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Like a lot of people here, I loved the Ramona books, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, pretty much anything Judy Blume.
But, it was Laura Ingalls Wilder that made me a reader. I can't count how many times I've read her books. I remember the feeling of sadness I felt as a kid when I realized that she had died long before I came around. I always dreamed of meeting her and being kindred spirits (Anne of Green Gables reference...loved that too).
Also, any of the Little Britches, Man of the Family, etc books by Ralph Moody. Those were my 2nd favorite set of of books (after Little House).
All the Little House on the Prairie books, Little Women (still love it, but you need to get the full version), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (again, there are 2 editions..get the full one), The Endless Steppe...(very interesting book..the first one I read about Jews during WWII...as I have gotten older it is one of my favorite subjects to read about.
I really liked The Endless Steppe and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as well...along those same lines, As the Waltz Was Ending. I still have all of those somewhere....
Have to add fairytales here. As a child, I had a whole series of books of them, and remember still reading them as a much older child. I remember the horror at my Mom's suggestion we 'get rid of some of these!'
And for a kid, it is weird, but I liked my Father's art books. He is an architect, and had bookshelves in the room we were supposed to stay out of as children, but when I could, I enjoyed sneaking in there and pulling those big coffee-table style books with the magnificent copies of paintings and sculpture, and his Frank Lloyd Wright books, off the shelf to look at the photos. The entire book covered my straddled little legs. Thought it was kinda neat grown-ups had their own 'picture books.'
typOnce I actually started reading, it was anything and everything I could get my hands on. The local libraries kind of limited what kids could take out, but they gave up on me after awhile. But I also had an uncle who'd died before I was born and all his books were stored in my gran's attic, so I was reading Dr Seuss right along with Edgar Rice Burroughs, and all kinds of pre-WW II boy's books. One of my favorites was Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, I was maybe 6 or 7 when I read that. All the Terhune books, all the Black Stallion books, anything about horses or dogs. I did get a few Honeybunch books as presents, but those were pretty quickly over and done with. There was an old Book of Knowlege that had a lot of fables and myths in it, those I read between 3rd and 4th grade one summer. Once I finished with all the horse and dog books in the library, I went straight to adult fiction. Lloyd Douglas, Sholem Asch, Leslie Turner White, Kathleen Windsor... Right after my kids were born, I took a Children's Lit class and had to read a couple hundred and write commentaries on them. So I got a whole new bunch to read to my kids, every night there was a bedtime story. They loved the Richard Scarry books although those weren't bedtime stories, those were 'read with me' books, and the ones about Frances the badger. They really identified with Frances and her woes! I read all the Narnia and Little House books to them and they loved those. My favorite of all their kid books was one called Timothy Turtle of Tookalook Lake, but it seems to have been a flash in the pan. I've forgotten the author long ago, but even then I couldn't find anything else by him[or her].
But I also paid a price for my eclectic reading - my 7th grade English teacher gave me an F on a book report because the book I'd picked was On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. He said it wasn't suitable for a child to read!
Last edited by karibear; 01-29-2008 at 12:04 AM..
Reason: typo
BOO! BOO! BOO! to that 7th grade English teacher, and kudos to you for reading Kerouac. Not sure what you might've been like as a student, but I think I would have argued that F into the ground if I had to -- especially if I could show I understood what I had read.
I admire anyone who goes into teaching, for the most part, but when I think of some of the ways people in that kind of position could conceivably 'destroy' something in others, I could scream. Did that English teacher ever miss a wonderful opportunity to steer you onto other works.
You know, I still have a fondness for some of the early readers from my school days. The books we had were Alice and Jerry, and I have sent my husband to eBay to find copies of those for me. My younger sisters had Sally, Dick and Jane readers, and I enjoyed helping them read, so I like that series too.
BOO! BOO! BOO! to that 7th grade English teacher, and kudos to you for reading Kerouac. Not sure what you might've been like as a student, but I think I would have argued that F into the ground if I had to -- especially if I could show I understood what I had read.
I admire anyone who goes into teaching, for the most part, but when I think of some of the ways people in that kind of position could conceivably 'destroy' something in others, I could scream. Did that English teacher ever miss a wonderful opportunity to steer you onto other works.
Oh, he wasn't all that bad, just a kind of conservative old duck. Some of my teachers were a lot worse, and some of them were great. But his idea of what was suitable and mine weren't even in the same state, let alone the same ballpark! His favorite thing was diagramming sentences, and he was very good at that. But there were other kids in the class who didn't fare any better than I as far as the literature part was concerned. We were also supposed to memorize a poem every week and recite on Fridays. One of the boys in the class was a self-proclaimed atheist [gotta love those opinionated 13 year olds who think they know everything], and the teacher found out. After that, every poem we were assigned had "God" in it somewhere, and every Friday the boy would say "You know I'm not going to say that," and he'd get an F, too.
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