Books to return to

Criccieth

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What are the books you read as a child that you now return to again and again? Have you passed the love of that book on to another younger reader?

I remember listening to the Bernard Cribbins audio cassette of Winnie The Pooh and couldn't wait to read Milne to my kids - they ALL loved the works as small children but I never seemed to manage to get them interested in The Wombles, sadly. My youngest quite likes Paddington though!

I love Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence (I can still recite both sets of verses easier than I can remember maths formula, and I still get a lump in my throat at the end of the sequence (and one or two other points) - my oldest loved it, my second was "meh" and the third is avidly listening as a bed-time story now.

I also can happily go back to The Little Princess; Black Beauty and The Secret Garden time and again and at least one of my kids loves at least one of each of them. I've successfully read/shown the older ones Diana Wynne-Jones (Howl's Moving Castle; Eight Days of Luke) and they've all read their way through as much Roald Dahl as they can get their hands on. I've just been reminded elsewhere of the wonder that is The Weirdstone of Brinsingamen, so I shall have track a copy down and try it on them, but my oldest says The Discworld doesn't do it for him, so I shall have to try the next with Pratchett! (in fairness, the classic Discworld stuff isn't really child-humour). I can always pick up a Holmes, but so far the kids aren't interested (but then, only the oldest 2 are secondary-school age, so there's time yet....)

I think sometimes I'm in danger of thinking "I loved that!" about things that I read when I was older than several of mine are - I didn't read The Great Book of Amber, for example, until I was into my mid-teens. But I'll happily, when I have time, go and meet Corwin and his crazy family again. And while I love picking up The Stainless Steel Rat books. I was about 13 before I found them, too.

And I have to admit - I've not read them Dickens, and although my Dad loved The Wind In The Willows, it's never spoken to me. There is the danger, of course, of assuming that a book-loving child will surely love the same books as we loved. After all, my oldest is a huge Percy Jackson and Skullduggery Pleasant fan, but I just can't get into them. Whereas I loved Harry Potter from the moment I found out, as a mid-20;s adult, what all the fuss was about when Goblet Of Fire came out (I picked it up, realised it was Book 4, and spent the next 3 Friday evenings on a 4-hour train ride home reading the first three books and leaving them with my husband when I went back to my working-week-address. Didn't have Book Four finished by the time I got home on the 4th Friday and by the 5th Friday he'd bought his own copy) and now I have four Potter-obsessed kids.


What do you regard as your own personal Childhood Classic?
 

Siri Kirpal

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The Wind in the Willows
Winnie the Pooh
Madeleine
The first three Mary Poppins books (the originals, not the Disney version)
The early pre-Cat-in-the-Hat Seuss books, especially Horton Hatches an Egg and On Beyond Zebra
I loved every fairytale I could lay my hands on. (And no, they aren't all about passive girls waiting for prince charming. Sometimes the girls are the ones who rescue the men.)
A children's version of the Arabian Nights (which is ultimately about a women rescuing her fellow women)
Jade Snow Wong's autobiography (which I no longer have)

I read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager and loved it. Still do. The Hobbit leaves me oddly cold, though.
Didn't discover the Narnia books until I was an adult, sad to say.

But I didn't just read kid's books. As a teenager, I also read The Brothers Karamazov, Steppenwolf, Pride and Prejudice and many of the Sherlock Holmes stories. And I read scads of poetry starting at age 11.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal