1,250 posts
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Post by joem on Jan 20, 2018 13:30:39 GMT
Well, someone requested a thread for this?
The unexpurgated Famous Five and Adventure series from Enid Blyton.
The Jennings books.
The two Catweazle books.
Bows Against the Barons by Geoffrey Trease
Some of the William stories
The Carne Cross Mystery by someone called Nelson Riddle (got a feeling this wasn't his real name)
Some Rosemary Sutcliff (especially Sword at Sunset and The High Deeds of Finn Macool)
Anything to do with King Arthur or Robin Hood
To a lesser degree
Alfred Hitchcock's 3 Investigators
Narnia
Hardy Boys
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721 posts
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Post by hulmeman on Jan 20, 2018 13:53:40 GMT
I'll join in with Enid Blyton's "The Pole Star Family". It engendered in me a love of travel. Reading it now, it doesn't stand up too well, but holds a place for me.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 14:25:50 GMT
You're either a Malory Towers girl or a St Clare's girl. Malory Towers girls are upright and honorable, and St Clare's girls are not to be trusted.
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5,159 posts
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Post by TallPaul on Jan 20, 2018 14:32:55 GMT
You're either a Malory Towers girl or a St Clare's girl. Malory Towers girls are upright and honorable, and St Clare's girls are not to be trusted. So which are you? I'm guessing the latter.  |
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1,582 posts
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Post by anita on Jan 20, 2018 14:38:30 GMT
Malcolm Saville`s Lone Pine series and 'The Hobbit.'
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 15:09:28 GMT
SOME Rosemary Sutcliff? I haven't found one I don't like yet. My favourites are Dawn Wind, The Armourer's House, Outcast, Song for a Dark Queen... I could go on. Dawn Wind though, by a mile.
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Post by floorshow on Jan 20, 2018 15:30:56 GMT
Tove Jansson's Moomin tales are books I still love and am now reading to our tiny troll.
The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark (Jill Tomlinson) is another childhood favourite and I've not read it for years but Brendon Chase by Denys Watkins-Pitchford was one I returned to again and again.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 15:35:28 GMT
I don’t know about the ones I still love but I have very frond memories of Enid Blyton’s ‘Mystery’ books. When I couldn’t get my hands on one of these I made do with the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. I always longed to have an adventure but didn’t know where to start. (Come to think of it, I still don’t...)
When I was at junior school the teacher read us Philippa Pearce’s A Dog So Small and we all loved it. A couple of years ago I decided to get hold of a copy; oh dear... my tastes have changed dramatically over the years. I couldn’t get past the first chapter.
And Bobby Brewster by H. E. Todd. I can remember reading the whole series in our school library. It was Bobby Brewster’s This and Bobby Brewster’s That... Bought a copy of Bobby Brewster’s Conker a year or so ago. A tatty old paperback copy on Amazon Marketplace for some ridiculous sum. What a load of tosh!
Two children’s books I absolutely love as an adult (I only came to them in adulthood) are Allan Ahlberg’s My Brother’s Ghost (if that doesn’t melt your heart nothing will...) and David Almond’s Skellig. A superb read.
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Post by oxfordsimon on Jan 20, 2018 15:39:44 GMT
The first book I ever stayed up late to finish (with a torch under the duvet) was Bogwoppit by Ursula Moray Williams.
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1,970 posts
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Post by sf on Jan 20, 2018 15:45:56 GMT
'Mischling, Second Degree' by Ilse Koehn. It was published by Puffin Plus, Penguin's YA imprint (years before YA was a thing), and that possibly means it never got the attention it deserved (the reprint's awful cover can't have helped). I read it when I was about ten, I've re-read it at least once a year since, and I'm on about my fourth copy of it. It's the autobiography of a young woman growing up in Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s (she was born in 1929). Her parents and grandparents went to enormous lengths to conceal, successfully, the fact that she was a quarter Jewish from her and from the authorities. It's an extraordinarily vivid, extremely moving account of life (mostly) in Berlin during the war.
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617 posts
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Post by loureviews on Jan 20, 2018 16:02:06 GMT
Ones I still have and regularly read:
Narnia series
Watership Down
Ballet Shoes and Curtain Up
St Clare's series
Wind in the Willows
Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner
Hilda Boswell's Omnibus
The Secret Garden
The Railway Children
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 16:42:15 GMT
I loved Tove Jansson's Moomin books as a child and I still love most of them as an adult.
It's an odd series. The first two books — Comet in Moominland and Finn Family Moomintroll — are definitely for young children while the next two — The Exploits of Moominpappa and Moominsummer Madness — are noticeably written for an older audience. But it's after that I find it most interesting. From Moominland Midwinter onwards Jansson abandons most of the cast of the earlier books and builds up a delightfully engaging fantasy world filled with all manner of strange creatures with their own cultures and rituals, and the books are more a collection of episodes exploring the world she'd created than the simple tales that started the series. I wish there were more of them, but I gather Jansson stopped when she realised she wasn't writing children's books any more.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 16:56:32 GMT
The Moomin books are definitely wonderful.
The earliest children's books I remember are Pooh (proper Pooh, not that saccharine Disney nonsense) and Little Grey Rabbit read to me by my mother. In my head Eeyore still has my grandfather's voice. Little Grey Rabbit is very old fashioned - I have all my mother's copies from the late 40s and early 50s and I just love them. They have my mother's handwriting in saying things like "for my 5th birthday from mummy" which makes them even better.
