Favorite Book as a Child

[TotallyOz]

I love reading. But, I learned this when I was a kid. My favorite book was The Hobbit. I read it way too early and didn't get a lot of it. But, I read it over and over and finally got each part. It helped me to fall in love with reading. What was your favorite book as a child?

[Latbear4blk]

El Principito

[caeron]

Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island. 

I liked my fiction fanciful as a boy.

[AdamSmith]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Seven_Gables

[AdamSmith]

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Sea

[Latbear4blk]

1 hour ago, caeron said:

Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island. 

I liked my fiction fanciful as a boy.

Yes! I would go to public libraries reading everything written by Verne! 

Edited August 20, 2020 by Latbear4blk

[nycman]

As a child....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Wild_Things_Are
 

As an early teen.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(novel)

 

As a late teen...   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Budd

[hornydude4sxxx]

Lord of the Flies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

[JKane]

I think the one that had the most impact on me was Flowers For Algernon.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon

[AdamSmith]

Not exactly childhood, but in 11th grade my English teacher said, ‘I know who you would like,’ and handed me a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O'Connor

Life perception was never quite the same since. 

[AdamSmith]

8 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

Not exactly childhood, but in 11th grade my English teacher said, ‘I know who you would like,’ and handed me a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O'Connor

Life perception was never quite the same since. 

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."^[20]Her texts usually take place in the South^[21]and revolve around morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears in the background. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote.^[22]"The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. ...When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."^[22]

She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she did not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as open to the touch of divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: "Grace changes us and the change is painful."^[23]

She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.

However, in several stories O'Connor explored some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her story "The Displaced Person", racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and intersexuality in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost." Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgement Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium."

Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Politically, she maintained a broadly progressive outlook in connection with her faith, voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and supporting the work of Martin Luther King Jr.and the civil rights movement.^[24]Nevertheless, she wrote in a letter to Maryat Lee 3rd May, 1964, “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” ^[25]

^{https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O'Connor}

[Latbear4blk]

I just had a flash back and called my siblings to help me up to reconstruct this memory. Many years before I read The Little Prince, I was fascinated with Monteiro Lobato's stories.

It is a blurred memory from the 60's. My family was living in Buenos Aires, but both of my parents were from a small town in Corrientes, in the Argentinean Mesopotamia. In the 60s there was not paved highway and no bridges to travel to Corrientes. We would board a huge steam boat in Buenos Aires and sail three days up the Paraná river. Then we would switch to a smaller boat to sail the Corriente river (not deep enough for the big steam boat) and in a few hours would arrive to our destination, Esquina. The name of the town comes from being right in the corner where two huge rivers meet. 

Esquina was a small town with two parallel main avenues and two major squares. Phone numbers were up to three digits, and you had to call the operator to connect you. The milk man would walk the town early in the morning, and deliver his still warm, just milked fresh product. Everybody had chickens in the backyard, and the first thing you would do in the morning was opening the house front door, to keep it wide open all day long. My grandfather (a dark skinned Uruguyan that I like to imagine gifted me with a few African gens, besides being a man slut with many women and illegitimate children, hell yes I feel identified) was one of the town butchers, with a stand in the local Central Market. I will never forget his fresh pork chorizos. There was one main church, one movie theater, one bar/cafe (una "confitería"), and yet many. many "panaderías".

Back then it was the golden age for the traveling vendors. The town had una "Escuela Normal", the kind of high schools that educated K-7 teachers, and a population very fond of reading. Traveling vendors from different publishers would arrive and suddenly in all living rooms you would find the same new books collections. All families had the same edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the same dictionary in three fat volumes with dark green covers, the same cooking book by Doña Petrona de Gandulfo.

All my relatives also had a collection of light green books by Monteiro Lobato, translated from the original Portuguese. "El Rancho del Pájaro Amarillo". I spent so many hours reading those books and dreaming about traveling around the world and across time! I had completely forgotten this sweet memory. Thanks for this thread, @TotallyOz.

Edited August 21, 2020 by Latbear4blk

[TotallyOz]

@Latbear4blk My french teacher had us read The Little Prince and I loved it. It was the first (and perhaps only) book I read in another language. But, later in life, I grew to love Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I don't know why your thread made me this of this, but this is one book that I always have with me.

The other book that has traveled with me is Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go."  It was a gift from friends when I retired and they all inscribed lovely thoughts in it before I moved from NYC to travel the world. They were right, I had many places to travel and many adventures.

 

[Theolover]

I have not thought about this in years... mine was Stuart Little and also The Star bellied Sneetches by Dr Suess.

[AdamSmith]

On some considered reflection, Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! is probably the single greatest book I have ever read.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/373755.Absalom_Absalom_

To include even the KJV of the Scriptures. Which for me (& including the works of my idol Harold Bloom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom) is to say something. 

[Latbear4blk]

You were reading Faulkner in your childhood, @AdamSmith? 

[AdamSmith]

55 minutes ago, Latbear4blk said:

You were reading Faulkner in your childhood, @AdamSmith? 

Well, on assignment from 12-th grade English class, ‘Honors English,’ taught by a high school teacher who had exquisite literary taste, and a master’s degree in same from UNC Chapel Hill.

Pretty big chops for hereabouts then. 

I loved her.

She also pushed us through T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, & so much more. As reported here already.

[AdamSmith]

1 hour ago, Latbear4blk said:

You were reading Faulkner in your childhood, @AdamSmith? 

