As a kid who just read and read, I devoured most of the things people have mentioned (with the exception of
The Thirteen Clocks, which sounds great and I wish I had). Like ChrisKH, I was well onto the adult stuff by the time I was 8 or 9 and by 13 I was reading the translations of the Nag-Hamadi scrolls ordering Huysmanns and the Marquis de Sade from the school bookshop (no-one said I couldn't!).
However the things that stayed with me were odd ones:
-
Where the Wild Things Are - which is just the best illustrated kid's book ever;
- the original W.S. Audrey
Railway books with the brilliant painted illustrations and what now seems like nostalgia for a Britain with working railways! (the redone Thomas the Tank Engine stuff is dumbed down, brightly-coloured gack and is nothing like the originals);
- Susan Cooper's
The Dark is Rising series. All kinds of quite dark British myths enter the lives of a group of kids;
- Alan Garner's
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the
The Moon of Gomrath - a similar idea to Cooper's but even richer and darker and far better written - Alan Garner has since written two of my favourite adult novels,
Strandloper and
Thursbitch, he is a master or words;
- Ursula le Guin's
Earthsea sequence - they have a kind of austere, lonely beauty which appealed to me and still does - I read
The Other Wind, the fifth and probably final one, when it came out recently and it was extraordinarily moving;
- A book called
The Boys of Puhawai by 'Kim', which was a set of stories about three kids in New Zealand - no-one else I know has ever heard of it, and I don't know how I came across it, but
it's apparently considered quite important in NZ.
-
Storm Boy by Colin Thiele - about a boy who lives on the south Australian and his friendship with an old aboriginal guy, and a pelican! I later found out about the film that was made of it - which is just wonderful.
There's something about many of these in common, I think, and that is they are all rooted in a sense of kids being outcastes or out of place, unhappy with school and conventional things, and finding some place and sense of themselves in extraordinary things, whether those extraordinary things were just everyday adventures or being 'recognised' and chosen for something special. It says a lot about how I felt as a child! I've kept many of them. Whether my child(ren) will read them or not, I don't now - they might not need those worlds as much as I did - but I will give them the chance to discover them anyway...
