What books did you grow up with?

The books of Robert Munsch (There's a Subway in My Apartment), Dennis Lee (Alligator Pie) and Beatrix Potter. There was also Dr. Seuss and the Bernstein Bears.

Elsie Dinsmore, Anne of Green Gables, Trixie Belden, Everything by Stephen King, Harry Potter, the bible.. lol I had to sneak my non christian books at the time

'The Little Grey Men' and 'Down the Bright Stream'
Wonderful books for an imaginative child.

New Zealand had a wonderful bunch of fantasy authors for kids/young adults while I was growing up... so I read Maurice Gee, Sherryl Jordan, Gaelyn Gordon... along with Margaret Mahy and Lynley Dodd and others.
Oh and some Australian authors as well. Like John Marsden and Paul Jennings.

I just read whatever was on hand though, so a lot of US and UK authors as well, including Enid Blyton for a while.

Secret Seven, Famous Five, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc. Probably goes a long way to explaining why I've always loved detective stories.

One of the first things I can remember reading was The Ancestral Trail. I forget who it was by, but it was kind of like a picture book series. There was usually quite a bit of text per page, but amazing pictures.

There were 52 issues over 2 years. The first year was Fantasy. The second year was Sci-Fi. It really explains my interest in those genres now.

And I also remember reading the Goosebumps series. Again, not sure who the author was. But that got me somewhat interested in Horror (which has passed me by by now).

And a few other random books. One that I remember had a Hippo in a river race with other hippoes. Of course, the MC gets the win in the end, but it was quite an enjoyable read. And then there was the one where a monkey went into space. Not much really happened, but I loved that book.

I don't think I really read anything by any famous authors, except for the Goosebumps series.

Then I read The Hobbit by Tolkien when I was 14 or 15, and I've been an avid reader since.

Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Roald Dahl. I read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series when I was about 12 and loved it. What else? Oh, Willard Price's Adventure books, they were great, as I recall.

I started reading when I was 2 or 3 and didn't stop. In my teens I would devour about 2 Nancy Drew books a day.

University killed it for me. I had to read some novels I really hated.

I read a lot of books from Otfried Preußler like The Little Witch, The Little Water Sprite, The Little Ghost or Krabat which is really, really great. I still pick it up occasionally and would recommend it to anyone who's looking for great German fantasy or wants to read a German folk tale.

A lot of Astrid Lindgren's books (translated) because these were (and still are) really popular around here.

When I was 11 or 12, our teacher made us read The Hobbit for school. I loved Tolkien after that and immediately jumped to LOTR. I've read both as translations back then and read the original texts a few years later, too.

Yeah, I jumped straight to Lord Of The Rings as soon as I finished The Hobbit too. Instant fan.

Y'know, now that I think about it, I don't think I ever read anything as a child that wasn't SF/F/H in some way...

I wonder if that was because of what I found interesting, or because maybe my parents just gave me SF/F when I was really young for some reason known only to them?

Interesting.

I'm in the states but I suspect I had more international books available when I was little than most people. Three I recall well were Hary Janos, The Little Prince, and The Wind in the Willows. Puma

I was horse-crazy when I was young so I read books by Margarite Henry, Jane MacIlvane Clary, K.M.Peyton and Mary Elwyn Patchett. Then I read 'Lord of the Rings' when I was 12 and everything changed.

Unfortunately, I grew up in a house that didn't really value books. Some were around, but the importance and fun of reading was never impressed upon me. With one notable exception. Mom loved the "Little House" series, and got me hooked on it. I still love reading them to this day. On my own, I did manage to get into Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume and Rosamond du Jardin's series about Toby and Midge Heydon.

My love of reading came a little later on. I've always stuttered, so it was embarrassing and difficult to express myself verbally. I turned to writing as a way of expression, and that turned into a love of reading.

I grew up in a house that has over three thousand books, so I was pretty much a book worm from the start. I read many a different thing but at about twelve, I fell for Forsyth, Ludlum, and many latinamerican writers. Now, I'm more into non fiction, though.

I have memories of Dr. Seuss, so naturally I read those to my kids as well. Once they were in school they got to choose what we read together.

Brian Jaques' Redwall books, the Harry Potter series and JRR Tolkien. There were many others but these are the ones I remember the most.

