s, the creative young female teacher made up all kinds of games and projects, always around “boy” interests. I asked the teacher about that once, and she said exactly what you said. The girls will do boy activities, but the boys won’t do girl activities.
Suzanne
I was a child in the 80s, and my favorites were The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins. There were a few other series I liked, but these were the two lodestars.
thruppence
I remember Charles Schulz having fun with these genres as author Snoopy typed up such masterpieces as “The Six Bunny-wunnies and the Hot Tub”
JPL
@Josie: I was just thinking about that. My younger son remembers that book from primary days at a Montessori school. His teacher read it to the class. Little grand imps aren’t quite ready for that but will be soon.
Ishiyama
@kalakal: My Grandmother gave me The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood for my 7th birthday. I was also reading the Just So Stories then.
Suzanne
@WV Blondie:
All-Of-A-Kind Family? I enjoyed those.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Josie: My family room as kid had built in bookshelves filled with books. None of them were appropriate for my single aged self. I would spend hours perusing them all whenever I got bored. I loved it. My parents didn’t care what I was reading.
schrodingers_cat
@gene108: They were pretty fun. They had ghost stories and folk tales, fantasy along with mythology most were serialized. I also had some from my father’s collection when he was growing up.
I subscribed to a Marathi magazine called Kishor (teen) which covered science stuff like NASA missions etc.
Just found out that their archives are online.
Netto
@Ishiyama: I thought I’d be the only one to remember Jim Kjelgard, but you beat me to it. I think I read every one of his books, as well as any others I could find in a similar style.
When I was in junior high school, Farley Mowat and James Herriot books were being passed around the family.
jackmac
@WaterGirl: Apologies for being a bit off topic, but here’s another favorite (also a dead author): Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels, specifically his “Dortmunder” series about a hapless thief, a collection of accomplices and complicated heists. There are around 14-15 Dortmunder books and a series of short stories. Westlake, a prolific author, wrote more than 100 books including several turned into movies. His books — especially the Dortmunder series — are flat out fun reads.
oatler
@Ishiyama:
“Danny Dunn and the Weather Machine”, “Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor”…
Miss Bianca
@Baud: Me, me, MEEEE, I loved The Three Investigators!
Mai Naem mobile
@Falling Diphthong: That’s Enid Blyton. I think my sister and I have read pretty much every Enid Blyton book. Famous Five was my favorite series. Also read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Jack London, Charles Dickens, Little Women, Black Beauty(i remember the TV series as well), Roald Dahl and the Chronicles of Narnia. I am glad there weren’t smart phones, tablets or cable teevee when I was a kid. I don’t think I would have read anywhere as much as I did.
Sheila in nc
Did anybody else read the Sally Watson books? Like Witch of the Glens? Set in Scotland during the English Civil War. She wrote several with girl protagonists set in different historical periods — one was set on a pirate ship with a female captain.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca:
I wondered when you would show up. People have been talking about literary you.
CaseyL
The thread has moved on from books read as children, but I have to say seeing the comments from people who grew up on Nancy Drew and other series is fascinating to me. I never read any of them as a kid: I was interested exclusively in books that centered around animals.
Black Stallion series? Yup.
“Lad, a Dog,” and its sequels; plus “Thomasina,” “Incredible Journey,” “Charlotte’s Web,” etc., plus collected short stories? Yup.
“The Jungle Books”? Absolutely, and I still love that one.
I just wasn’t interested in humans as a kid.
I graduated from animal stories to science fiction pretty much without segue, so at least started reading human-centered stories that that point.
Suzanne
I must have been a weird kid. Growing up in fairly dense suburbs, I found all the nature stories dull as hell. Like Misty of Chincoteague. Bleh. I also hate “incorrigible” characters, like Anne of Green Gables.
There was a separate Nancy Drew series that was more modern and action-oriented, called “The Nancy Drew Files” or something like that. I dug those, they were written like thrillers. Original Nancy Drew always felt dusty and old and like little kid stuff.
Mr. Suzanne and I both look back fondly on The McGurk Mysteries. There was also a Canadian series called Bruno and Boots that I found just hilarious.
Central Planning
We had a few books in The Adirondack Kids series. I just looked at the website and they have a 20th anniversary edition of the first book that was published (ETA – now 20 books) – that makes me feel old (my oldest just turned 26, so maybe I am).
Anyway, I think they were more middle-school focused and not YA. It was fun to read them and know some of the places they were talking about in the Adirondacks. They have good reviews on Amazon.
I read Hardy Boys when I was a kid. I think I read most of them, but the only thing I remember is when the boy’s father was kidnapped, and they saw a flashing light in a house far away. Turns out it was morse code. By the time they got to the house, nobody was there and the lamp in the wall had a loose connection. Or it was something like that.
And not to derail the books conversation to TV, but has anyone seen the new Nancy Drew series and Tom Swift series on HBO? They are awful. Nancy Drew was ruined for me when they made it clear she was was getting some action along with all her friends (I’m not a prude, but I have a vision of Nancy as something like a 14-year old, not a 18-19 year old young woman). But hey, maybe that’s what kids these days do all the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Suzanne
@CaseyL: LMAO at our back-to-back comments. I hated animal stories. Horse girl I am not.
dnfree
@WaterGirl: The Boxcar Children were orphaned and found an old boxcar to live in. People were always trying to split them up or kidnap them, as I remember. One of the boys won a footrace and they found their grandfather. Then they continued to have adventures, apparently.
Part of the fascination was how they fixed up the boxcar to live in, found old dishes, etc.
Miss Bianca
@WV Blondie: Yep, all those, and Uncle Wiggly too!
Was anyone else a fan of the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks?
JPL
@CaseyL: ha It’s time for All Creatures Great and Small on PBS.
dnfree
@Shana: awww, I loved Betsy, Tracy, and Tib!
JPL
@Suzanne: My niece loved those series and like you she is successful in her chosen field. They must have presented strong female role models.
soapdish
Can’t believe only one person mentioned The Great Brain here.
Wag
@WaterGirl: What’s a Ramona book? An inspiration for the Ramones, of course!
Link
Miss Bianca
@Frankensteinbeck: Ahem. If I must say so myself, I would NOT call Miss Bianca “incompetent”.
A touch clueless and entitled, perhaps, but a brave and clever little lady who became the presiding light of the Mouse Prisoners’ Aid Society and spearheaded several daring rescues on her own.
@Omnes Omnibus: My ears musta been burning. :)
Glidwrith
@Baud: Shout out for the Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown. Despite parents wanting us to get a good education, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, anything that wasn’t FACTS was frowned upon. Sheer desperation drove them to allow ONE (1) comic book series called Elf Quest to get my dyslexic brother interested enough in reading to help overcome the problem.
Gendered books didn’t matter, because being allowed to read outside of school materials was difficult until I was old enough to get to a library on my own.
I still remember breaking out in a cold sweat the first time I used my own money to buy a book when I was 13 years old.
Now to read the thread…
Spanish Moss
I also loved Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and The Little Princess. I had hardback versions with the gorgeous Tasha Tudor illustrations. I reread them so many times.
Sheila in nc
@Spanish Moss: absolutely. Also read them many times.
Miss Bianca
@PaulB: Ah, I see I should have read down further in the comments. I should have known there were other Freddy fans out there!
Miss Bianca
@Frankensteinbeck:
Um…me?
jackmac
Okay, back on topic. I recall my introduction to The Hobbit midway through grammar school. Loved it. And The Lord of the Rings trilogy followed. All have been reread many times. And as a testament to Tolkien’s brilliant descriptions, when the movies came out the characters looked pretty much as I envisioned them in my mind.
pluky
@Ishiyama: You’ve just cited the first SF book I ever read (in the 5th grade)! Went on to do all the Danny Dunn books. Graduated to more serious stuff in the 8th grade when my English teacher plopped Stranger in a Strange Land on my desk one day.
zhena gogolia
@Spanish Moss: Yeah, those were cool. (I only saw them as library books.)
William D
I read the first 6 Wizard of Oz books….and most of the Great Brain series by Fitzgerald….also numerous Hardy Boys which included my Dad’s collection of books published in the 1920s ?..took me a while to grasp how far back in the past the setting was
Suzanne
@JPL: So the Netflix series of The Baby-Sitters Club came out in 2020 when we were all staying indoors, so I watched it with Spawn the Younger. There were a few updates made, but all in all, it dawned on me how progressive those stories were for their day. And how influential they were on my young little self. One of the best parts of those stories is that all of the lead girl characters have some hard edges on their personalities in some way, and yet the stories never really encourage them to change that. I admire that. So much of the media of that time was about becoming more agreeable.
The author, Ann M. Martin, was apparently an educator of some sort for children with autism before she started writing kids’ books. There were a few story lines about children with autism and other disabilities, long before that was in the public consciousness like it is now.
Skepticat
Apparently I could read before I was three years old (which may be a function of being on the spectrum), and I read everything that didn’t move fast enough to get out of the way; still do. The specific books I remember best were my father’s old copies of the Poppy Ott young boys adventure series, and I was very upset to find my mother had thrown them away when I went to college; I wish I still had them for sentimental reasons.
scav
As for the (nearly) moderns, my cousin’s kids were seriously into the Rick Riordan books and luckily I was well up on various pantheons of gods as the youngest took pleasure in testing me for hours — my job was to keep up but be utter rubbish at a critical few (Egyptian mostly). Ended up reading some so we could have expanded conversations that included verbs. Pretty enjoyable actually.
My ultimate series might actually be The Hitchhikers Trilogy. Or at least very very near the tippy top. Thursday Next another contender.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Which one?
kalakal
The very first book I ever read was
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
I owe so much to Dr. Suess, I could never thank him enough if I live to be a 1,000
Steeplejack
I was always an avid reader, but my memories of what I read when are a little jumbled. I started school as a proper public-school boy in the late ’50s when my father (Air Force doctor) was stationed in England and we lived “on the economy” in a semi-detached house in Ealing. I got half of my allowance in American money (25 cents) and half in British money (about the same). I remember walking up to the high street in Ealing to the newsagent’s every week to get The Beano and a bit of candy. (The Beano was a weekly comic in tabloid format.) On Friday we would go out to the base at Ruislip to eat dinner at the officers’ club, and I would get two comic books and a candy bar for my quarter at the BX (base exchange). I must have read books, but I don’t remember any except the very nice hardback edition of The Wind in the Willows that my parents gave me. I loved that book; it had the original E.H. Shepard illustrations.
We came back to the States in 1960, when I was eight, and I have much clearer memories of what I read. The base (in Illinois) had an excellent library, and I used to go frequently with my mother. I don’t remember many titles, but I read a lot of books—the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and a number of books in a weird mini-genre of (male) writers reminiscing about their rural hunting backgrounds. Stories about going hunting for coons or possums at night, usually accompanied by a trusty dog. The one author’s name I do remember is Jim Kjelgaard, who is remembered now (if at all) for Big Red. His Wikipedia article is atrocious (possibly written by a relative or a besotted fan), and I recognize very few of the titles, but one point rings true: “His books were primarily about dogs and wild animals, often with animal protagonists and told from the animal’s point of view.” I particularly loved those books. There were some other authors who mined that same lode.
Around that time my parents got me a Random House subscription that sent me every month a Landmark book and an “All About” book. The former were history and (sort of) current events; the latter were, e.g., All About Strange Beasts of the Past, All About Dinosaurs, etc. I read them avidly and waited impatiently for the next month’s delivery.
Around that time I started reading science fiction. The usual—Asimov, Bradbury, Jack Vance, a bunch of one-off writers. We moved to a small training base in west Texas in 1964, and every month or so I had to go to San Antonio for orthodontic work. We would go to the North Star Mall (one of the first in the country), and I would load up on paperbacks at the bookstore (Waldenbooks?). I remember diving into the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ballantine was issuing all of the Tarzan novels, and Ace was putting out the non-Tarzan books (the Barsoom novels,, At the Earth’s Core, etc.), enhanced by Frank Frazetta’s lurid cover art. Just the thing for an impressionable young lad.
Somewhere in there I started reading “grown-up” books. Both of my parents were avid readers, and my father’s dictum was that he didn’t care what we read, he just wanted us to be readers. He felt that our taste would inevitably improve. He did have to suffer through a long period of me reading him the highlights of Mad magazine out loud every month. Good times.
Well, this has certainly been a trip down the halls of memory.
SeattleDem
I had four older brothers who all liked to read. The bookmobile came once a week and allowed each child to check out 5 books, so I had books handed to me by older brothers who used me to extend their limit. I started reading Hardy Boys, Louis L’Amour, Stephen W Meader, and Robert Heinlein as soon as I could sound out the words. I still like to read children’s books of the era, but my training in literature makes me appreciate them with a different eye. My favorite nun read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to us at lunch when I was in second or third grade. It may have been odd listening to them in a thick German accent. Sister DeSales had taught in De Smet, South Dakota for the first quarter of the 20th century. I didn’t realize at the time that Little House on the Prairie was more than local history about people that she knew.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: What about the Miss Bianca books? Did you like those?
TiredOfItAll
No love for the old Jim Forest and Ranger Dan books? More recently, I read the Hazel Green books (by Odo Hirsch to my kid when she was young — they’re great. And everyone who was a Nancy Drew superfan should name their favorite. Mine was The Clue of the Dancing Puppet!
Suzanne
@scav: Oh hot damn. FOR SURE. Spawn the Elder is 19, and his faves were the various Percy Jackson (Rick Riordan) books. Just gobbled those up. And Hunger Games, Series of Unfortunate Events, The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dork Diaries…..quite a few graphic novel series that I can’t remember…..
WaterGirl
@dnfree: That sounds pretty interesting.
CaseyL
@Suzanne: Yes, a real contrast!
Kifaru
Wow. I saw Trixie Belden and had a flash-back. I learned that apple seeds could be poisonous in Trixie Belden and the Hudson River Mystery.
I grew up overseas and remember reading those, the Hardy Boys and a British series called Malory Towers. What is a British upbringing without reading stories about boarding school.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl:
There is only one as far as I know. The former bassist for the Pogues.
sab
@WV Blondie: JD Salinger’s Glass family?
sab
@SiubhanDuinne: I loved those.
Miss Bianca
So, to sum up: Many of you have mentioned series, from The Hardy Boys to The Great Brain to Sherlock Holmes to The Rescuers to Enid Blyton’s Adventure series to…on and on and on, all of which I devoured and enjoyed.
So I’m only going to throw one more series out there that I haven’t seen mentioned and which was not only great at the time, but really holds up on being revisited later in life: The Mad Scientists’ Club.
Proud nerds before being a nerd was cool in any way, shape, or form, who had crazy adventures where they routinely bested their peer rivals *and* most of the adults they encountered, through the power of…SCIENCE!
Miss Bianca
@WaterGirl:
Um…what do YOU think? I mean, taking a wild-ass guess? :)
WaterGirl
@Wag: I definitely had a Ramones phase!
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia, @schrodingers_cat: SC, I had wanted to ask if you knew The Jewel in the Crown and if you did how it struck you. I saw the first run in the US on PBS with my parents and really enjoyed it, and at the beginning of Covid watched it again with my partner. Watching the first time it broke through my naivete as to what the British had done there, individually and as imperialists.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: This is Balloon Juice, of course you don’t have to read the comments before commenting!
Nelle
@Shana: I hoped someone would bring these up. My favorites..especially Emily of Deep Valley.
The Jennifer books by Eunice Young Smith took place in the early 1900s in Aurora, IL, except for Jennifer Dances, in Chicago. My sister and I read and reread them.
Suzanne
@Kifaru:
So as an American kid who read a lot of those boarding school stories, I remember thinking, “Why would any parent send their kids to boarding school?! Do they hate them?! It sounds like torture.”
Then Spawn the Elder turned eleven and I was like, “Boarding school….that sounds GREAT, where can I find one?”.
arrieve
@Sheila in nc: Witch of the Glens! I hadn’t thought of that book in years, but recently had a Proustian moment where the taste of a brand of barbecue chips I never buy transported me back to a Saturday on my childhood bed eating chips and reading Witch of the Glens. That’s where I learned the word scapegoat.
I also read everything and anything: Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, Trixie Belden, Sue Barton, Cherry Ames. I realized as an adult I preferred mystery series like Sara Paretsky’s to standalones because I like to follow a series of characters through multiple books. There’s something so wonderful about opening the latest book in a series you love and just immediately plugging into the story.
NotMax
Quick scan shows no mention yet of The Rover Boys nor of Sherlock Holmes.
For fiction within fiction, mediawise, always chuckle when the adopted son interjects by reading aloud from the boys’ series of books he is addicted to, Third Lieutenant Stanley, on the old time Vic and Sade radio show. Lt. Stanley does seem to wrangle with every strain of counterfeiters. :) (A 9 minute sample.)
RSA
What great memories you all have brought up. I read all the science fiction I could find when I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me of Tom Swift, Danny Dunn, the Tripods, …
I remember a short series called Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Wikipedia mentions Heinlein’s juvenile as an influence but not Tom Swift.
Wasn’t Matt Mooney at one point a character in an SF novel or series for kids? A sort of fantasy about people living on the moon.
I also read some of the adventure and mystery series that have been mentioned. A few of my favorites, though I haven’t revisited them in decades:
The Mad Scientists Club (just mentioned)
The Mudhen (which may have been just a collection of short stories)
The Great Brain (also mentioned; the religious politics were new to me)
… and a series I can’t remember the name of, set in the American southwest, with similarities to Little Big Man?
WaterGirl
@kalakal: Yes, we had that one, too! If you asked me to name a really young childhood book, I probably would have said that one.
