I’m all zingy, zappy, and fizzy. I think I’ll be reading late into the night.
Blueberries in nonfat yogurt make me happy.
Question of the day, following a discussion at D’s about childhood reading: What book or books in childhood did you particularly love? Which one or ones did you reread multiple times? Which one would you go back and read now, as an adult?
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I went back and read The Phantom Tollbooth recently. It was my favorite as a kid, and it still rocks.
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H.G. Wells – First Men in the Moon and anything by Conan Doyle were my favortie elementary school reads -lots of fantasy like Verne , Wells etc
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I loved any book by Alvin Schwartz and Shell Silverstein and I’d gladly go back and re-read any of them again. And The Pokey Little Puppy. I keep that with me at all times just in case.
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Off the top of my head…
Where The Wild Things Are and the Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak.
The Encyclopedia Brown and Danny Dunn series.
And for the obscurists in the audience, Arm In Arm by Remy Charlip.
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yup.
where the wild things are…
actually… they were watching the movie version a couple weeks ago at dasan’s daycare when i picked him up… i couldn’t have been happier.
that book rules.
also anything with a pick your own ending.
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oh, and the growing tree, and the happy caterpiller…
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Depends on what you mean by childhood. Very young: the Monster At The End Of This Book, Horton Hears A Who, Tootle, Poky Little Puppy, Hop On Pop, Old Hat New Hat. I have ’em all still, most recently reread Horton, which through the bleary eyes of adulthood seems like a political statement on one elephant’s steadfast refusal to bow to the madness of crowds. A Swiftian statement on society’s intolerance of dissent. Like “The Prisoner” with a pachyderm.
Middle years: Podkayne of Mars by Heinlein was the first SF book I ever read with a female protagonist. Up till that point I didn’t think girls could do anything but mope about on the prairie in awful gingham dresses waiting to be mercifully run down by a rabid heifer, or solve really, really stupid crimes when the Hardy Boys were off doing whatever Hardy Boys do when they’re unsupervised. Disobedient, crafty girls in space! I read Podkayne, probably 9 times, but none in adulthood. I should have a look at it, actually.
Slightly before teenage years: Little Women, and To Kill A Mockingbird. (beaten that topic to death lately, I know.) I read the latter once a year, pretty much.
After that I got all punky and weird and started reading crazy, forbidden things. Like Judy Blume!
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when I was VERY little I loved “The Color Kittens” and “The monster at the end of this book”
when I got a bit older my Dad used to read to me from this book of shorts that he won when he was a very little boy in sunday school. The stories were really out there.
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I read D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths a few tens of times when I was a kid. Also, /All About Dinosaurs/ and /All About Electricity/ were repeating favorites. As I got older I discovered /Choose Your Own Adventure/ books and began obsessively mapping them out one by one.
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childrens books. my favorite subect!
Eloise
the pobble who had no toes
the giving tree
the rainbow goblins
cloudy with a chance of meatballs
Miss Nelson is Missing
Harold and the Purple Crayon
Watch out for the Chicken feet in your soup
The Very Hungrey Caterpillar
I have to go to school or I’d add more 😉
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What a dangerous question to ask me. I was in the book club, and the highest ranking member (yes, i’m a huge nerd) from the age of 6 until 11. So I had lots of fun reads. If I could, i’d just pillage the children’s section of an old library and kick aside all this blue’s clues and elmo bullshiat! Gimme the classics any day!
Especially stuff like Where the wild things are, and the thief of always. Swoon
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bookssssssssssss
Little House on the Praire (re-read multiple times, Farmer Boy more often than the series as a whole)
Where the Red Fern Grows
To Kill a Mockingbird (which I still re-read at least once a year)
Old Yeller
White Fang
Anything Roald Dahl wrote for children, and those are very different years later (especially after having learned more about him and read his adult stories).
Where the Wild Things Are (I think it’s telling how often this comes up.)
The Encyclopedia Brown series (though that’s something you definitely grow out of).
The Little Prince (which I definitely did not get as a child and enjoy more and more every time)
E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, etc. etc.
I repeatedly checked out the only book on Norse mythology in my middle school library.
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Re: bookssssssssssss
The Encyclopedia Brown series (though that’s something you definitely grow out of).
I might have thought that too, had there not been an article on him in the Onion a while back… 🙂
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The Case of the Crazy Shit
Modern Humorist did some good parodies of the stuff. I still have fond memories of the books, but it’s not something I’d ever re-read.
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As a kid I read a lot of anthologies of science fiction and I still have most of those around, so there are probably 50 stories that I have read at least once a year since I was 8. “The Marching Morons” by CM Kornbluth springs immediately to mind, as does “Automatic Tiger” though I can’t recall the author.
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Every Roald Dahl book I could get my hands on, especially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach.
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To copy some previous answers:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Phantom Tollbooth
A Wrinkle in Time (I never read the other books in the series)
Anything Jules Verne
Anything H.G. Wells
There was an Asimov series called “Robot City,” as I recall, that was not actually written by Asimov and was aimed for teens and kids that I enjoyed. I think they were mostly mysteries, and specifically locked-room mysteries. I’m not so sure about the preset re-read value, though.
I had a teacher read us aloud “The 21 Balloons,” but I never retained the name of the book, so all through my teens and adulthood, I would have little flashback memories to the story, but be aggravated because I could never remember what it was. About a year ago, I did one of my pretty-much-yearly web searches for the book and finally found the title! It was quickly ordered from Amazon, read in an evening, and made me a very happy little monkey.
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oh yeah, Phantom Tollbooth, AND The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. I’ve always wanted to go there.
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the narnia books, the dark is rising books, where the wild things are, mister dog, hmm what else. I think I am probably exempt from the “going back and reading” part since I regularly read them to the kids 🙂
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