The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Completely original [Chat] about beloved childhood books.
aioua
Ora OccidensOra OptimaRegistered User regular
Ora OccidensOra OptimaRegistered User regular
okay, this and thinking about hardy boys etc inspired me
BOOKS I REALLY LIKED WHEN I WAS A KID
a giant effortpost by Jacobkosh, age 37 omg
This is from like the late 60's and is about a doctor who goes to live with some kind of Salish tribe in British Columbia as their village physician and while he's there discovers he has cancer and only a year to live and throws himself into his work. Pretty grim! But I think that bothers kids less than people think it does. Kids know that people die and they're curious about it. I haven't read it in 25 years and have no idea if it's good but I remember some really lovely descriptions of nature and of life in the village. I don't remember there being a lot of artificial drama into the situation after the fundamental premise, which I think speaks well of the author that she assumed kids could handle that.
All I remember about this one is that it was intense as shit. Most of what we learned about the Revolution in early grade school was the stuff before - the Boston Massacre, the Stamp Act, etc - and the stuff after, like the Constitution. We kind of skimmed the actual war part. This is the first time I remember it being driven home.
Man, I love this book and I still reread it every so often. It's not supernatural - people who have only seen the later Disney movies will be amazed to learn that the animals don't talk, they're not magically smart, it's literally just a story about real-ish dogs and cats walking through the woods and getting into trouble and not talking to each other. The descriptions of nature (they trek across the Canadian Shield, as I recall) are beautiful and they meet people occasionally and get wrapped up in the people's lives for a chapter or two before moving on. There's something really delicate and gentle and melancholy about it.
I have no idea how well this holds up, but I dug it. As I recall, the sequels get pretty dark - the cupboard doesn't actually bring toys to life, it kidnaps real people through time and subjects them to the actual horrifying experience of being owned by a ten-year-old. So I'm desperately curious to revisit it sometime.
The school librarian pressed the Prydain books into my hands after I'd mentioned loving the Black Cauldron movie (which is not a great movie, but had fantastic scary skeletons). And it's terrific - it doesn't really have the sweep (even the implied sweep) of Middle-Earth, but it makes up for it in big undiluted doses of Welsh strangeness, with characters and places whose names are just big strings of consonants. That doesn't seem too weird, though, when you were reading Dr. Seuss just a couple years earlier. But like The Hobbit, the books have this very sweet, gentle, fairy-tale atmosphere; you feel like you're reading the prose kid's version of some ancient mythic cycle.
Hanging out in the fantasy section also led me to these, the Dark is Rising series. I really like them, but they're odd books. On the plus side, they positively drip with menace; remember how exciting the first part of Fellowship of the Ring is, with the hobbits being chased inexorably by horrific, implacable, Terminator-like spectres? Imagine multiple books of that! It's great. At its best, the series taps into that same vein of myth and dreadful evil that fuels LOTR and Prydain.
On the other hand, big chunks of the stories take place in the present day (1970s Britain) and are full of this kind of...I don't know. Imagine a book written by a religious conservative environmentalist Wiccan. The books are full of grousing about how the perfect green land of England has been soiled by the tread of Industry and how TV will rot our brains and how modern life is DISEASED and etc etc but it takes plenty of time to point out how powerless Christian beliefs are in the face of true Celtic myth - heroes and villains alike chastize our young heroes for being so STUPID as to think for a SECOND that hiding out in a CHRISTIAN CHURCH could protect you from ghosts when what you really need is some good old-fashioned salt and cold iron! And even at age ten I was like "hmmmm."
Also, the heroes have magic powers thanks to being born magically awesome and instead of this being just kind of a foundational premise to get the story up and running it keeps being reiterated to a weird-feeling degree how much better they are than the ordinary sheeple around them. The protagonists of the first book, who are ordinary kids, are even told that they have to sit out the cool final battle because they're just weak stupid humans and I was again like "hmmm."
Like I don't know anything about Susan Cooper but it basically feels like maybe her teenage rebellion was to get really super into Ren Faires and tarot cards and now she won't shut up about how religion is stupid while at the same time extolling her moon powers
Still, I want to reread these to see how I would feel about them now.
This is a really terrific and, I assume, completely forgotten book from the 1950s about a 14-year-old boy drafted into the Union Army as a courier, and he gets captured by the Confederates and manages to convince them he's just a regular kid and befriends them and becomes kind of their mascot and is torn between that feeling and having to warn a town about an attack they're planning. It's a coming-of-age adventure story, of course, and the adventure was tense and exciting, which is sometimes not the case with books set in historical periods (as a kid, you can instantly sniff out when someone is trying to sneak some education upon you, and revolt immediately). I found it because I was little junior Civil War buff at age 10 and as a bonus it's set right near where I live; a lot of the book happens in and around places I go to in Missouri all the time.