Also when I was little, Littlenose, which is a wonderful series. I have a furry woolly mammoth called Two Eyes after the mammoth in that.
As I got older, all the Enid Blyton, but especially the Adventure series (I liked Kiki the parrot). Chalet School and the Wells ballet books, although they could be a bit twee.
I tended to discover books through Jackanory when I was maybe 7-12 ish. I've still got lots of single novels because of hearing part 1 on Monday, and then having to buy the book on Tuesday to read and find out what happens before Friday. The ones that immediately spring to mind are classics like The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, Tuck Everlasting, then things like The Sylvia Game (Jane Asher read it - there was a redheaded girl and a stately home and a mystery with a painting and a drowned girl), The Eyes of the Amaryllis (there was a girl living with an odd granny by the sea, and granny spent all her time searching for something mysterious in the tide) and Swallows and Amazons (I only liked the first one, not the rest of the series).
Oh! And the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the Little House series. An American we met gave me a copy of Little House on the Prairie when I was 4 (I still have it, complete with a US library stamp!) and my mum read it to me, and I loved it so she sought out the others. I only liked the early ones when I was small as the others were too grown up, but I read the whole lot in a binge when I was about 11 and have loved them ever since. We did a Little House road trip in 2007, which was fab. NOT the tv series, urgh.
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275 posts
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Post by emsworthian on Jan 20, 2018 17:05:45 GMT
Did anyone else love the "Katy" books? As well as "What Katy did", "What Katy Did At School", "What Katy Did Next", I also read the two sequels "Clover" and "In The High Valley", which follow the fortunes of other members of Katy's family. I've still got my old editions of the last two books.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 17:13:19 GMT
Did anyone else love the "Katy" books? As well as "What Katy did", "What Katy Did At School", "What Katy Did Next", I also read the two sequels "Clover" and "In The High Valley", which follow the fortunes of other members of Katy's family. I've still got my old editions of the last two books. Yes! I loved Katy. I had no idea about Clover or In the High Valley though, never heard of them! I'll have to track them down. I forgot Anne of Green Gables! I love Anne Shirley the most, I think she's one of my favourite characters ever. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 18:04:17 GMT
I still love 'Valley of the Dolls'.
What? Didn't everyone's mother read that to them on the nanny's day off?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 18:48:54 GMT
I loved the Anne of Green Gables books and the rest of L.M. Montgomery (Emily of New Moon!); I've always wanted to go to Prince Edward Island because of them. Maybe one day.
Also a fan of the "Katy" books, I'd almost forgotten they existed. One of my favourite books was Daddy Long Legs, though retrospectively the plot is vaguely disturbing. Must read all these books again at some point.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 18:58:01 GMT
I read a lot of Pan Horizons as a young teen - they weren't called YA then, but they were. I especially liked Lois Duncan ones, things like Stranger with My Face, Locked in Time or Daughters of Eve - the thriller/mystery ones. I read recently that they've all been republished with modern updates like mobile phones, urgh!
Ooh, and Judy Blume! They would have been my first American books. I loved her writing. Deenie and Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself are my favourites. Oooh, and Tiger Eyes!
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379 posts
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Post by ctas on Jan 20, 2018 19:53:45 GMT
Blue Door was an absolute favourite of mine, they were very outdated when I read them but somehow timeless.
Same for the Lorna Hill ballet books, lovely stories. I’ve spent a lot of time collecting hardback original print copies of the lot.
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950 posts
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Post by vdcni on Jan 20, 2018 20:00:12 GMT
I was a Blyton fan as a child. The Adventure books, Famous Five and the Mystery series being the main ones but also the Secret Seven, The Secret Island and even some of the Malllory Towers/St Clare series which was unusual among boys my age!
Other than that the only thing that really stands out in my memory is The Hardy Boys.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 20:27:17 GMT
Also a Katy fan here!
And Blyton obviously, and all the Chalet School books.
I'm also of the Harry Potter generation so a lot of my reading time was spent on those!
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 20:33:21 GMT
I loved a lot of the Enid Blyton books as a child, though I also remember finding them a bit samey when I came to reread them. The Famous Five books set on Kirrin Island kept their appeal. The others, not so much.
I've just looked through the Wikipedia article about Blyton and read that the publisher recently tried modernising the language to make it better for current readers but then abandoned the changes after negative feedback. I have to say I rather liked the antiquated feel of the stories. The use of formal phrases like "mother and father" rather than "mum and dad" set everything firmly in the past. I know my appreciation of the books wouldn't have been sophisticated as a child but even so I always felt that I was reading about a world that wasn't the world I knew, and I think it would feel quite odd to hear modern phrasing in stories that are so clearly set in a mid-twentieth-century world.
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1,250 posts
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Post by joem on Jan 20, 2018 22:15:45 GMT
I forgot the Armada Book of Ghosts, at least five of them. And a couple of compilations of ghost stores compiled by Aidan Chambers.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2018 22:21:32 GMT
All the history books published by Ladybird. I loved all the illustrations and I used to think the name of the author (L du Garde Peach) was ever so exotic!
(My dad even made me a special bookstand for my collection.)
Price 2/6. Sold in newsagents.
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Post by nick on Jan 20, 2018 22:32:02 GMT
..... and David Almond’s Skellig. A superb read. I think Skellig is a contender for the greatest children's book ever. But Alan Garner, Peter Dickinson, Patrick Ness, Willian Nicholson (Windsinger trilogy), Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden are all special. I loved reading 101 Dalmations and Starlight Barking out loud to my children. I still read children's books and the quality is as great as ever. |
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