Encyclopedia Brown RULES!!!! love it, it totally geeked me out! I wore a feckin' Sherlock Holmes hat every waking hour for 2 years because of those books!!!!
I started readin very young (like 2). Dr. Seuss was my all time favorite. I liked the Bernstein Bears and all the classic Disney/Golden Book stuff when I was really little. As I got older, Judy Blume books were a favorite (especially the Fudge books). Charlotte's Web and James and the Giant Peach were good. And I loved Shel Silverstein (sp?). Ummm....Curious George, Nancy Drew, Lois Lowery were all good too. Unfortunately though, once reading became really mandated at school, I really got turned off from it. Recently though, I've started getting back into it. Lynus got me interested in LOTR series and I've been reading many interesting books in college. I love the Freidman book I'm reading now. Exterminate all the Brutes and Beloved were two that really interested me last year. It's starting to become fun again!
The Berenstain Bears was a great series... Also, I was forced to read stuff by my dad like Call of the Wild, Abe Lincoln Grows Up (by Carl Sandburg), and Captains Courageous....*shiver* No wonder I don't care too much about reading.
Some great reads were the Gordon Korman series ...it might just have been a Canadian thing though. Absolutely the most enjoyable books I read as a kid.
'The Hardy Boys' were okay, but nothing beat 'Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators'! Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Ben Andrews were my literary heroes growing up. The Three Investigators I was also heavy into "Choose your own Adventure" books. Anyone remember those?
I read Berenstein Bears, Encyclopedia Brown, anything by Judy Blume (Fudge, Superfudge), and all that Newberry and Caldecott medal winners we were required to read for class....agh book reports!!!! Also throw in some Boxcar Children... oh!!! almost forgot!!!....ANYTHING BY ROALD DAHL (includes The Witches, The Twits, BFG, Charlie and Chocoloate Factory, Charlie and Great Glass Elevator, Matilda, James and The Giant Peach, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More)...blah.
Choose Your Own Adventure, baby! Also, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, The Lord of the Rings, The Black Cauldron Series (can't remember the name of it, started with "The Book of Three", ended with "The High King"), The Lone Wolf Series, The Foundation Series, Watership Down, and of course all sorts of Comics. I had an active imagination.........
Lots of reading. As the step-child in a new family, I kind of withdrew, so books became a sort of refuge. When I was 12, my favorite books: Sho-gun King Rat (also by James Clavell; isn't that some s**t? a 12 year-old reading a novel based on an author's experiences in a Japanese WWII POW camp? talk about a somber kid! But a great book by the way.) Lord of the Rings The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1st and 2nd)
Interesting thread. When I was younger, some of the things I read that I haven't seen here are Winnie the Pooh, Rupert the Bear, Tintin, Paddle to the Sea. In mid to late elementary school I started reading different things. I read a number of WWII action adventure books by an author named Rob White that I stumbled onto. I read the Hobbit, LOTR, Asimov's Foundation series, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, and the first couple of Dune books. I also read every Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mystery I know of (Miss Marple didn't do it for me for some reason). I read other sci-fi like Edgar Rice Burroughs too.
Dennis L. McKeirnan, in addition to many already mentioned. His work is a bit derivative of Tolkein's (especially the Iron Tower Trilogy in comparison to LOTR) but good in its own right. Cavern's of Socrates is a litle trippy, kind of a fantasy story inside a sci-fi story.
Only the magazine in my dad's sock drawer...we'll, it was mostly pictures. Good call in the Three Investigators! That was the sh*t back in the day. Old School
Does anybody remember "The Great Brain" books by John D. Fitzgerald? I read all of those, as well as Encyclopedia Brown, Ramona, Judy Blume and the Dr. Seuss books. I loved Dahl, too. He really captured how evil kids (and everybody) could be. My favorite Dahl book was "Danny the Champion of the World." Great stuff. I also read a lot of biographies when I was in elementary school. I probably checked every sports biography in the library at the schools I went to through junior high. Once puberty hit other obsessions took over, but that's another story..
I do, in particular the story about when they got the measles. Most of the books I remember reading as a kid were on the sad side, but not all of them. Bridge to Terabithia The Cay Trader Woolly A Lion to Guard Us White Fang All of the Grimm Fairy Tales All of Beverly Cleary's series (Ramona, Henry Huggins) and about a million picture books, as my relatives sent at least a dozen to me and my sister every Xmas.
