Seewalds 20 - Fashionably Modest and Baby Curls

[VineHeart137]

I love most of the books that have been mentioned here, but I also read many books that were inappropriate for my age when I was a kid. I would find my mom's books and read them. That's how I was introduced to VC Andrews (I still need to watch that Flowers In The Attic movie that came out on Lifetime). I also read Roots when I was 10 or 11, and I read several trashy romance novels with fairly vivid sex scenes.

And yet, in between all that, I still enjoyed Harry Potter, the American Girl books, and Archie comics lol. I did not discriminate with my reading material.

[purplepeony]

1 hour ago, Bad Wolf said:

Read Redwall as an adult and loved them. Weren't around when I was a kid. We just had Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome. Swallows and Amazon's, anyone? Also Narnia, LOTR. Lots of great YA fiction out there.

I pretty much only lurk but childhood fiction is one of my favourite topics. I'm 24 and absolutely loved swallows and amazons as a kid. Re-read it the other month and still really enjoyed it. I also loved Enid Blyton so much I have just done a unit on Malory towers with the class I teach! I also loved the Alex Rider series even though was told they were only for boys.

[BabyBottlePop]

1 hour ago, VineHeart137 said:

I love most of the books that have been mentioned here, but I also read many books that were inappropriate for my age when I was a kid. I would find my mom's books and read them. That's how I was introduced to VC Andrews (I still need to watch that Flowers In The Attic movie that came out on Lifetime). I also read Roots when I was 10 or 11, and I read several trashy romance novels with fairly vivid sex scenes.

Omg, yes for V.C Andrews. My mom would not let me get books like Gossip Girl cause she thought they'd be too dirty and yet she let me read books about incest and rape. To be honest, I'm not sure she even knew what those books were about. And I read The Thorn Birds! Loved that book. 

Sometimes I would read the books she got from the library-- I would skim them for sex scenes. She read Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, that ilk.

[SportsgalAnnie]

I read the BSC and BSCLS , American Girl, Alex Rider series and my favorite, Dear America / Royal Diaries 

[Rachel333]

I read absolutely everything I could as a kid, including stuff that wasn't really appropriate for kids like weird fundie marriage advice books.* I read through our set of encyclopedias several times. (Volume R-S was, incidentally, how I learned about sex.) I found my dad's Douglas Adams books and read those, which I loved.

We went to the library all the time too and I would always come back with a huge bag overflowing with books, but I read too much to keep up with and would run out before I could get back to the library.

*There was this one that advised men to be understanding of their wives because there are only about two days a month in which women are not overwhelmed by their hormones and can be reasonable. I was horrified by the picture of womanhood it offered and it made me dread puberty, since apparently my hormones would just take over.

[singsingsing]

I never read trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. I was far too sophisticated. Just kidding, I read the millennial equivalent: trashy, sexually explicit fan fiction.

[emscm]

Totally loved the Boxcar Children too for whoever mentioned that! And Anne of Green Gables. I have a lot of memories of reading chapter books at night with my parents and we made our way through those, Little House on he Prarie, Little Women, and most of the Roald Dahl books. 

In BSC... Now that I am older and also a secondary teacher, 8th grade and especially the 6th grade babysitters seem so young to me. It seemed so much more grown up when I was a kid! 

[Carm_88]

15 minutes ago, emscm said:

Totally loved the Boxcar Children too for whoever mentioned that! And Anne of Green Gables. I have a lot of memories of reading chapter books at night with my parents and we made our way through those, Little House on he Prarie, Little Women, and most of the Roald Dahl books. 

In BSC... Now that I am older and also a secondary teacher, 8th grade and especially the 6th grade babysitters seem so young to me. It seemed so much more grown up when I was a kid! 

Oh my goodness Anne of Green Gables! I read all 8 of those books again and again!  

[BabyBottlePop]

50 minutes ago, emscm said:

In BSC... Now that I am older and also a secondary teacher, 8th grade and especially the 6th grade babysitters seem so young to me. It seemed so much more grown up when I was a kid! 

And the covers half the time had the babysitters looking like 16-- esp. Stacey-- I couldn't wait to be that glamorous looking when I was in 8th grade! Yeah, didn't happen.

[HarleyQuinn]

This is embarassing now, but I read Go Ask Alice in 7th grade and I felt like it was the most grown up, intense thing I had ever read. I believed every word of it. It wasn't until after high school that I was browsing online that i realized Beatrice Sparks is a total hack. I was so naive.

[Audrey2]

 

I'll add myself to the Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary teams. If you are a Beverly Cleary fan, go to her old neighborhood, the Hollywood district in Portland, OR. You can even do the walking tour of Beverly Cleary's neighborhood and walk down Klickatat Street.

I also loved the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery series, and Paul Danziger books. I also can't forget the Barthe DeClements series, starting with Nothing's Fair in the Fifth Grade.

[feministxtian]

I'm so old I read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. By 8th grade or so I had switched to Star Trek novelizations, the Dragonriders of Pern series and then I found Clive Cussler. I was never into any sort of romance novel. Even now my tastes run to sci-fi (Kim Stanley Robinson is the BOMB) the ongoing Dirk Pitt adventures from Clive Cussler and the Jack Ryan books from Tom Clancy (and his ghostwriter). Yes, I know I'm an incredibly shallow person with non-intellectual tastes in reading. I suffered through the "classics" in high school and never picked them up again. My non-ficton reading runs to geeky things like the Columbia Accident report, various autobiographies written by astronauts, books like that. 

Yeah...I'm an odd one...

