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Books of your childhood

N

nephele

New Member
At what age did you start reading and
which is - are the book(s) you remember from your childhood?

Mine are fairy or folk or whatever, tales. Andersen, Grimm, 1001 Nights (expurgated of course). And the Encyclopedia. I still love story-tellers less so encyclopedias, but I love dictionaries.
 
The first books I can remember are the Enid Blyton books, I think it was "The Faraway Tree" series.
 
I can't remember precisely when I started reading - but know I could read by the time I began school at age 6 (no kindergarten back in my day ;))

First books I remember were the Golden Books - mostly pictures with a few sentences per page.

My favourites came a few years later: "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", "Winnie the Pooh", the entire "Sue Barton" Nurse series, . . .

nephele, I love encyclopedias. I start by looking up one item and end up reading all the surrounding articles!
 
Same thing here, Ell. My mother was telling me that I taught myself how to read around the age of 4-5, anyway, before I could speak very clearly, and never stopped since.
One of my best memories, a little later, was when I had a tonsilectomy and stayed at home from school for a few days. The happiness of having piles of books around my bed, as well as the little papers by which I communicated with everybody.
An experience repeated when I was 15. This time it was an apendectomy. But by then I had plunged into Dostoyewsky. Now I believe I hurried too much to read him at that early age. A couple of years ago I re-read the Brothers Karamazof and the effect was, understandably, different, although not quite as violent as it was at the first reading.
 
I can remember Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh. Also the Enid Blyton books.

My father used to work a lot and I didn't get to see much of him sometimes, so he read Winnie the Pooh stories on to tapes for me to listen to when I went to bed at night. It was like him being there and reading a story to me. I still have them, and I am 35 years old. My daughter listens to them now.


Cheers, Vicky
 
I remember to start to read the picture 'topsy and tim' and then properly to read Roald Dahl book.
 
I remember mostly clearly reading The Secret Garden. I wished I would find one! I haven't liked any of the movie versions. They didn't quite capture the magic, in my opinion.
 
I remember having to ask the teacher at school if I could learn to read (I was 4 I suppose), and being told 'Not yet'. I bugged her for days after before she relented. I've been reading ever since.

I read the usual Enid Blyton 'Famous Five' books and so on and remember having a large selection of 'Ladybird' books. These were small hardback books covering all sorts of stuff such as classic stories and history.

The books I remember most were 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' and 'The Moon of Gomrath' by Alan Garner. These were set around Alderley Edge in Cheshire and were full of wizards and magic. A bit like an early Harry Potter I suppose.
 
How far back into my childhood do I go? I remember having a Golden Books omnibus with all the stories in it - Pokey Little Puppy, Saggy Baggy Elephant etc. There's Sam Pig and Brer Rabbit stories squeezed in these years as well, as well as Paddington Bear, Mary Plain and The Wind in the Willows. In my pre-teen years I was reading Agaton Sax, Tam Sventon, The Moomins, Uncle and the Treacle Trouble amongst others. The Phantom Tollbooth is a particular favourite. I still have it, and have read it just recently.

In my early teens there was (and still is, occasionally) The Three Investigators. Also the Old Ireland Yard mysteries (Vivian Butler?), James Blish and Robert Heinlein. Wizard of Id and BC cartoons. Louis L'Amour and J. T. Exclamation - oops, J. T. Edson. Larry and Stretch westerns.
 
Letterhead,
How nice to see somebody else mention The Three Investigators. Jupiter Jones was a hero of mine when I was in elementary school. For that matter, he still is. I read some of the series about once a year.
 
I think the reason I liked the 3 Investigators was because the author(s) didn't actually mention the boys' ages. That way I always felt as if they were my own age. It was also good how Jupe was knowedgable, brainy even, yet not annoyingly so. I still read new stories as I find them, and my teen daughter has just started reading them. :)
 
I think I learned to read at about the age of 5 or 6... I have never stopped since. when I was a kid I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and lots of books about animals.

~Witch
 
I remember all the golden age books but the first books I really remember reading by myself were Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. After that I went through the various childhood series The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Three investigators, Robin Kane, Doc Savage, Homer Price, The Chronicles Of Narnia, The Boxcar Children and Encyclopedia Brown.
 
I loved Encyclopedia Brown. Sally Kimball and Bugs Meany. If anyone's seen the movie About Schmidt, one of the nice touches is when Jack Nicholson is reading an Encyclopedia Brown book and you see him flip to the end to read the solution.
 
The books I remember loving as a kid were 'The Good the Bad and the Rest of Us', 'Where the Red Fern Grows', 'Flowers for Algernon' and 'Charlotte's Web'.
 
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