Meh.

[mrissa]

Will I read the new Harry Potter book? Probably, at some point. I write children's and YA fantasy novels, and I think it's good to keep tabs on one's field. It's hard to know if you're going to do something that looks derivative of The Great Big Bestseller if you haven't read the said GBB.

Will I read it soon? Eh, probably not. If someone gave it to me for my birthday, I would thank them and put it on the pile for eventually, behind, say, The Reverse of the Medal and Last Tango in Aberystwyth.

Do I care if you enthuse about it? No. Enthuse away.

Do I care if you anti-enthuse about it? Not really, but unless you've read it or want to say specific things about other YA authors and/or earlier volumes (or are really clever, and really, when are you lot not clever?), I'd rather read about something you like than something you don't like or (more appropriately, I hope, in this case) don't much care about. It's generally more interesting to me.

Sort of along this topic, you often hear of parents giving away boxes of priceless baseball cards. Do you still have the books you loved most in childhood? Did you ever own them, or were they mostly library books? Is there anything missing that you would really like to have again?

I could swear I'm missing a mixed box of childhood books containing Arthur Ransome's Peter Duck and Madeleine L'Engle's The Arm of the Starfish, among others. I've given up and replaced Starfish (which is, by the way, one deeply weird-assed book) and have Peter Duck on my Amazon list. But mostly I'm looking for the ones I got from the library: the Bagthorpe books, some but not all of E. Nesbit, that sort of thing.

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Sort of along this topic, you often hear of parents giving away boxes of priceless baseball cards. Do you still have the books you loved most in childhood? Did you ever own them, or were they mostly library books? Is there anything missing that you would really like to have again?

A couple of years ago when I was talking with friends via Blog and Lj comments about childhood books, it dawned on me that I never owned any books as a child. I could not remember having a single book of my own. Every single book I read came from the library, was borrowed from neighbors or I read at my grandmother's house, which was full of books. I read constantly, but the stacks of books I read all belonged to someone else.

I was the oldest of four kids and I knew we didn't have much money at the time, in that vague way kids know other people have more. But until that discussion I think I'd blocked from my memory that my parents never bought me a single book during my entire childhood. I didn't own a book of my own until I was in college and started buying them for myself.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some people are just not book buyers, even if they have money for it, even if they're readers. My parents had a hard time adjusting to my book buyer tendencies: they kept saying, "But you can get that from the library."

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Starfish was one of my deeply formative books. It helped frame my mindset on the kind of person I wanted to be. A Joshua, a Canon Tallis. Doing the right thing because it was needed.

I still have all of my Narnia books, all of my Prydain books, my Laura Ingalls Wilder collection, and all of my L'Engles. I still have Rabbit Hill and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. In recent years I've taken to tracking down and replacing other books I loved as a child: the Avonlea books, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Bridge to Terabithia, some of the Trixie Belden series. I spent a lovely hour in a local children's fantasy bookshop the other day, just drooling.

I do enjoy Harry Potter, incidentally, and will get the book eventually. I'm just burned out on the very idea because of all the hype at the moment. It's my "inner Brit" recoiling at the excess. *g*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The Witch of Blackbird Pond ate my head the first time I read it, and I've never been able to recapture that with it. Other head-eaters (Terebithia, God, yes) have worked just fine, but not that one.

I liked Trixie Belden, too. I liked her a gajillion times better than Nancy Drew, I think in part because she hung around with boys and still got to be the one to solve the mysteries and do the fun stuff. And the boys were kind of romantically interested in the girls but without being all goopy and vice versa. Ned was Nancy's Ken doll. Jim was Trixie's special friend. I didn't think much of Ken dolls, but I always had some special friend in tow.

[ellarien]

I loved E. Nesbit, but never owned any of her books. Maybe one of these days, if I reestablish a consistent pattern of rereading, I'll try to get my hands on some of them.

At about fifteen or sixteen, in a moment of ... something, I sent a lot of my childhood books, including the Narnia books and my collection of Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings books (boarding-school books, very funny, possible early precursor of HP without the magic -- I wonder if those are still in print and if older nephew would like them), to a charity shop. It was probably a mistake. I did hang on to Watership Down, and The Hobbit, which I still have; some others got passed down to my sister and are still in Sheffield.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Rereading is good, but sometimes it's more primal than that for me; sometimes the books just need to live with me and that is that.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have most of my beloved childhood books--the Oz books, the Narnia books, Susan Cooper, Swallows and Amazons, The Wind in the Willows, Asterix and Tintin, Diana Wynne Jones, J. R. R. Tolkien. Most of them are the copies I originally read (I also have a pirated Taiwanese edition of The Wind in the Willows), except for all but two of the Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books, which I got from the library initially, and then acquired my own copies when they started rereleasing them sometime in the early '90s. renenet found me a copy of Aliki's Mummies Made in Egypt, which I adored as a child (somewhat to my parents' dismay), and still think is one of the coolest books ever. I don't know where A. A. Milne has gotten off to. I read Zilpha Keatley Snyder from the library, and have, sadly, found that as an adult, I don't love them anymore. I also read a lot of Enid Blyton as a child, and feel no need whatsoever to read them again. Ditto Nancy Drew. But I bought One Monster After Another for myself last Christmas, when I was supposed to be buying gifts for actual children--I liked it very much as a child, but I think I love it more as an adult. And I need more Mercer Mayer. Desperately.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I liked some of ZKS better when I was reading it for a freelancing assignment last year than I did as a kid, and some of it less. She wasn't one of my big peoples as a kid, though.

For some reason I didn't discover Diana Wynne Jones until I was an adult. I don't know why. I'm certainly young enough to have read her stuff as a kid, but our library never had it, I guess.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I recently re-acquired a Louis Untermyer collection that I had had as a child read until it had fallen apart.

K.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've started requesting some replacements as gifts in hardcover in hopes that they'll last longer.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

From about the age of 8 or 9 I read everything I could get my hands on: books from the school library, the public library, my mother's library books, books given me as gifts, books I found at my grandmother's house. Whatever I could get my hands on. I still have Alice in Wonderland and Little Women from those days. I practically wore out the library's copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books but I don't have those. I have many I found at my grandmother's, including aforementioned Alice, Gulliver, Oz, and so on. But she had a bunch I've never seen anywhere else and which seem to have disappeared to some unknown place. No one else has ever heard of the adventures of the Teeny Weenies which I read with delight. Sigh.

MKK

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The worst ones are the ones whose author I forgot. Even if I otherwise didn't like alecaustin, I would owe him forever for just saying the word "Bagthorpe." I had forgotten the series name or the author's name, and "they had grey covers with monochrome circles and a crazy English family" was not getting me anywhere with anyone.

I was saying just the other day that it's a great relief to live a life in which other people have heard of Moomins, which was not the case a few years ago.

The Adventures of the Teenie Weenies

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

By Wm. Donahey. I have the Junior Edition. The cover is a picture of the Dunce knee deep in a piece of custard pie. Isn't a scary combination of charming and dreadful? Gogo the little colored Teenie Weenie isn't even the worst; at least he gets a name, unlike The Chinaman and The Indian. Too be fair, very few Teenie Weenies seem to have names, and if being known only by title is good enough for The Lady of Fashion it must be good enough for anyone.

Oh yes

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

there are MANY books I loved throughout my childhood. In my case it was my eldest sister, Deidra, who inspired a love of reading. Dee would read to me from a huge green cloth-covered book which I THOUGHT was called "A Child's Garden of Verses" until I actually SAW that book a few years ago and the book I saw was a very very slim volume, whereas the one we had when I was little was just humongous, like a dictionary. It was in these pages that I lost myself reading Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Ballad of the Harp-Weaver's Son" which to this day makes me cry, and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" and my all-time favorite, Archibald MacLeish's "Eleven." But these are not books, these are poems from one very special book I will never find, because like you, I don't know the name of the volume.

I do still have several special books from my childhood, including Jimmy Potter Buys a Lollipop (corny but I loved it), all my Laura Ingalls Wilder books (which poor Dylan has endured hearing read aloud countless times and I STILL read every year), and what I think was my favorite book for the art: The Potted Witch, or A Girl's Best Friend Is Her Mother. These books are falling apart but I still have them. Jas and I have also handed down our favorite YA and chapter books, such as Tolkien, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and Madeleine L'Engle books. Jason and I are big fans of reading aloud, and even when I was in nursing school and did not sleep, I made time for Jason to read aloud to us every night (at the time we were reading Once and Future King and The Three Musketeers). It always comforts me when I'm sad and Jason reads (or by now, recites by heart) Sylvie and Bruno excerpts. In many ways I had to reconstruct "the childhood that should have been" when I grew up, and these books played a big part in how I made it.

Re: Oh yes

[fiddledragon]

Oooooh! I used to have "A Child's Garden of Verses" - and yeah, it was HUGE (though mine wasn't cloth covered ;) )

[songwind.livejournal.com]

My favorite books as a kid were a mixed bag. I still own some (Book of Three, Wrinkle in Time, Narnia, LotR) and some I ditched a while ago (Xanth, Darkover, etc).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I still have my Darkover books, and sometimes I go back and reread a couple of them. The Forbidden Tower was a pretty important book in my life, out of proportion with how good it is.

