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.

[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*

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Do you know akirlu? She was born in Sweden and is a big Moomin fan.

The other somewhat obscure books I loved as a child were John Blaine's (Stratemeyer syndicate actually) Rick Brant books. Also hard to find but I have a nearly complete collection now.

MKK

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I believe akirlu's was the journal on which I was saying it, actually. (Which dodges the question of whether I know akirlu, because I'm at the stage where my answer would be, "No, but we're on each other's friendslists.")

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

LOVE Moomins. Ryan just showed me plushy Moomins online, for $50 tho.

And I forgot, I still have my Dark is Rising series. And I just bought the collected Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, though it only covers 3 of the 4 books for some idiotic reason.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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."

[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.

[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).

[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 :)

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 ;) )

[fiddledragon]

oooh...there's another one I absoultely adored (The Witch of Blackbird Pond not the Trixie Belden books, though my grandmother *tried* to get me to like them *chuckle*) I saw it at B&N last night, and thought about getting it.

Re: Oh yes

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

REALLY???

Might there be more than one by the same name? Or did it get pared down for some reason in between? Oh I would DESPERATELY love to find that book again...it had EVERYTHING...I was reading Jabberwocky at 5 years old in that book. I loved it - the cozy Robert Frost, the unfathomable Longfellow...oh if only I could find it.

Re: Oh yes

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is a more generic title for children's poetry books, yes. There are several of them.

Re: Oh yes

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Edna St. Vincent Millay was my favorite poet in the world when I was 7. I was absolutely crushed to find out that New York City had not stayed in the 1920s.

[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.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

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

carbonel also likes them.