[VixenToast]

I still think of Number the Stars. It has always stuck with me. Basically after that I would read every holocaust book I encountered. Then I found Anne Frank. Ill trade Karen Brewer in for Anne Frank, any day. Mom tried getting me into BSCLS with Karen. I hated that dumbass bitch.

come to think of it, I disliked all those tween books until I read American Girl (too easy to read) then Dear America/Royal Diaries. I realized my fiction of choice was historical  By the time I graduated, my mom was pretty well used to my usual selection of sex, scandal, and royalty, always history. The Other Boleyn Girl was my first rendezvous into adult historical fic, and I was 14. I remember squealing when I got to a raunchy part in pep band (at a game) and having to explain it to the incredibly Mormon clarinet player who was by my side. 

Harry Potter and ASOUE (and to a much lesser extent, no shame here, Twilight) were my fave youth series outside of Dear America.

[Timetostoplurking]

OH my....you are all making me nostalgic for not only my childhood, but for my kids.  I think I have read most (90%) of the books mentioned and loved them all.  I really liked reading whatever my kids were reading so I could talk about it with them.  Since my oldest is a boy, I read most of his books.  I started out reading the Eragon books to him, he was obsessed.  I also read the Rangers Apprentice series.  I really credit Harry Potter with teaching him to read.  Lol. Loved those!!

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, HarleyQuinn said:

This is embarassing now, but I read Go Ask Alice in 7th grade and I felt like it was the most grown up, intense thing I had ever read. I believed every word of it. It wasn't until after high school that I was browsing online that i realized Beatrice Sparks is a total hack. I was so naive.

Hack? How so?

[PennySycamore]

@nausicaa,  Meg Ryan makes a reference to the "Shoes" books in the film You've Got Mail.  She owns a little children's bookshop (The Short Around the Corner)  that is being driven out of business by a mega corporate bookstore.  She goes into the children's section at Fox Books and a mom asks the clerk for Ballet Shoes.  He doesn't know what the mom is talking about, but Meg does and goes on to give the name of the author and say that there is an entire series of Shoes books.  

I was recently shopping for a birthday present for my granddaughter who turned 8.  She wanted a couple of Serafina books (which we eventually found) but not before finding some other books that I hope she'll enjoy later on like A Wrinkle in Time and Ginger Pye.  I think I was in 6th grade before a read A Wrinkle in Time.

[TeddyBonkers]

Oh my goodness, this drift is taking me back! In addition to BSC and SVH, I was also a big fan of Stephen King as a middle schooler! I always had to wait until we went into the town library to check them out, though. The bookmobile ladies wouldn't bring them to the school. They would bring Gone With the Wind, though...

[potato]

Did anyone else absolutely love the Princess Diaries series?  I remember one of my friends and I were obsessed with them back in middle school.

[Audrey2]

@feministxtian, you are not odd. There are places for people like you- Science Fiction/Fantasy conventions. They are filled with panels talking about both the literature and the science. I went to Sasquan (WorldCon) in Spokane and listened to George R R Martin read a chapter from his unreleased GoT book. The Astronomer from the Vatican was a science Guest of Honor. It's so nice to surround yourself one weekend a year with others who enjoy science.

[feministxtian]

Just now, Audrey2 said:

It's no nice to surround yourself one weekend a year with others who enjoy science.

I belong to a couple groups on facebook for science/space geeks. The cool thing is my husband caught my fascination so I can happily watch the geek documentaries here at home. Hubby actually brags about my geekness!

[VineHeart137]

39 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Hack? How so?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I remember reading that most of her books, which she originally claimed were actual diaries from real teenagers that she merely edited, were actually completely fictionalized. I believe there was also some question as to her credentials and experience- she claimed to be a Ph. D but people who looked into it couldn't find any record of her ever being in a doctoral program.

[PennySycamore]

@VineHeart137 is correct about Go All Alice and other books being fiction.  We had a thread recently in Quiver Full of Snark about them.

[lumpentheologie]

6 hours ago, MargaretElliott said:

Did anyone else read the Keys to the Kingdom series (Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, etc), or Sabriel, both by Garth Nix? They were (and still are) really cool, original fantasy books that are unlike any I've ever read, because there's no tall pretty elves or dwarves in their mountains or dragons. He's not pretending to be Tolkien. It's all about magic sigils and necromancy, prophecy and folklore... really neat stuff. No one else I know actually read them as a child/tween.

I really liked Sabriel.  Some of my favorite children's books (that I haven't seen mentioned) were a series called Dealing with Dragons -- the premise is that there's a princess who is supposed to get married and be a quiet, submissive wife, but she doesn't want to so she runs away to go live in a cave with a dragon and learn Latin and magic spells and how to make cherries jubilee.  She has lots of adventures and a much more exciting life than she would have had as a princess. One of her friends is a witch who has 7 or 8 cats, and one of them is named Scorn -- I always thought that was a great name for a cat. 

[church_of_dog]

1 hour ago, feministxtian said:

Kim Stanley Robinson is the BOMB

I'm not into mainstream sci-fi but there is a specific subset of dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction (often classified as sci-fi) that I'm deeply into, and I loved LOVED LOVED KSR's "Science in the Capital" trilogy ("Forty Signs of Rain", "Fifty Degrees Below", and "Sixty Days and Counting")

A part-time neighbor of mine is a retired UC Davis professor who still mostly lives in Davis and knows KSR, and a year or so ago I sent him home from a visit with instructions to "please beg KSR to write more in that series."   Nothing so far though 

[feministxtian]

As of right now, I've been "prohibited" from buying more books...something about 1 bedroom apartment and overflowing bookcases. So...after we move into a bigger place (let's hear it for a 3 bedroom place!) I'll be able to add to my collection again. I'll definitely be looking for those books...somehow I get the feeling me and the UPS guy are going to become great friends! 

 

***Mr. Xtian would never really prohibit me from doing anything but given that we do have overflowing bookcases and live in an oversized closet, we're trying not to add anymore stuff in here.