[fiddledragon]

I never owned them myself, but I devoured every one I could find in the library: all of the "Shoes" books by Noel Streatfield :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Check the "S" section next time you're here. :)

carbonel also likes them.

[pameladean]

I have almost all of mine now. There was a dry period when about half the books I had loved passionately had been library books, and I didn't have them any more. Then I stumbled on the Book Boat in Greenwich, which is or was a children's boookstore, and there were Puffin editions of all the stuff I'd loved and a lot of stuff I'd heard of but never read.
Those editions are getting a little raggedy around the edges.

I was mainly seeking Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel books.

Read-to-death stuff that I owned all along includes Lewis Carroll, Madeleine L'Engle, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott. The set of Alcott my mother passed on to me was missing its copy of Little Men, so I didn't read that til I was in my twenties.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Should I read the Carbonel books?

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>Do you still have the books you loved most in childhood? Did you ever own them, or were they mostly library books? Is there anything missing that you would really like to have again?<<

Still have them--at the moment they're in an attic, but I refuse to give them up!

My wife's favorite book as a child was an Appalachian story from the 1940's called Cotton Top by Jean O'Neill. She never owned a copy, but had regularly checked one out from the local library. So after we got married I determined I was going to find one for her...after a few months of searching I turned up one on eBay that I payed something like $9 for. Extremely lucky, as we went looking for another copy recently for someone else, and the cheapest one we've been able to turn up so far is going for $280. Whew.

[ckd]

Many of the books I owned-and-read from my younger days have probably fallen victim to the repeated moves of my parents. With luck, they found their way to other children who loved them too.

I also read bunches of library books, but preferred having my own copy of anything I might want to re-read, on the grounds that if I want to re-read something I want to re-read it now, not when the library opens.

One series I should go back and rediscover: the Great Brain books.

As for E. Nesbit, last weekend I found a used copy of The Railway Children for hr_macgirl, who is also a Nesbit fan.

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I still have my copies of Narnia and Laura Ingalls Wilder and the A Wrinkle in Time trilogy. Others (Prydain, Earthsea, Riddlemaster) I've re-bought as an adult or I only had from the library in the first place.

My parents are still (12 years after high schoo) keeping books for me; every time I go home I bring whatever I have room for back. I'm lucky they haven't moved; they haven't even moved the shopping bags of books in "my" closet.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

My especially favorite books as a child were library books. But then I went and found them starting in high school, and bought them (in some cases all the editions of a given title I could find), and now they are Mine Mine Mine.

Which reminds me, I still need to keep an eye out for The Chestry Oak.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I have some of them, but due to a childhood spent moving overseas and back again, many of them vanished. I've been trying to get them back into my hands: books like Roller Skates and My Side of the Mountain and A Children's Almanack of Words at Play, plus L.M. Montgomery, Trixie Belden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Susan Cooper. But I read and reread so much that I have mostly forgotten when I read something for the first time.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

I have looked off and on for the first boxcar children book I read at school, the first "real" book I read that got me hooked on reading. I loved the 'Dorrie the little witch' books which I got from the library, more for the illustrations than anything else. I remember being quite taken by something called 'The mad scientists club' or something of that sort in fifth grade. I also, (mutters quietly) enjoyed choose-your-own-adventure books more than I probably ought to have.

At home I had oversized versions of the time machine, the invisible man, and paul bunyan tall-tales that had definitions and such at the edges of the pages so a little person could better understand the stories. Plus other books, but those were the ones that stand out.

I read the Hardy boys, but noticed that my brothers' (10 years-older) copies seemed more interesting than the then-current stories. I learned later that they rewrite each book ever few years so that it stays current.

I read the tripods trilogy serialized in Boy's Life before seeking out copies of my own.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I loved the tripods trilogy. We picked up several John Christophers for a dime apiece at a book sale once we moved home.

We have The Mad Scientists' Club. markgritter picked it up as a childhood favorite he wanted to have around.

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite books as a kid, the one I read over and over, was called "The Night They Stole the Alphabet". I've never found anyone else on the planet who's even heard of it, never mind read the thing. For a while I thought I'd dreamt up the whole thing, but I see that the library in Big!City nearby has it. Now I have to decide if it's worth packing up the kids for a road trip.

[palinade.livejournal.com]

I want all the comic books my brothers destroyed and my parents tossed.

I want the large volume Hans Christen Anderson storybook my brother took and does nothing with but put it up on a high shelf because it has "value".

I have the boxed set of Richard Scary books I'm now reading with Nathan, and they are very outdated, but fun. Nathan thinks it's a little funny to see household items and cars that look nothing like the ones he sees everyday.

I have the L'Engle, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis books. My sister has some others--they are in good hands, but I still miss them (Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and some more).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Siblings. I just don't know how this stuff works.