That’s the one with the pink spot that causes all sorts of problems.
billcinsd
Another book I remember reading when I was pretty young (probably 5-7) Mr. Pine’s Purple House. Mr. Pine lived on Vine St. In a white house, one of 50 identical white houses on Vine St. He tried a bunch of things to make his house different but they kept getting copied. Finally, he painted his house purple. In my mind, many people on his street copied this, but having checked I think the purple house inspired the rest of Vine St. to paint their houses different colors. A book about how its OK to be different which seems to have had a huge impact on my life
Kifaru
@Suzanne: LOL. I never went to boarding school but loved the idea of some freedom from daily life. My son has high-functioning autism so no boarding school for him….
schrodingers_cat
@Layer8Problem: I saw it when I was a teen. I really liked it then. A lot of it was difficult to watch. From what I remember it does not glorify the Raj or put in soft focus like many of the Raj shows that end up on PBS.
Indian Summers was unwatchable I gave up on it after a few episodes. The historical inaccuracies were just too jarring.
NotMax
Another scan above also reveals no one has brought up Pippi Longstocking.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: There appear to be two of them, but only one used to play with the Pogues. I can see why you would be excited.
Miss Bianca
@Sheila in nc: Wow, I don’t think I’ve heard of this author. (Now off to see if the library system has a copy of Witch of the Glens out there.)
Omnes Omnibus
@NotMax:
Your scan is wrong wrt Sherlock Holmes.
scribbler
@Ishiyama: VERY late to the party, but loved all of the Mushroom Planet books!
Mr. Bemused Senior
Funny, I’m sure I read a bunch of Tom Swift and Hardy Boys as a kid but I don’t remember them at all.
My introduction to science fiction was a collection of Alfred Bester’s short stories, the Dark Side of the Earth. After that it was Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, Cordwainer Smith, on and on.
True story: when my older daughter was in 2nd grade we had read and loved Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Her teacher at some point asked the class for their favorite authors and of course she answered Salman Rushdie. When we next had our parent-teacher conference we were informed of her ahem “strong imagination,” with that as an example. Needless to say, we were not much impressed with her teacher.
Now her family lives with me and I have the great pleasure of reading to my twin grandchildren, a boy and a girl, age 7. We finished the Ramona series a while ago and are now on Harry Potter, almost to the end of the Order of the Phoenix. I’m so lucky.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Now I’m wondering about walking alone up to the high street in Ealing at age seven or so. 🤔
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it don’t.
:)
kalakal
@Suzanne: I went to a boarding school.
It had its good bits and its awful bits but I would never send my child there.
I consider the film If to be a documentary :-)
TiredOfItAll
@NotMax: Oh, wow. I can still remember her full name: Pippilotta Delicatessen Windowshade Mackerelmint Ephraim’s Daughter Longstocking!
Mr. Bemused Senior
@kalakal: did you enjoy Mr. Dibley’s version?
bluefoot
@Miss Bianca:
I was just about to post about The Mad Scientists’ Club. I loved those books. I developed an interest in codes and cyphers from those books. And I wanted to own my own submarine. :)
Earlier in my youth, I read a lot of Hardy Boys (got the first few books from an elder son of the friends of my parents) and Encyclopedia Brown. Never got into Nancy Drew. From the Hardy Boys, it was The Three Investigators and The Mad Scientists Club. When I was 10? 11? my dad gave me a book of Sherlock Holmes stories. Maybe it was my youthful reading that has led me to reading mystery novels to relax as an adult.
From there, I discovered science fiction and literature. So The Three Musketeers, Shakespeare – though I didn’t understand all of it, A Wrinkle In Time, etc.
NotMax
@kalakal
Also too A Separate Peace. Novel better than the tepid film.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Only because NoOne dusted that part of the memory shelf until now. Yes, I read her, and some others mentioned above. And Gulliver’s Travels and The Prince and the Pauper as well as Tom and Huck, some of the earliest very long books I read.
Mel
Not series books, but did anyone else read The Cat in the Mirror by Mary Stolz, or The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (can’t remember the author) ?
Loved them both.
Layer8Problem
@schrodingers_cat: I made it through Indian Summers‘ first season, but it simply didn’t ring true for me. My partner continued through the second season, Art Malik’s if I remember correctly.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
@WaterGirl: Never heard of this series, but the book titles are hilarious. Much better than the Hardy Boys that I devoured as a kid.
Sheila in nc
@Mr. Bemused Senior: My daughter was always Harry’s age. That is, she was 11 when Sorcerer’s Stone came out, 12 when Chamber of Secrets was published, and on throughout the entire series. We read them together. Cherished memories.
Matt McIrvin
Encyclopedia Brown, yeah. The Great Brain, Paddington Bear, and Tove Jansson’s Moomin books (strangely obscure in the US compared to everywhere else).
Around age 9 or so I got into science fiction. Read one Heinlein juvie, The Rolling Stones, and liked it but for some reason never read any others. But then I started reading collections of Asimov stories not particularly intended for kids. I read a couple of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series later.
I had a collection of old “Children’s Classics” several of which seemed too boring to even open, but the ones I did read over and over were Alice in Wonderland, Tom Sawyer, and my favorite one of the lot, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I think it was a heavily abridged edition, like many that were available in English at the time, marketed as a kid’s book. I just re-read that one recently in the unabridged original, and damn, it holds up. Jules Verne’s best book by far.
When I was maybe 10 or 11, my mother randomly bought me a copy of Stanisław Lem’s Cyberiad she saw on a store shelf, and that was a profoundly mind-altering experience. He’s still one of my favorite writers.
Mel
@eclare: Ramona the Pest! 💕
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Of a kind along with Tintin, Asterix and Lucky Luke.
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca: Dammit, I loved The Mad Scientists’ Club!! They had a computer, they built a submarine, they did cool stuff, they made a fool out of the mayor!
PBK
@Mel: I still reread The Wolves of Willoughby Chase at least once a year…a good two decades after I read it for the first time.
kalakal
@Mr. Bemused Senior: No, Lindsey Anderson did it better, however Dibley’s Rear Window however…
bluefoot
I also remember reading the Ramona and the Henry Huggins books when I was young. And lot of Zilpha Keatley Snyder.
I remember a friend of mine in middle school loaned me the two books Julie Andrews (Julie Edwards) wrote – I loved them both. I still have my childhood copy of “Mandy” on my bookshelf.
From what I can tell from my nieces and nephews, books seem less gendered now. At least, it seems like it, especially the younger than 10 year old set. And they are all into Minecraft. :)
thruppence
I was pretty young when I started working my way through my Dad’s James Bond paperbacks…
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: And Lem, for that matter.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Not as a kid. Read a lot of Hardy Boys and DC comics. One of my sisters was really into the Black Stallion series and I read all of those, but I don’t think those were aimed at girls.
However as an adult I developed a fondness for young adult fantasy stories which are probably aimed at adolescent girls as they usually feature fierce female teenage warriors. A bunch by Tamora Pierce for instance. The “Dark Materials” trilogy. I always feel a little sheepish checking them out from the library, but I then thoroughly enjoy them.
Edit: Just remember the “Bobbsey Twins”. Those might have been aimed at girls. I think one of my sisters was into them, but I wasn’t shy about raiding her shelf.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Sheila in nc: my girls were aged 10 and 12 when the Sorcerer’s Stone came out. We didn’t line up at the book store but didn’t wait long each time.
Maybe 7 is a bit young to start but so far the kids are enjoying it. They seem to grow up faster these days. I did warn them that the ending is sad. Things get very dark after this, maybe we’ll take a break.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@eclare:
I learned about the Ramona books through my daughters. As a kid I read lots of Henry Huggins, but had no interest at all in the Beezus character and still less in Ramona. What can I say? I had poor taste as a kid.
There was briefly a Ramona TV series that we watched as a family when the girls were young. And I read all the Ramona books to my granddaughter.
whatsleft
I loved loved loved the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, and anthologies like East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
NotMax
@thruppence
One grandmother’s second husband’s son’s room had shelves upon shelves stuffed with Doc Savage tomes.
(She outlived three spouses.)
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: Asterix was a revelation in my pre-teen years.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@kalakal: touché
kalakal
@NotMax: Tintin is wonderful, I adore Herges artwork & Asterix* is glorious.
Lucky Luke I never really got into for some reason
* The names of the Asterix characters still reduce me to hysterix. Cacaphonix, Unhygenix, Vitalstatistix, Getafix etc etc
Mike in Oly
@WaterGirl: The Boxcar Children was about (IIRC) a group of orphaned kids that go to live in the woods in an old boxcar. It was just four or five books that my library had and in the end they get adopted by an uncle they had previously believed to be a villain but proved himself a responsible adult who loved them. It was for quite young children. I only have vague memories of it but always fantasized about escaping to the woods to live on my own (gradeschool sucked).
Steeplejack
Other memories coming back like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist (h/t Nick Danger). Probably my earliest book memory is of a couple of Little Golden Books from when I was four or five years old: The Little Mailman of Bayberry Lane and Tuffy the Tugboat. Mailman was a chipmunk—’nuff said.
I think both are still in print. My RWNJ brother sent a copy of one of them to our niece and nephew a few years ago.
kalakal
@Mr. Bemused Senior: thank you for bringing back the memory, I’d forgotten it until I read your comment, then I started to laugh
NotMax
@kalakal
Dogmatix, :)
Also wherein I first encountered the word menhir.
dnfree
@Steeplejack: We learned so much from the Landmark history books. I’ve bought a couple of them in recent years that have held up pretty well, such as the one about the Seminole Indians and the one about Lincoln. Oh, and Toussaint L’Overture and Haiti. I wish my grandchildren were looking forward to those monthly books instead of the next TikTok video.
Suzanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I didn’t much care for Ramona, either. She was another of those “incorrigible” characters that I generally find really irritating. Like, I always hated stories that positioned that kind of behavior as impishly charming.
However, I loved the Peter Hatcher books by Judy Blume…..Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing, Superfudge, Sheila the Great, etc. In those books, Fudge is the annoying character, but the reader gets to identify more closely with Peter. And there is a great scene in which the dad puts Fudge in the bathtub and dumps his cereal on his head. High comedy.
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: And the word “Paf!” between a pair of Roman boots at the bottom of the panel and two bare feet ascending skyward at the top of the panel.
kalakal
@NotMax: The pirates were hilarious
Starfish
@Matt McIrvin: What?! I just cannot imagine kids reading Heinlein or Asimov that early.
I feel like with some of the discussions in this thread, people don’t remember how old they were when they read things, but you have me questioning that now. I remember peers reading Ann McCaffrey when we were in high school.
Matt McIrvin
Re crossing gender lines: I read a bunch of the same books my little sister did. The All-Of-A-Kind Family series, the Mary Poppins books.
I actually liked nonfiction as much as or more than fiction, for most of my childhood. Loved books about science, nature and animals, especially dinosaurs and insects, also aviation and spaceflight. But there was a mix.
Hitchhiker
This thread is over, but … Julie of the Wolves.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: Yeah, I was in about the fourth grade. I was kind of a precocious reader. I remember because I changed elementary schools multiple times. Heinlein’s juvies, what we’d call YA books now, were actually kind of popular among some of my peers, also Tolkien though I don’t think I read The Hobbit all the way through until I was in college.
Mel
@Hitchhiker: Oh, yes.
And The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Laura
@Kathleen: I remember reading those biographies! I believe they were part of a series called ‘Little People Who Became Great’.
I enjoyed Nancy Drew, Harriet The Spy, and quickly moved on to Agatha Christie books. Still love reading mysteries.
Starfish
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe I didn’t know any of his young reader books. I started with Stranger in a Strange Land, then Time Enough for Love, and a few others.
Feathers
@Frankensteinbeck: The Egypt Game is about a girl who goes to stay with her grandmother. She and some of the neighborhood kids start making up a game where they are reenacting/making up ancient Egyptian rituals/adventures. There is a strange antique shop run by an odd old man involved. Turns out my local library has it in the children’s section. Think I’ll pick it up, see if it is worth reading and pick it up if it is. I must have been first on the list for Spare though, picked it up Saturday. The list is close to 1300, so I want to get it back fast. So far very good. Reads like a novel. In a good way.
zhena gogolia
@Mel: I loved The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. I see it’s by Joan Aiken.
Suzanne
I liked mysteries when I was a kid. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Westing Game were both favorites.
#turtlewexler4lyfe
Dennis Brown
I am a guy, but I read Nancy Drew, plus Trixie Belden and Encyclopedia Brown. I thought the Hardy Boys books were particularly stupid: “Look! I found a Clue!”. The Nancy Drew books were much better written.
zhena gogolia
Just throwing in:
Adam of the Road
The Trumpeter of Krakow
Across Five Aprils
A Dream of Sadler’s Wells
Lark (about Puritans and Roundheads)
Steeplejack
@jackmac:
I read the Spenser novels in real time (as published), starting with The Godwulf Manuscript in 1973. The first I don’t know how many were good, but as Parker hit it big they got formulaic and also outlandish.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: Way too much detailed description of his cooking techniques.
Steeplejack
@PaulB:
Andre Norton was one of my early science-fiction binge reads.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
And his running shoes and workout routine.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish: The Rolling Stones was definitely a YA, none of the wild sexual material Heinlein put in his later books, though in hindsight there was a fair bit of sexism. One episode in the book prefigured the Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” so closely that fans have been debating whether there was a direct connection for 50 years.
SarahK
A series that I loved reading with my kids when they were little were the Lily Quench books. A series that they loved but I didn’t was A Series of Unfortunate Events.
For myself, when I was a kid, I loved the twin books (The Scottish Twins, The Japanese Twins, the Revolutionary Twins) as well as most of the other series mentioned here. Although The Mushroom Planet, the Oz books, Pippi Longstocking, and Mary Poppins were especial favorites.
One thing I love about the Betsy-Tacey series is how the level of the writing changes as the characters age. The first ones are definitely for younger readers; the later ones not so much.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Steeplejack:
Spenser novels are a guilty pleasure for both of us. They’ve gotten better in my opinion since Parker died and Ace Atkins took them over.
I think we may have found the character via the Robert Urich TV series before discovering the books.
I liked most of his other characters as well, but I’m less fond of where his literary heir took the western characters Hitch and Cole.
StringOnAStick
I can’t believe no one has mentioned My Side of the Mountain. It was a boys book but I very much related to it; I suppose that was a start of my obsession with the outdoors. None of the coded as “girl” books had enough of the wild outside for me.
I was a precocious reader and got through the horse stuff before age 7, and The Little House on the Prairie books were interesting but I felt the racism and totally lost interest when it became about getting married and all that; I was born a feminist apparently.
When I was 9 I had an accident involving my ear, so that summer I was not allowed to swim anymore (getting kicked in the ear under water will shred your eardrum and mess things up past that point) and we lived in a very hot climate. I’d go to the library 3 times a day until I read every shelf (in order) of kids science books. At age 12 I read my aunt’s entire encyclopedia set, all 23 volumes though I admit that by the last third I was skipping what didn’t interest me. I feel like it’s a breakthrough that as an adult I can now drop a book that isn’t doing it for me and move on.
Steeplejack
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I had the opposite trajectory: the Spenser: For Hire TV series came along after I had been reading the novels for quite a while. I thought it was okay but that’s all. It, like the novels, got out over its skis as Hawk took on superhero qualities.
Central Planning
@Steeplejack: I found the Spencer novels maybe 25 years ago. I liked them because they were fast reads. I agree with the formulaic aspect of many of them. I tried watching Spencer For Hire but it didn’t quite capture what I felt from the books.
Xavier
You people are nerds, but I will not be outdone! I used to read my older sisters’ readers, I think the name of the series was “Streets and Roads.” Total middle America for a kid who did not grow up in middle America.
TheflipPsyd
I loved From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiller and re-read it every few years. How about Lois Duncan? Stranger with My Face, Killing Mr. Griffin, etc. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. And M.E. Kerr’s books (she wrote so many but I remember Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack. Then there was S.E. Hinton who wrote The Outsiders. And then some other stand alone one hit wonders: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Wait Til Helen Comes. Zis for Zachariah.
kalakal
A book I absolutely adored from the age of 6 onward was Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes. I’ve been a sucker for Classical Greek Mythology ever since. Anyone else get an early age blast of mythology?
Omnes Omnibus
@kalakal:
Bulfinch’s Mythology here.
Steeplejack
@William D:
I think some of those series were “modernized” in the ’50s, but even as a kid I picked up on some odd details, e.g., I think Frank and Joe drove around in a “roadster.” Even in the ’50s that was a clunker. And I think one summer at my grandparents’ farm I found a few original editions in their attic that really brought home how old the series was.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@kalakal: Oh yes, I had a Greek mythology book I loved. Amazon ran a series, Great Greek Myths, I watched not long ago, pretty good.
SectionH
OMG, so happy this thread is still going.
Quick: Nancy Drew was ok, but her cousins Tomboy (sorry) and Beth (plump girly girl) were kinda more interesting. |
Otherwise, I was a horse girl before I was much of a reader. So the Marguerite Henry books were IT for ages. Not just the Chincoteague pony stories, but the Morgan horse book and the book about one of the 3 founding sires of all the Thoroughbreds in the world. Oh, and the Black Stallion. Oh, a book that killed me – the real Black Beauty. I start tearing up just thinking about that book. Ginger…
But then I read Jules Verne – 20,000 leagues. And loved that. So when I discovered that there was a sequel, I drove my poor mother nuts until she found it: The Mysterious Island. Much different but srsly interesting in its own way.
And then I guess Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle in Time. I really liked that book. I was still a kid then, so I’ll pass on the sequels to that.
Not sure if Mark Twain (Tom and Huck) count as kids’ books but I certainly read them younger than 12, and I have great fondness for them. Never mind the rest of Sam’s oeuvre which I really appreciate.
The Lodger
@Shana: A friend from choir attended a couple of Betsy-Tacy conventions. They sounded like a lot of fun.
Fahrenheit -460
@Miss Bianca: I adored these as a kid, and when I read these to my 13-year-old daughters and they LOVED them too!
Pappenheimer
@schrodingers_cat: Growing up in 60’s Calcutta = early exposure to Enid Blyton. I also enjoyed my illustrated book on the Pandavas (title and author long lost to memory) – legends from a time when there were wide forestlands between city-states. The part where the brothers are being taught archery stayed with me, though…
“What do you see, Arjuna?”
