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Your Childhood Books


Snakenaps

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This is in response to another thread, where instead of focusing on book recommendations, we all ended up floating down memory lane. 

What was your favorite book/book series when you were a kid? What were you obsessed with? What remains close to your heart, and what do you cringe over now?

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Rick Riordan: I loved Percy Jackson, Heroes of Olympus, the Kane Chronicles

Cassandra Clare: Man, I loved the Shadowhunter series. Plus all the drawings on tumblr! But now it's the only series on this list that I wouldn't reread (still like the art though)

Philip Reeve: Predator Cities and Here Lies Arthur still make me nostalgic

I remember Pat Walsh too

Darren Shan: Cirque du freak, demons, vampires, vampaneze, werewolves, magicians, mages, Windows, spiders, pickles, lakes, Desmond Tiny, Kah-Gash... I loved this. 

Artemis Fowl, Skulduggery Pleasant, Dresden Files and Alex Verus

I used to read some manga back then too: the big shōnen ones mostly but also stuff like Tegami Bachi, Nodame Cantabile, etc

Edited by Dreamer
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My first introduction to fantasy was Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest books. I was obsessed with those and they were the first things that inspired me to start creating worlds. After that Eragon was a massive part of my childhood, I think the Inheritance Cycle books were being released at the perfect time for my gradual maturing as a reader. I also read a lot of Garth Nix, starting with the Keys to the Kingdom series and then moving to the Old Kingdom later. I haven't read any of these books again as an adult and I don't think I want to. I'm a much more critical reader now and I want to keep the magic of those books in my memory.

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Wish I had read more during my childhood. I mean, I read a lot since I was little but back then it was only science books, and not even the complex useful ones but the ones with lots of pictures. So I guess back then my passion was to collect useless facts?

I've been a Harry Potter fan since I was like 3 years old though (when the first movie came out) so when my grandfather took me to the library in fourth grade I had the oportunity to read the Goblet of Fire (can't remember why I started there) and then my fate was sealed.

After that I spent the rest of my childhood with some of the other Harry Potter books. I had trouble having any interest in anything else, until I tried a bit of Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Carpathian Castle) and read The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

I do wish I had started earlier though.

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The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart, and illustrated by Chris Riddell, was the first book series I was obsessed with. Riddell has since gone on to illustrate covers for Neil Gaiman among others. I love his drawing style, so clean and rich in detail. The Edge world reeks of bizarre alien biology and doesn't make much sense in retrospect, but has so much personality.

It's also the only other fantasy series I know, apart from Mistborn, to show a civilization develop from one era of technology to another (although it never gets beyond steampunk).

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(FYI - I am prolly a lot older than the rest of you, & times were different back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, LOL...)

I remember when I was in grad school, & coming in to an evening class all excited because I had found a copy of one of my favorite childhood books in the college bookstore and bought it. My friends were all excited to see what it was. I proudly pulled it out of the bag and said "It's The White Stag!" And they said, "What's it about?" And the looks on their faces when I oh-so-happily replied, "Attila the Hun! It's a wonderful story!" Then they all told me that they already knew I was weird...

But srsly, it is a great story - more myth than history. The book won some children's lit awards too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Stag

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22 minutes ago, Lump-wing said:

(FYI - I am prolly a lot older than the rest of you, & times were different back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, LOL...)

I remember when I was in grad school, & coming in to an evening class all excited because I had found a copy of one of my favorite childhood books in the college bookstore and bought it. My friends were all excited to see what it was. I proudly pulled it out of the bag and said "It's The White Stag!" And they said, "What's it about?" And the looks on their faces when I oh-so-happily replied, "Attila the Hun! It's a wonderful story!" Then they all told me that they already knew I was weird...

But srsly, it is a great story - more myth than history. The book won some children's lit awards too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Stag

I've never read The White Stag, but this sounds great! Once my library reopens, I'll have to see if they have a copy.

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Let's see... my big loves growing up were in no particular order:

- Hardy Boys mysteries (the second editions when it came to the early books) which I read a whole bunch of but by the time of the Casefiles spinoffs I'd largely moved on so I didn't read those past the first.

- Likewise some of the Three Investigators books, though I didn't read them as voraciously.

- Before those, the Boxcar Children though I remember skipping over a whole bunch because my local library skipped from about volume ten to volume twenty.

- A friend had nice copies of Enid Blyton's Adventure series and I read the first three of those, but not the later ones or any of her other books.

- I think I started reading Frank Herbert's Dune in sixth or seventh grade (I can't remember exactly) and I know I'd gotten into Tolkien by then because I was finishing up Return of the King at the start of eighth grade when my teacher noticed it, we started talking about books outside of class and he loaned me a copy of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

- Likewise I started reading Wheel of Time around seventh grade.

- I have a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula that I picked up from one of my library's book sales when I was twelve (which I'll never forget because it happened during a power outage so we were looking through the selection with flashlights) and I loved it but never got around to reading anything else of his beyond starting and not finishing Lair of the White Worm. But I'll still go back to Dracula and it's probably the reason I eventually started watching genre films.

- In 'sometimes fondness, sometimes cringeworthiness' status I also was really into the Star Trek/Star Wars novels. Some of them I could reread (like Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy or Dark Mirror, the TNG-era Mirrorverse novel before DS9 went and changed the game) and some I just wonder what I was thinking.

No doubt if I think about it some more I'll remember other books I loved growing up, but these are all the ones that spring immediately to mind. I just missed the Harry Potter train by a few years and haven't jumped into any books aimed at the Teen/YA demographic since I aged out of it myself until I started picking up Brandon's own books meant for younger readers.

Edited by Weltall
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  • 7 months later...

I was born in 94 so obviously Potter was a huge part of my life.  I also adored (still do) Redwall.  I read a LOT of goosebumps, Michigan chillers (as I was from Michigan) and American chillers.  I also read a ton of Star Wars books, as well as books based on my favorite game franchises, like Halo and Resident Evil.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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