January 6, 2020
What is your favorite childhood book?
Define “childhood.” Or let’s not. Let’s just say that I’ll talk about books I enjoyed after the age of ten. And I couldn’t tell you how far above ten for most of them!
We always had books in the house growing up. Old books passed on from other family members seemed to gravitate to us. There were more books than my mom could keep on her bookshelves in the living room, so they ended up in the attic. And I loved digging through the boxes, looking for old favorites and new discoveries.
That’s where I found my first favorites. The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. Out of the three series, The Hardy Boys were my initial favorite, but we didn’t have many of the books. It didn’t take long to gravitate to Nancy Drew, as other friends were reading the series and we traded books. Plus, it was easy to ask for another of the books for birthday and Christmas presents. I kept those books until I went away to college and passed them on to another fan.
My hunger for reading soon led me to more mature books. Ivanhoe. Rebecca. Frenchman’s Creek. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Even then I preferred novels that featured more action than romance.
(FYI-I have that copy of Ivanhoe on my bookshelf. It’s in sad condition, with torn and yellowed pages, but it’s still readable. It was originally owned by a school library, and is the Academy Classics for Junior High Schools edition, dated 1926.)
By the way, I suggest being careful if you go back and read some of your old favorites. They don’t always hold up to an adult perspective. The casual racism in the older versions of the Nancy Drew books can be annoying. And Ivanhoe? I need to remind myself that it’s historical and has to be read from that perspective.
It’s easy to see how those early favorites have influenced my writing. And why I struggle with using the British version of English over the American version. (Grey vs. gray, snuck vs. sneaked, labor vs. labour … you get the idea. That along with going through a phase of reading Barbara Cartland as an adult.)
I’m going to make a rash assumption that many of these books won’t appear on anyone else’s list. (Except for Nancy Drew.) So let’s follow the links below and find out!
January 6, 2020
What is your favorite childhood book?
Rules:1. Link your blog to this hop.
2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.
Nancy Drew appears on my list of favourite childhood books definitely! However, the topic you added to MeWe wasn’t this one – it was whether a big ego hurts writers, and that’s the one I wrote about!
Stevie, my apologies. Another of our authors reminded me we’d done an ego topic a few months back (so much for my tracking system!) so I switched topics.
Oh well, never mind. I think the childhood books have been covered in the past too.
What a great post! Some of my favorites include Winnie the Pooh, James and the Giant Peach, Encyclopedia Brown, etc. One of my favorite series has to be the Shoe Books series by Noel Streatfeild. Ballet Shoes is my all-time favorite but I also love Theater Shoes and Skating Shoes.
When I was a children’s librarian, I got to spend time exploring books for our weekly story hour. (Mostly ages 3-6) So many great books out there!
I loved those books. I only ever read one of the Bobbsey Twins books because it wasn’t in our library and our local toy store — the only place in town to get children’s books — didn’t carry the series. It was a birthday gift from my older brother, who was maybe 18 at the time, in the Navy. and sent it from one of the American bases Japan. It has these Japanese characters inside the front cover that my son says is the price.
Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were available in the public and school libraries and Trixie Belden as well as those other two were available at the toy store. I really liked the Belden series. Julia Campbell wrote a more realistic girl sleuth than Nancy who just always seems like such a paragon. My kids tried to read the books I’ve kept, but they had to keep asking me to explain cultural references and I think that diminished their enjoyment.
I almost remember Trixie Beldon, but only read a few books in the series.
I suspect it had something to do with the personal tastes of the toy store owner. Maybe her kids loved Trixie. And because they were on the shelf, they were available for purchase. Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys were there too, but because they were so much more popular, the books were always sold-out. I actually kept reading Trixie into high school because the stories were good, but around 10th grade I stopped. The series continues into the 1980s, but I never read the last 10 books or so.
Pingback: Childhood Favorite Books #OpenBook Blog Hop | aurorawatcherak
The Hardy Boys was my first ever “big book” and I loved them! I moved on to Nancy Drew because my grandmother had many of the books. I haven’t read Frenchman’s Creek, but I enjoyed the rest of your list. I’ll have to check that one out, thanks. I agree about the perspective on reading older books, and I have the British/US problem in my head, too. I think classic readers tend to share that one.
Frenchman’s Creek is worth the read. I thought I’d grabbed my mother’s copy of the book, but couldn’t find it, so I’ll have to find another copy somewhere.
A great list of books. I also have some unusual favourites and I always preferred The Hardy Boys and The three investigators to Nancy Drew. I never fancied her that much for some reason.
I never heard of the Three Investigators. The covers of the books (Yes, I googled them) sure look a lot like the covers for the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew!