ML had a terrific blog post about the types of books we read as kids, especially our obsessions, or at least that was what I took away from it. I almost fell off my office chair when she mentioned Lurlene McDaniel because I remember her well.
I have an extremely well worn copy of the book Six Months to Live although my copy has a bit more of an 80′s cover than the one that is available on Amazon. My copy most likely dates from Scholastic Book Fair when I was in grade school. I can just flip through the very yellowed pages and I remember reading about these poor young girls with cancer. How sad. Yet I envied them. Why couldn’t I have some kind of disease. Maybe that would make it OK for people to notice me without it being about where I slept last night – seriously – my principal once pulled me out of class to ask me where I slept the night before. No, I wasn’t homeless but there were “family issues”. We weren’t supposed to discuss them with other people. I took solace in these books where people definitely had it worse than me.
There was even a sequel to Six Months to Live called I Want to Live which has a copyright of 1987. I guess I grew out of them as I moved into my VC Andrews phase because I never read the additional sequels about Dawn Rochelle. I am tempted to go back and read the books I have and then to read the new ones, but I don’t know that I still need them the way I did when I was a pre-teen.
Thank goodness for YA writers who tackle the everyday and the tough subjects for those of us who really needed a world to escape into.
Oh, and I was also obsessed with witches. Real and fiction.
Do you remember what some of your pre-teen book obsessions were? Are you still attracted to those same topics?
wonderful book authors view.
I read so many books for children,
know some of them,
i still read a lot of children’s book, especially YA
I remember discovering Victoria Holt books in sixth grade and checking out stacks of other ones. Mystery murder mingled with a hint of romance, and also your going to laugh but books on how to draw, self teaching. Did not do a thing for me, because until I was much older did I understand it, but of course cook books! Surprised? I was all over the place, because Sci-fi also was something I picked up in high school.
We will not talk about the encyclopedias my parents bought in grade school and I took for show and tell, and got threatened by the kids to stop, or I would be shoved in a locker
I won’t laugh cause I tried to do the same thing! I tried to learn to draw, to speak Spanish, many thing!
I’m impressed you had lockers in grade school
Show and tell is always so funny for me because I think I am the only kid who never went through that.
There’s one book in particular that stands out: Hatchet. The funny thing is that it, too, resurfaced recently in a poem I was reading. I can’t recall verbatim, but it was referenced as something that feeds the adolescent dreams of pre-teen boys. So true. That was probably one of the first boy adventure books I read and I stayed with that genre for a while.
This is an interesting topic, and, looking back, I think it’s fair to say that, just like the toys we play with as children, I can almost recognize some sort of gender divide between the books pre-teen boys and girls read. The girls read books about feeling and emotion and caring; the boys read books about boys living alone on islands and surviving independently.
Fortunately, I outgrew it quickly all because of one very empowering book: Clan of the Cave Bear. I’m 35 now and I still enjoy historical fiction, but more so Michener than others.
Great topic, Jessie. You’ve made me think about the different genres we read in our youth as it relates to gender. It’s something I wish I had more time to explore.
I’ve thought about taking additional classes at UNC-Charlotte towards an MA (as if my MFA was not enough!) because they have a children’t literature concentration. I think your comment on gender is really interesting. There is always talk about why J.K Rowling is J.K and not Joanne same thing with the Nancy Drew Books and the Hardy Boys books having appropriately gendered names when weren’t they in fact written by the same person?
Most of what I read was for girls but I also loved the Choose your Own Adventure series and some of the sci-fi and fantasy books my brother was reading.
Now you have got me thinking even more!
Tel is onto something! A poem based on what we read or writers we admired as youth…hmmm
Like the new header photo! If it was up there last night I missed it, but when I went to your photos I thought, I like that perspective. It almost reminds me of what if…your car went off road, you know, slide into the side. A story of how you could suddenly hear the train… Okay that was a prompt if I ever wrote one!
That is a great prompt! I have outrun a few trains going over those tracks. Daring!! whee!
Chose your own adventure books was one of my favs — I think those damn things in my childhood led to my controlling personality… LOL
i found some of my husband’s at his parents house and i have added them to my bookcase. i actually saw new ones so i think they re-released them!
After my childhood reading phase which included Enid Blyton books, my first real foray into ‘proper’ literature were the Jules Verne books.
I loved Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I’ve read it a few times since, and every time I read it it’s just like the first time; a wonderful adventure, seen from a ten year old child’s perspective. The wonder, the joy and the adventure are all there, as if I never left them behind; I become a child again. Just remembering it all makes me smile.
Oh I remember the Jules Verne books! There really isn’t anything like remembering what made you fall in love with words
I can even go as far back to the Richard Scary books where it was kind of the where’s waldo effect but all the items had the word next to them. what a wonderful way to teach vocabulary!