Oh, in Russia, even in the times of the Soviet Union when I grew up, the children's market was very multicultural -- in fact, publishing houses aimed it to be multicultural and children's translation was a biiig business. Brilliant literature was shoved down Russian kids' throats, from staples like Charles Perrault, Andersen and Brothers Grimm to Jonathan Swift to Antoine de St Exupery. But my absolute favorites were Astrid Lindgren's Seacrow Island, Tove Jansson's Moomintroll (is it my imagination or is there a tendency that the most creative children's writers tend to be Scandinavian?), Mary Poppins, any folk tales I could lay my hands on, all Russian and international SF I could lay my hands on, plus a bunch of great Russian children's writers, like Nikolai Nosov with his Dunno trilogy and Anatoly Alexin with his down to earth YA novellas.

But Seacrow Island and Moomintroll, I still reread them at least twice a year -- they're so addictive!

The first book I picked up to read was Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (I refuse to use the mistranslated English title, since it misses the point). I read a lot of English lit as a kid. I never read many Aussie or American authors. Harry Potter came out when I was already in grade 9, but I guess I was still technically a kid.

I had pretty eclectic taste for a kid, I guess: Where the Red Fern Grows, 101 Dalmatians (the actual novel, not the Disney stuff), Island of the Blue Dolphins, anything Tolkien, and a number of Judy Blume books. I still have not forgiven Steinbeck for "The Red Pony". I was 8 years old and kept waiting for it to have a happy ending!

Oh, Fresie said it Growing up in the Soviet Union had its advantages - including the international authors translated into my mother tongue and the wonderful cartoons Sojuzmultfilm produced.
But back to books - Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, R. L. Stevenson, A. Dumas (sen.) and his Count of Monte Cristo and my all time favorite (and the reason I live in Mexico) - Jules Verne. I also liked Victor Hugo (hands up everyone who has read Les Miserables three times from cover to cover).
Also the authors who wrote in my mother tongue and fed my imagination with the unforgettable characters.
And, of course, all the fairy tales one could read. Soviet Union might have had only 15 "states", but it had far more nations and the fairy tales of these nations were translated and published in my language too. What bliss it was

I love Antoine de St Exupery! I read it later than childhood, and I didn't grow up with French at all, but I wish I had

SaraP said:

Which got me to wondering, how did the country you grew up in influence the kind of books that were available to you?

Click to expand...

Where I grew up is completely different to where I am now.

Had access to all the Enid Blyton stories, Nancy Drew, anything by Diana Wynne Jones, all the Point Horror books I could get my hands on; anything fantasy / SF.

Also had access to manga (back when it wasn't a huge thing), so read series like Ranma 1/2 (in Chinese), and other kids story books like 小王子, not to mention the studying, e.g., 中文一百字.

Don't remember much more right now. I'd have to go look through the boxes in the attic and that's not feasible right now.

Some Romanian authors, like Gelu Naum and Constantin Chirita, and Kipling, London, Dumas, Zevaco, Zelazny, Karl May, Jules Verne, Stepanov, Pierre Clostermann, Sven Hassel, Jack Higgins, Clavell, Bronte, and of course Margaret Mitchel's Gone with the wind. Basically, I read just about anything I could get my hands on. I couldn't live without book. I used to skip school to stay home and finish whatever book I was reading at the time. Few days after finishing 8th grade, just before exams, my mom made the mistake of bringing home James Clavell's Shogun. Needless to say I forgot about everything else but THE BOOK.

Ah, Shogun. And Taipan, by the same author. I don't know what it is about the conflict of cultures that interests me so much :d

I don't know if this is a British thing (or rather an English thing, as I haven't actually seen any of the titles in Scotland), but I remember reading the Serendipity books as a child, and have yet to come across anyone else who has read them. The Moomin books mentioned before reminded me of the fat (100+ page) black and white collections of comic strips - another thing which nobody seems to recall. The best thing about spending time in the South East was the number of used bookshops which carried foreign language titles brought over by the students from the language schools - it's where I picked up most of my (French-language) Titans comics (Marvel reprints) and a few Australian pocket westerns - no idea why westerns were massively popular in 1950s Australia, but the numbers on my copies are in the high 600s.