Fnaar
Smutmaster General
- Location
- Thumberland
Favourite childhood books
- Thread starter TVC
- Start date
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Cycleops
Legendary Member
- Location
- Accra, Ghana
"Grimm's Fairy Tales" with illustrations by Mervyn Peake. Scared me rigid!
Arch
Married to Night Train
- Location
- Salford, UK
I'm afraid I'm guilty of getting you wrong too? (and I ride recumbent, sometimes...)
Arch
Married to Night Train
- Location
- Salford, UK
Me too!
Now, I see that they are terribly formulaic, contrived, and a bit racist in places*, but I loved then as a kid, as they were full of FACTS about animals.
*perhaps just 'of their time'. I remember one line about "these days even some Africans go to University"... But I feel uneasy enough about them not to want to pass my collection onto my nephews.
Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
- Location
- Odawa
On the identity issue, one of the oldest cartoons ever published about the Net, back in 1993 (!)... it used to be everywhere, but people seem to have forgotten. It's interesting how online 'identity' has come to be so much a matter of pinning people down; things used to be much more fluid and ambiguous for a while back in the Utopian days of the digital frontier. But we seem to want (and expect) dogs to be dogs now...
Fnaar
Smutmaster General
- Location
- Thumberland
Flying_Monkey
Recyclist
- Location
- Odawa
Back to the subject... I was one of those weird kids who read everything in the children's section of the library (I presume most people actually remember libraries back when they had books in them...) before I was 10 and was given a special (secret) adult library card... so I was reading all kinds of things pretty young. I got in trouble for ordering the Marquis de Sade from the school bookshop when I was 13, but in the end they still let me have it - all I can say is, if you think James Bond was eye-opening...
So when I think of kids' books, much of what I'm really thinking of (and indeed what's already been mentioned here) would now be called Young Adult books... I loved Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, Lloyd Alexander and Alan Garner (already mentioned), Leon Garfield, John Christopher... Peter Dickinson was a major favourite - I loved The Changes sequence, Tulku and others - he's still writing, apparently - Tolkein and Lewis natch, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, which she has continued to write sporadically and which have grown up with her audience - the last book, The Other Wind is a beautifully moving adult work, but it is still absolutely and unequivocally Earthsea. I also loved the bits and pieces that I came across from other places - one of my favourite books was a kid's novel from New Zealand, The Boys of Puhawai, which just seemed incredibly exotic but also very real indeed. I read lots of mythology too, from Norse myths to Chinese tales... I could go one forever. I still get lost in books. My wife only really read non-fiction. I don't get it.
So when I think of kids' books, much of what I'm really thinking of (and indeed what's already been mentioned here) would now be called Young Adult books... I loved Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, Lloyd Alexander and Alan Garner (already mentioned), Leon Garfield, John Christopher... Peter Dickinson was a major favourite - I loved The Changes sequence, Tulku and others - he's still writing, apparently - Tolkein and Lewis natch, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, which she has continued to write sporadically and which have grown up with her audience - the last book, The Other Wind is a beautifully moving adult work, but it is still absolutely and unequivocally Earthsea. I also loved the bits and pieces that I came across from other places - one of my favourite books was a kid's novel from New Zealand, The Boys of Puhawai, which just seemed incredibly exotic but also very real indeed. I read lots of mythology too, from Norse myths to Chinese tales... I could go one forever. I still get lost in books. My wife only really read non-fiction. I don't get it.
U
User169
Guest
Nice! I crept the boards in my youth. But I never really had it in my blood, and that's what's so essential, isn't it, theatrical zeal in the veins. Alas I have little more than vintage wine and memories. It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself "I will never play the Dane." When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree?
marknotgeorge
Hol den Vorschlaghammer!
- Location
- Derby.
Objection!
I put it to the court that teenage boys (but not me) draw phalluses, not those things. Specifically, in Physics textbooks. More specifically, on the cartoon of Archimedes streaking out of the bath, if my school is a typical example...
Globalti
Legendary Member
I remember reading lots of Ladybird books and stuff like Peter Pan and we had the entire set of Beatrix Potter, which we only sold recently. Then when I was about eight, I remember my Dad coming back from a trip to Oxford and meeting him as I came downstairs. He held out a red, linen-bound book and said: "I think it's time you started reading something a bit more adult". It was a copy of Biggles in the Jungle. I read all the Biggles books after that, then all the Swallows & Amazons books, then at some time getting into Alistair MacLean and even, briefly, the Mary Stewart historic fantasies. I must have been going through a sensitive stage at that time.
Eton or Harrow?
swansonj
Guru
The copy on my bookcase, lovingly but autistically filed in the correct chronological sequence between Biggles In The South Seas and Biggles In Spain, is, sadly, a later edition with an orange cover. Or perhaps it's just faded.
Diggs
Veteran
- Location
- Billericay, Essex
Loved the Jennings books as a kid
Diggs
Veteran
- Location
- Billericay, Essex
Picked this up a while ago. Seems amazing to think that at some point we may even be able to set foot on the moon!
Archie_tect
De Skieven Architek... aka Penfold + Horace
- Location
- Northumberland
I always thought FM was a fruit bat.Does this mean you are actually not a monkey that flies?
Children of the New Forest was a surprise read.... and The Hobbit, given to me by my granny.
Loved all the AA Milne Pooh series [including Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young- can still remember all the words, tiddly-pom].