“I see the bird, Master”
“Shoot.”
Steeplejack
@kalakal:
Edith Hamilton. I think it was just called Mythology.
SectionH
@Steeplejack: Yes, her book “Mythology” is good but not exactly a kids’ book. Although “kids” doesn’t ‘xcatly have obvious perimeters
It was useful a place to start.
Steeplejack
@SectionH:
I read a paperback copy in fifth or sixth grade. Maybe it was an “abridged” kids’ edition.
KENNETH TIVEN
@WaterGirl:
As a reader, I spent part of my summer camp for two years reading all 11 Lanny Budd books written by Upton Sinclair.
Budd was the son of an American arms manufacturer. Therefore, he had the confidence of world leaders, witnessing events and often propelling them. As a sophisticated socialite comfortable with all cultures and socioeconomic classes, Budd was the antithesis of the ugly American. It clearly had a profound impact on my approach to journalism, politics, and life. Interestingly the third book in the series, Dragon’s Teeth won the Pulitzer for novels in 1943 when the issue of WW2’s outcome was still in doubt. As I think about it, this is why the RW in America is opposed to what students can read, preferring the faux-sanitized version of US history.
BTW: a devoted Ballon reader for years.
SectionH
@Steeplejack: the edition I think I still have (yeah, that’s 2500 miles away before I can check) wasn’t abridged afaik. That’s a different problem…
Otoh, my Mom didn’t generally shelter me: I’m pretty sure it was her copy
bjacques
@kalakal: The corner of my intermediate school library ca. 1974-1976 had a great collection of myths and legends, so besides Greek, there were Norse, Celtic, (Western?) African, and US regional legends. Ghost stories, science fiction from the 1940s to the late 1960s, young adult (The Dark Tower, The Ghost Boat). Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys were in our elementary classroom libraries, though somehow I have a memory that one had HP Lovecraft’s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos II in it. The Three Investigators, Mad Scientists’ Club, The Detectives Four (?). The school library subscribed to a monthly periodical called READ, that always finished a dystopian science fiction story like Richard Matheson’s “Born Of Man And Woman” and “Examination Day” by someone else. At least those are the stories I remember.
Scholastic Book Services: C B Colby’s “Strangely Enough”.
At home, my parents had Naked Lunch and Hunter Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels”, the latter I read when I was about 12 but didn’t really understand it.
Did that book way upthread about the Jewish family feature a kid called Herbie Bookbinder who was always getting crosswise with a bigger kid named Lenny Krieger? I think they end up becoming friends after a week at a kochalein resort.
KSinMA
@zhena gogolia: Loved the Trumpeter of Krakow!
Tehanu
I had two anthologies of stories that I loved. One of them I found in a used bookstore recently — it has Charles Kingsley’s story of Perseus and The Pied Piper of Hamelin and “The Reformed Pirate” by Frank A. Stockton. The other I’ve never been able to find; the first story in it was George MacDonald’s “Cross Purposes” and I’ve never forgotten it. I also had Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, with all the illustrations; Louisa May Alcott’s Jack and Jill, which I still prefer (along with Eight Cousins and An Old-Fashioned Girl) to Little Women; Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates; The Little Lame Prince; Huckleberry Finn; and The Arabian Nights with the color illustrations by Maxfield Parrish.
Groucho48
@PaulB: I loved the Freddy the Pig books when I was a kid! I read one a couple years ago, and it holds up pretty well.
As a younger reader, I really loved the Harold and the Purple Crayon books. Magical! There was also a series about Mr. Bass and the Mushroom Planet I liked. Also, a collection of fairy tales. East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Wonderful illustrations. I read a few Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews but never really got into them. I did like the Hardy Boy series on the Mickey Mouse Club. I also loved Enid Blyton and her The — of Adventure series. Kiki the parrot stole every scene she was in. A series I didn’t see mentioned in the first few dozen comments was The Forest Runner series, by Joseph Altsheler. Set back when Kentucky was the frontier. It’s probably horribly politically incorrect but when you’re 7-8-9 in the 50s, that just didn’t register as a problem, and I loved them. Andre Norton had a few 2-3 books long series aimed at kids with continuing characters. Time Trader series. Stars are Ours series, Solar Queen series. And, probably the favorites of my preteen years were the Tarzan and John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I also loved Dr. Doolittle, but when the controversy over his racism surfaced, I looked into it, because I didn’t see them as out of the ordinary for the times, I found that the versions of his books I had read had been heavily revised to remove most of it. Saw excerpts of the originals and, yes, they were way racist. Oh, and when I was a little older, loved the Hornblower books. And various Robert Louis Stevenson books.
Kathleen
@Almost Retired: Yes! I read those books!
cursorial
@Suzanne: I had a box set of Gordon Korman’s Bruno and Boots series that I re-read as a kid until the bindings were destroyed. Growing up in small-town America, I completely romanticized the strange idea of boarding schools growing up, just based on those books.
The book I remember loving, and searching for to share with kids once I was grown, was The Great Christmas Kidnapping Caper, by Jean Van Leeuwen. One of a short series about three mice living in the NYC Macy’s – it shared the mouse-eye view of the human world with some of the Beverly Cleary books, but with more of a screwball caper/heist energy to it. One of those treasured books-you-never-outgrow for me.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
OMG, I loved the Landmark books. Also read Heinlein, The Hobbit, LOTR in junior high. Did anyone read Gladys Malvern books? I loved fantasy: The Edward Eager books, etc.Got started on Agatha Christie in junior high also, as well as the nearly endless supply of my grandparent’s Readers Digest Condensed books
Adored the books of Robert Lawson when I was a kid, as well as his illustrations (Ben and Me, etc.)
Travels with Charley
This has been such a great thread! I’ve never met someone else who loved the Albert payson terhune books…not to mention all of the other series identified (too many to list). The only series I haven’t seen mentioned yet is the beany Malone series; set in WWII, father is a newspaper reporter. The silver brumby books (which I can’t find now). As a teenager, ALL of the georgette heyer regency romances, which I still read.
