Childhood Books
It started with the Westing Game. The e-book went on sale, and while we own multiple copies of the paper version, we decided we needed a copy to keep in our pocket — a boost for a bad day.
Then it was Beverly Cleary’s books. How could we walk through the world without the ability to read about Ramona whenever the mood arose?
We may be regressing.
Someone in my Facebook feed posted a meme about how re-reading books (or re-watching shows) is soothing because our brain can predict what will happen next because the story is already familiar. It makes our brain feel safe in an unpredictable, new situation.
I’ll go with that.
What is your favourite childhood book you’d want to re-read?
6 comments
Ohhh. Too many to list! But here’s several: anything with Ramona Quimby, The Little Gymnast, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and The Girl with the Silver Eyes.
The Phantom Tollbooth. Oh how I loved reading that book.
I thought of more essential reading! Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
I don’t need to read it, since I can recite most of it from memory, but the illustrations are so good that I will read Madeline over and over. In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived 12 little girls in two straight lines…
Well, I basically skipped from Little Golden books to adult/young adult books, but the young adult series that I have reread multiple times, and will again is “The President’s Daughter” by Ellen Emerson White. In fact, they were released, updated to include cell phones etc. a few years ago and I bought them for a 2nd time. The series follows the teenage daughter of the first woman president.
You want me to pick ONE??! lol I hadn’t re-read a lot of L.M. Montgomery’s books in a long time, but I’m now in a Facebook group that reads & discusses her books, chapter by chapter, and I am SO enjoying it. (We’re almost done “Anne of the Island” right now.)
I did a post about a year ago at Christmastime about finding some of my old books in the crawl space at my parents’ house and bringing a few favourites home. There are a couple of them I’d thought about a lot over the years (“Snow Treasure” by Marie McSwiggin, “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean George, “On Indian Trails with Daniel Boone” by Enid Lamonte Meadowcroft), but I still haven’t read them since bringing them here. But it’s nice to see them on my shelves and know that I COULD read them now if I wanted to. (Some are now available as reprints and/or e-books, but some are hard to find these days.)
One book that I’m pretty sure I had but didn’t find, and would love to read again, is “The Distant Summer” by Sarah Patterson. It’s out of print — I could probably buy a used copy online, albeit at $30+ for a paperback (!). I read it as a young teenager, and the author herself was still a teenager when she wrote it — her father was the novelist Jack Higgins. I don’t think she ever wrote anything else, but (as I remember it) it’s a beautiful WWII story about a teenager growing up near an air base in England, in a love triangle with two pilots.