I love this for the same reason I enjoyed The Dark is Rising - it's scary as hell. There's this sense of eerie, omnipresent menace underlying everything, like a really terrific Twilight Zone episode, but unlike the Twilight Zone it goes beyond creating an atmosphere and a twist; it evokes real emotions. There's this sense of authentic familial love - the kids for their missing father, the mother for the kids, the kids for each other - that I often miss in other things. With the movie coming out, I want to revisit it, and the sequels, which got weird as shit.
My grade school kept adjusting the recommended reading level of this book, and independently they kept adjusting my own measured reading level, a result of which is that I had to read this perfectly good novel five years in a row and even today the thought of rereading it again makes me quiver with loathing. It's a good book, though! An Indian girl from a tribe living on an island off the coast of California (I didn't even know there were such things) is abandoned by accident when her people decide to move to the mainland, and has to fend for herself for years, hunting fish and wild dogs for food and fur. At the end she gets rescued. I guess this is a true story but the woman who was brought back from the island promptly died after a few months thanks to being exposed to all the new diseases. Womp womp.
Obviously this is great
This is another terrific animal book that I think is maybe underrated. I don't know if anyone remembers it, but it manages to mix the talking-animal genre with a sort of Midnight Cowboy portrait of trying to survive as a poor in the hellhole of late-60s New York City, except instead of being a rent boy, the main character is a cricket who plays music with its wings - basically a busker? The whole thing is suffused with this neon-lit atmosphere of shabby romance in the big city that I think stuck with me much more than the various pastoral idylls that talking animals usually frolic in.
A kid is flying over remote Canadian wilds in a prop plane to visit relatives when the pilot has a heart attack and crashes in the woods and the kid has to learn to survive armed only with what he can salvage from the plane and a new hatchet that his outdoorsman father gave him. The whole thing is very macho and all about MANHOOD and DANGER and KILLING WHAT YOU EAT but it's also, as I recall, pretty gripping and obviously as a kid one is an easy mark for stories about kids having to make it on their own. You always imagine that if trivialities like money were taken care of you could definitely manage life better than the adults you see bumbling through it.
There are lots of books about the love between boys and dogs and this one is the one I remember best. It was another book that got assigned on multiple occasions - but only two or three, thankfully - and while it was never my favorite I also never minded rereading it. It's more a collection of linked anecdotes about growing up in the Ozarks in the 1920s (again, this local connection probably added interest for me) than a single story, and I always kind of appreciate that picaresque rhythm, dipping in and out of little incidents (as with The Incredible Journey or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or etc etc) and while I did not have a dog as a young child and was kind of neutral on dogs until later in life the book thankfully does not hinge on dogs as its primary appeal. Nonetheless, the dog is described winningly and I was gutted when (this is not a spoiler, it happens in every book about dogs ever) he dies.
Another book about kids making it on their own! It's a theme, but it keeps working. I saw that there were sequels and I'm curious about how they work. Does he just keep running away from home or getting lost or whatever over and over again?
It's a cursed vampire bunny that sucks the juice from tomatoes and the other pets in the house have to prove that he's a supernatural menace! I don't even know. It's such a weird premise but it's charming as all shit and the sequels (one is called Howliday Inn, which obviously I approve of) are also very good.
===
I think what really strikes me, looking back, is that I read and re-read and re-re-read all of these books interchangeably in the same three or four year period, during which I was also reading Hardy Boys novels and Star Trek novels and adult pop-history stuff about the Civil War and the issues of Rolling Stone my mom bought every month. Everything went into the hopper and I don't recall ever once going "oh, I just read this grown-up thing, guess I'm done with Bunnicula."
Which isn't to suggest that I would necessarily enjoy all of these things just as much now but I know for a fact that I do with some of them and trying to maintain a similar...breadth of input is one of my continuing projects in adulthood.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
+13
This discussion has been closed.
Posts
This is the Juggalo cover edit.
RIOT!
See also sign of the beaver
$80 seems cheap for a console.
I had the max joystick those little circular dpads sucked.
pleasepaypreacher.net
My goal was to repost it in the very next chat, but alas it has taken this long for me to win the roulette
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
yes, the normal cover for hatchet
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I have a feeling of preparedness that I don't like, like studying well in advance of a test; I am somewhat comforted by the fact that it doesn't feel earned
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Smh
I once built a chat when I was backup, and then saved it as a draft for next time
finally a use for this otherwise irritating feature, I thought
of course when I went to retrieve it later, it was gone
i have a gdoc with 'em
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Truly a cautionary tale.
pleasepaypreacher.net
this is quality surrealist humor tyvm
I'm like a modern Andy Kaufmann
or, perhaps I am the still-living Andy Kaufmann
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
fite me 1v1 mid knives only
This was a book that I very much enjoyed as a child, which featured such delights as a revenant protagonist, a serial killer, body horror, and elvish fae going to war against tanks
My tastes have very much not changed since then
I managed to scam my parents into getting a Power Glove and a U-Force:
My bullshit game was strong in my youth.
~ Buckaroo Banzai