On reflection, in my childhood I was reading mostly Seven leagues under the sea, other like kind of SF, A.C. Clarke, etc.

[AdamSmith]

6 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Well, on assignment from 12-th grade English class, ‘Honors English,’ taught by a high school teacher who had exquisite literary taste, and a master’s degree in same from UNC Chapel Hill.

Pretty big chops for hereabouts then. 

I loved her.

She also pushed us through T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, & so much more. As reported here already.

Such as also Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.

She treated us as adults, who could do difficult things, well.

[Latbear4blk]

33 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

Such as also Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment.

She treated us as adults, who could do difficult things, well.

I understand and makes sense. Reading the books in the 12th grade doesn't surprise me. I do not see teens at that age as children, but in that weird no one's land adolescence is.

[AdamSmith]

4 hours ago, Latbear4blk said:

I understand and makes sense. Reading the books in the 12th grade doesn't surprise me. I do not see teens at that age as children, but in that weird no one's land adolescence is.

Exactly. And this will make me sound like an old fart, which I certainly am, but I see today too much ‘protecting’ of students, even in college. ‘We don’t want to trigger the delicate little things.’

Well, yes you do! Education is the job of preparing kids for real life. Which is, in one sense, just a constant series of micro-aggressions punctuated by macro-aggressions.

Get used to it; and learn which to ignore, and which to fight back against like an enraged tiger.

’Don’t be careful, be dangerous.’ https://www.jordanbpeterson.comI 

[Latbear4blk]

 

 

3 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Exactly. And this will make me sound like an old fart, which I certainly am, but I see today too much ‘protecting’ of students, even in college. ‘We don’t want to trigger the delicate little things.’

Oh, I agree. We have men and women with almost adult functional metabolisms, and the character and emotional needs of little children. If you do not believe me, look at Tasso. LOL.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Latbear4blk

[Buddy2]

I read John O'Hara, Katherine Anne Porter and James Mitchner's " Tales of The South Pacific" in the early 1960s.

 

Tried to read Faulkner many times,  but cannot get very far. James Joyce too except for "Ulysses."

[AdamSmith]

1 hour ago, Buddy2 said:

I read John O'Hara, Katherine Anne Porter and James Mitchner's " Tales of The South Pacific" in the early 1960s.

 

Tried to read Faulkner many times,  but cannot get very far. James Joyce too except for "Ulysses."

If you absorbed Ulysses you have nothing to apologize for.

I myself can still make almost nothing of Finnegan’s Wake.

Which gives me one more thing to continue to live for. 

[forrestreid]

My goodness, you all must have been such artistically and literary inclined children!

 

When I was a child my favourite book was a book called the “3000 Question and Answer book” written by an author with the rather wonderful name of Plantagenet Somerset Fry.

Like many boys I was a lot more interested in non-fiction than fiction when I was younger and with Mr Fry I was able to sate my desire (to paraphrase Dickens Gradgrind) with “just the facts”.

 

The Guinness Book of Records was a close second.

I don’t want to be critical of any previous posters, but I do wonder if we asked their mothers at the age of 9 or 10 what their favourite book was, I suspect a factual books such as the Guinness book of Records or a picture book of Star Wars spacecraft would feature more prominently then “The Little Prince!

 

But all that’s pretty boring for a thread like this, so I will mention some of the fiction I used to like.

I have a very vague memory of what I read before 12, except like nearly everyone else in the UK and Ireland in the 70s and 80s, Enid Blyton and Carolyn Keene (Pseudonym of the Nancy Drew author) featured prominently. I always preferred Nancy Drew to the Hardy Boys when younger.....

And like many kids I really liked reading children’s versions of Bible stories (which, like non-fiction, is another form of reading I think many adults tend to forget when they are older how much they loved reading as children).

I remember in particular a book of rather dramatically illustrated Bible stories which my brother (two years older) had at first. I only realised he had never read it when I drew his attention to what I thought was a rather fantastic looking illustration in it, where Jesus is facing off against the Devil and where the artist had drawn cloven hoofs in the corner of the picture to represent Lucifer. Presumably the artist thought that to draw the Devil in his entirety would be too shocking for young eyes. However, even that was too much my brother who tore out the page to my amazement. He told me that he wanted no picture of the Devil to be any any of his books!

I think I was a bit reluctant to show him illustrations I liked after that...

 

I was quite a precocious reader, and I remember being very proud of myself at about age of 10 for a reading a full length Jeffrey Archer novel (Naturally I look back at that with shame now, LOL).

 

As I got older, historical novels piqued my curiosity the most.The fact that in the 80s, they were some of the few mainstream books where you were likely to get a bit of a gay storyline in them was probably part of it, looking back.

For instance, I really adored Rosemary Sutcliffe’s “The Eagle of the Ninth”. In retrospect the relationship between the Roman soldier and his Celtic (male) slave which it portrayed it was part of why I think I liked it although I didn’t quite understand that then as I had not realised yet that I was gay.

 

I also loved Colleen McCullough’s series on the last years of the Roman Republic. I was always rooting for the dictator Sulla in the earlier part of series, even though he was bit of a bad boy, because I was hoping for a “happy ever after” with his lover Metrobius.

 

And as an Irish child, books with an Irish theme such as “The White Seahorse” by Eleanor Fairburn (an historical novel based on the life of Grace O’Malley) and the “Run Wild” series by Tom McCoughren (about a family of foxes) struck a particular chord. Would be interesting to see if any non-Irish member has ever heard of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 24, 2020 by forrestreid
Adding some pictures