Well, I’m having so much fun reading other Weekly Geeks’ lists of childhood favorites that I thought I better post one of my own after all. I am going to try to list only books that I haven’t already mentioned in other posts. So no Joan Aiken, no Louisa May Alcott, no Arthur Ransome, C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Noel Streatfeild or Elizabeth Enright, and no obscure German authors in translation. (Yikes! Who’s left?)
Anyone remember Lotte’s Locket by Virginia Sorenson? I would love to get hold of a copy of this. Little Danish girl goes on an ocean voyage (what is it about me and ships?) and comes to America. I think it was America. She wrote letters to her best friend back home. I loved this book and I wish I could remember it better. I think I read other books by the same author but this was my favorite.
When I was in sixth grade I discovered Lois Duncan. Down a Dark Hall and A Gift of Magic were my favorites — oh I would love to read those again. And, in the same genre, A Candle in her Room, by Ruth M. Arthur, along with every other book by her that I could find. Oh, and Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp. They were all creepy gothic horror stories and I ate them up.
Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George. My first wilderness survival story. My grandmother gave it to me for my birthday, inscribed “To Julie (no wolves)” — but I would have loved this book even if the main character didn’t share my name. That is, I loved the part where she was out on the tundra with the wolves; the other parts of the story (her “husband,” etc.) were not so good.
Another favorite author: E.L. Konigsburg. I especially loved her two historical novels: A Proud Taste for Scarlet & Miniver, about Eleanor of Acquitaine, and The Second Mrs. Giaconda, about the woman who was the model for the Mona Lisa. The writing was somewhat dry, but the subject matter was fascinating.
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I loved Julie of the Wolves (the part on the tundra) too. Did you know there is a sequel? I just read it a couple weeks ago. Pretty good. I’d like to reread the first one - I think it was better, but I haven’t read it since I was young. Apparently there’s a third one as well.
Yes, in fact I just read the sequel not too long ago. I was kind of disappointed with it, actually. It felt kind of disjointed, and the plot was too predictable. I also looked at the third one, but as I recall it was just about the wolves, no people, and I didn’t read it.
Ruth M Arthur!! Her writing was so appealing to me as a pre-teen too. She was especially good about having main female characters who were loners and considered strange by their peers. Pretty much the story of many bookworms younger years, eh? And great illustrations too by Margery Gill. I still to this day desperately want to visit Cornwall since so many of her stories were set there.
Awhile back, my husband and I had some Photoshop fun with book cover/tv character mash-ups. Julie of the Wolves became Julie Cooper of the Wolves. Behold:
http://thisbookisforyou.blogspot.com/2007/11/before-after.html
Jean Craighead George! yeah! Julie of the Wolves and My Side of the Mountain. I loved them both. I think the first one I read was Gull 747 and I found a copy at Powells last time I was there, along with her autobiography. I’ve read the sequel to Julie and I quite liked it, the third one, I gave up on. I’ve also read the sequel to Mountain…
Oh, how I loved A Gift of Magic. Read it and reread it.
One of my favorites, now out of print, was The Ghost of Opalina, a story about the ghost of a cat who haunts generations of family in this rambling old house. I adored that book.
Man, I totally forgot about “Julie of the Wolves” and “My Side of the Mountain.” Those books were awesome!
Librarian PM, I remember the illustrations very well! I remember feeling disappointed when I came across one or two that had a different illustrator.
Crit. I’ve never heard of Gull 747. I’ll have to look into it. Didn’t know there was a sequel to My Side of the Mountain, either.
Veronica, Opalina sounds like something I’d have loved!
Chartroose, yeah. And I don’t remember any other books that were even remotely similar to them.
I’m stuck on the sofa so I can’t go check, but I think it’s called The Other Side of the Mountain and the gull one, I think was (one of) her first books. It’s about a family who study herring gulls and use conditioning to stop them from causing major air disasters on takeoff. I think what I liked about it was that it was fiction, but it has so much animal behaviour stuff in it…
Ah…speaking of Lois Duncan, have you seen these reviews?
http://jezebel.com/tag/fine-lines/
A couple classics that I re-read several times as a child that no one has mentioned: Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood”, and Rudyard Kipling’s stuff - especially “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and “Kim”. :-)
I love Eve Duncan’s books - my favorite is “Trapped in Time”. Gallows HIll is also an amazing read.
Crit, those sound great! I’ll have to see if I can find them.
Sandy, thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen that before. I don’t remember reading much Kipling as a kid, except the Just So Stories. Hey, I don’t think anyone has mentioned those, either. Or the Oz books. ?
Hi Guusje! I’m not sure I remember that one. My favorite was definitely Down a Dark Hall. It was my first introduction to the genre and at the time I thought it was an amazing literary feat.
I returned to my bookshelf the other day..the Mountain sequel is called The Far Side of the Mountain and his family come to stay for a while. There’s also a third book called Frightful’s Mountain which is about Frightful the falcon. It was written in 1999, and isn’t quite as good as the first two, but is still interesting. I tend to find with nature-fiction writers that as they age, their prose becomes more stilted somehow. I was a great fan of Elyne Mitchell who wrote a bunch of anthropomorphic novels about brumbies (wild horses) in the region close to where I live. The first ones were fantastic, but after 6 or so she seemed to run out of steam, and her writing wasn’t as engaging. it was a similar thing to JCG i think, that the first ones were written about 30 or 40 years ago and then more recently made into movies by people who’d read the booksa as kids, so the writers who are now quite elderly in some cases felt like they could or should capitalise on the renewed interest, and write the novels that they’d had ideas for, but never got around to. I could be wrong of course, but it’s a guess…
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