WereBear
@Baud: yes
Nelle
@Pete Downunder: Amother Arthur Upfield fan here. They have a good sense of place .
scribbler
@Travels with Charley: Yes to the Beany Malone books! I had forgotten all about them until your mention, but I loved them. So many great memories (from my very earliest) of hanging out in public libraries, browsing the shelves.
AM in NC
@WV Blondie: All of a Kind Family! I loved those as a girl!
Count me as another fan of the Three Investigators series, Nancy Drew, and a bunch of Judy Blume books.
Also loved, loved, loved the Great Brain series of books. I was thrilled when my two boys also loved them. Funny, smartly written, ultimately sweet story lines, and what kid doesn’t love to see the kid outfox the adults (but where the adults aren’t dolts either). Just great.
WaterGirl
@Mike in Oly: Your full description is much appreciated! thank you.
WaterGirl
@Hitchhiker: I loved Julie of the Wolves. I have kept my copy all these years.
WaterGirl
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I did not know that. I might have to try some of the new ones.
WaterGirl
@StringOnAStick: Yikes. Your accident sounds awful. Can eardrums recover? Reading all the science books on the shelves in the library. Amazing. We had encyclopedias, but I sure never read them cover to cover.
KimK
Whoa, taking me back! Trixie Belden and Cherry Ames. I LOVED Trixie, I must have read all those books 10 times each, at least the pre-1970 books. Mystery of the Emeralds set in Williamsburg was the beginning of my interest in the Civil War.
I had all my mother’s Cherry Ames books (still have them) and those books are the reason I became a nurse. I didn’t have quite the adventures that Cherry had, but it has been a rewarding career.
Thanks for this post!
WaterGirl
@KENNETH TIVEN: I have never heard of the Lanny Budd books.
It’s clear that the books we read as kids influenced us, and also helped us figure out who we are and what we liked.
Glad you commented. Lurk less, comment more, I always say! :-)
WaterGirl
@Groucho48:
I had no idea there was more than one!
JML
wow, so many old friends in these books. I have been a voracious reader basically my entire life, so I dove into a lot of these series early (before moving on to more adult science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery).
Hardy Boys? check, but these were inconsistently available at the library. Three Investigators? devoured these for a while, liked them more than Encyclopedia Brown. Boxcar Children & Famous Five were real hits. I banged through pretty much all of the Little House on the Prairie books (school library had them all) and liked them well enough at the time (second grade, maybe?).
Really liked the Five a lot. Wanted to hang out with them.
pensive
@Baud: I loved these
Miss Bianca
@SarahK: Dead thread, but…the Twin books! One of the things that passed directly from my mother to me. The Scottish Twins was far and away my favorite.
And oh, dear, so many people loved A Wrinkle in Time…am I the only one who never made it through that book as a kid, and had to force myself to finish it as an adult? Probably. :(
However, Ursula LeGuin *did* write The Earthsea Trilogy, right? I loved those.
JML
@Miss Bianca: Correct: LeGuin wrote Earthsea. (and there are additional works after the original trilogy too)
I liked L’Engle (and was frustrated that I could only ever find the Wrinkle In Time, Wind In the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet group from her).
Uncle Jeffy
@Fahrenheit -460: Finally someone remembers Rick and Scotty and their Indian friend (whose name escapes me).
Groucho48
@WaterGirl: There were around half a dozen. Loved them all.
Miss Bianca
louc
Nostalgia time!
I loved Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden and the Happy Hollisters and Pippi Longstocking and Little House and the Bobbsey Twins and Phyllis Whitney’s teen mysteries.
Also loved a Wrinkle in Time but was disappointed in the sequels because in AWIT, Meg was smarter than Cal and better at math while he was better in English. then all of a sudden, he’s a brilliant mathematician and she’s a stay-at-home mom. wtf?! I did love the cherub, though.
Lagavulin
@Uncle Jeffy: Chadha!
Larch
@Kathleen: Yes! I devoured those biographies as a kid, but couldn’t find them for my niece.
Looking back, their coverage of women and Blacks was amazingly extensive, especially for the time — mid/late 60s — and even for today, I’m afraid. Not just the “big names” but more obscure people I didn’t encounter again until much later in much deeper reading. I don’t remember bios of Hispanic or Asian people, though. Not sure if they actually weren’t included in the series or if my library didn’t stock them or if I simply overlooked/didn’t get to them.
Jacel
Great long thread!
I read a lot of early Beverly Cleary stories.
I read a number of Hardy Boys books, tried Nancy Drew which was more enjoyably written, but didn’t bond with mysteries.
Freddy The Pig novels were my favorites, and they do hold up to reading as an adult. The Rescuers/Miss Bianca series was a favorite. “The Gammage Cup” by Carol Kendall was a fantasy I recall enjoying even more than “The Hobbit”.
I read a lot of science fiction juveniles from the library of which I haven’t managed to remember the authors or titles. When the Heinlein juveniles got reissued after a lengthy absence, those didn’t ring any bells for me.
Non-fiction wise, I devoured books in the “How And Why” series along with the thick books by V. M. Hillyer (“The Child’s History Of The World” and “The Child’s Geography Of The World”). “The Golden Treasury Of Poetry” edited by Louis Untermeyer was in my hands very frequently, especially on family car trips; it long seemed the perfect book.
From others in this thread, I’m glad to see Mark Crilley’s Akiko books are some kids’ favorites. As an adult I enjoyed his comic books, and when I saw the illustrated books he created for a younger audience I envied kids who would be able to grow up reading them. Also, I did not know of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd books, which I must seek out now.
Ajabu
I didn’t post this last night because I thought the thread would be dead by 11 PM. Water girl reminded me today that medium cool can go on forever. Just wanted to let you all know about my good friend Joyce, Carol Thomas, who became very prominent as a writer of Black children’s books. She was an extraordinary woman who died in 2016. Google her name for the material. There’s too many to list here…
And, as a blatant act of self promotion, Valentine’s Day is coming up and I have a wonderful CD of love songs available. Get my E mail from water girl if you’re interested…