Interesting Question from the NYTimes

[jaunthie]

The New York Times, inspired one supposes by the current "Pottermania" surrounding the incipient release of the 7th (and last) book in the series, asked its readers what their favorite children's books were when they were growing up. It's a really good question, actually. I'm inspired to share some of my favorite SERIES I remember reading as a kid ("kid" being defined as the years I would have happily identified myself as one):

• The Green Knowe series by L. M. Boston. The series started for me with "The Children of Green Knowe", which my 4th-grade teacher read aloud to us during quiet time (do they still have that in schools, I wonder?). I loved it, and rabidly hunted down all the other books in the series. I still have many of them, although not all. And I still love the books.


• The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. I know I'd read these long before the first book (The Black Cauldron) got turned into a sub-par animated feature by Disney during its animation-department's dark years. And I still really like them, although I'm still pissed about how they "resolved" E's power issues in the fifth book.


• The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. My sister was given a set of these at some point during our childhood. I'd read the Hobbit and not been overly impressed, but I dearly, deeply loved all three of the Lord of the Rings books, and still do. An annual re-read.


• The Mad Scientists' Club books by Bertrand R. Brinley. I found the first one of these in the bookshelves of my elementary school, and I was delighted to discover more of them over the years. Great "science is cool" stories, although I wished then (and wish even more so now) that the author had included girls in his collection of wacky, science-obsessed troublemakers.


• The various horse stories by Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley and Mary O'Hara. Yes, I was a horse-mad young girl, at least when it came to books (a week spent at summer horse-camp helped cure me of romanticising horses, although I still liked them a whole lot). And yes, I loved the "Misty" books, the "Black Stallion" books, the "Flicka" books, and so on, despite realizing even as a kid that a lot of what the first two authors wrote was pure formula. (Probably Mary O'Hara was as well, but it was a different formula than the ones I was familiar with at the time.)


• The Myth-Adventures books by Robert Asprin. My seventh-and-eighth grade English teacher read these aloud to us in class during study/quiet time. Needless to say, you don't get a lot of studying done when you're laughing yourself sick, but it's a great cure for settling down a classroom full of emerging-hormone overly-bright kids. While the series quality tapered off sharply near the end (and I think Asprin has started writing these again), you just can't beat the first few books for snarky, pun-laden fun.


• The "Dido Twite" and others' adventures by Joan Aiken. I discovered many wonderful books in my local library branch, including "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase", which led to "Black Hearts in Battersea" and so on. I don't know if Joan ever had an official name for this loosely-tied-together series, but it was a really fun ride.

There were other series, of course; I was a definite bookworm as a kid. But these are the series that stand out in my mind. Most of what other series I can remember now was either not very good, or really young (kindergarten), or getting into the teen years, which is a whole 'nother bunch of lists. In the meantime, what were some of your favorite SERIES-books from when you were a kid? Please share!

Comments

[monkeybard]

The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper leaps instantly to mind. As does The Lord of the Rings, of course. I loved those Joan Aiken books, too. I only remember three--the two you named plus Nightbirds on Nantucket. D'you remember if there were more?

There was an author I loved called Wylly Folk St. John. I read all of her stuff out of the library. They weren't a series, but they were all mysteries. Only one was a murder mystery, as I recall: The Mystery Book Mystery. :D

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I loved the Dark is Rising Sequence! Great books, all five of them. And yes, there were several more books in the Joan Aiken series, plus a fair bit of standalone stuff.

[hiker-chick.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, I remember Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House..., Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (yes, she wrote a couple sequels), Judy Blume (of course), and Carolyn Keene's Nancy Drew. I read some (maybe three?) of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Ummmm.... I think most of the rest were one-offs.

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Yes, I read and liked Little Women, Little Men, et al, and Judy Blume - she was HUGE, everyone read her when I was a kid. I wasn't all that crazy about the Nancy Drew books, although I read most of them anyway. Heck, I read almost anything I could get my hands on, like that's a surprise. ;-)

[fisherbear.livejournal.com]

Elementary-schoolish? That was pre-Lord of the Rings for me, so Tolkien didn't count as a series yet. Unfortunately, the only one I can remember off hand is 'The Three Investigators.' (Unfortunate because I'm sure there were better series that I've forgotten, but also unfortunate because the plot holes and failed marketing tripe are still with me.)

Hmm, I can do better than that... I think I read 'The Borrowers' about then, and 'The Cricket in Times Square' had a couple of sequels, so I suppose it counts as a series. 'Encyclopedia Brown', some Beverly Cleary novels, some books about farm kids in Utah whose name I can't come close to retrieving... the Choose Your Own Adventure books, believe it or not... oh, of course! The Time-Life series machine! I was a hardcover pop-history junkie. 'Early Man', 'The Egyptians', 'The Greeks', 'The Vikings'... they even had a naval history series that had full-color maps and twenty or thirty sunken ships per volume. That was some serious boat geek Nirvana.

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Woot! Yeah, I loved the Time-Life series books. I read through most of the Great Ages of Man series, and there was a book in their War series about the WWI flying aces that I thought was the coolest thing ever. And I too read a bunch of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, although they frustrated me more often than not. :-)