Because everyone else is doing it ...
Aug. 7th, 2011 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elingregory15 of my favourite kids books/authors. The problem is that 'kid' = 0 to 18 and that covers a lot of development, also nobody really cared much what I read as long as I was quiet and out of the way. School holidays, with both parents at work, was just one long reading session.
1] A A Milne - I loved the Winnie the Pooh books and also the poetry.
2] Kenneth Grahame - Wind in the Willows. The child's version always concentrates on that oaf Toad, but I far preferred Ratty and Mole. I read the unabridged version for the first time when I had my own children and was reduced to tears by Dolce Domum, The Seafarer and Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Pan - what a benign god. [Going to lump in Henry Williamson and Denys Watkins-Pichford with this because they are similar in their luscious description of the English countryside. Sadly they are period pieces now and much of what they describe is gone forever.]
3] Enid Blyton - yes I know she's horribly dated and very very non-PC but I loved the books as a kid and since I never identified with any of the girls, not even George, I didn't notice the unfairness of it. Spies and adventures and I had such a crush on Barney!
4] Rosemary Sutcliffe - who wrote the book The Eagle was loosely based on. The books are infinitely better and in Sword at Sunset she included the first sympathetic depiction of a gay couple I had ever seen.
5] Mary Renault - The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. I read them again recently and was surprised how short they were for how much action and incident were packed into them.
6] Primrose Cumming - this lady wrote stories about ponies. Silver Snaffles with its subplot about 'people with no horse sense' has been republished recently but her other books - the Silver Eagles series, The Wednesday Pony etc - are long out of print. The only one I still have is "Ben, the story of a carthorse".
7] C M Enriquez - Khyberie, the Story of a Pony on the Indian Frontier. I read and re-read this. The historical detail is rose tinted but I just lapped it up. Rivers in spate, rabid gharri ponies, amazing rock climbing feats. Highly recommended. I looked it up to check the spelling of the author's name and found a photo of the edition I had, illustrated by K F Barker who was an author of books about dogs..
8] I'm going to lump some more 'pony' authors together here because there were so damn many of them. The ones that stick in the mind are Veronica Westlake who wrote The Ten Pound Pony, about the efforts of a bunch of kids to raise enough money to buy a neglected pony, and Flame, a piece of sheer melodrama that I LOVED about a pony stolen by gypsies, that was written in 10 weeks by 12 year old Daphne Winstone and published almost as is. You can imagine what that gem was like but the illustrations were superb.
9] Earnest Thomson Seton - Wild Animals I Have Known. I got this from the travelling library - a lorry that visited the little villages once a week. I was only allowed 3 books on my card so I used to pick thick ones. Almost all the stories in this ended sadly. I wept buckets.
10] C S Lewis - I wanted to move to Narnia when I was small and have a horse just like Bree. I didn't much like Pauline Baynes drawings, dunno why.
11] The Arabian Nights - no idea who wrote the edition I had but I used to pore over the illustrations by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. [ok I know that's Androcles not Sindbad or whatever but isn't it gorgeous?]
12] 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, also illustrated by the Grahame Johnstones. I remember being very upset that none of my animals seemed inclined to talk.
13] Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, illustrated by Cecil Aldin.
14] Alan Garner - Weirdstone, Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, the Owl Service - SO GOOD. I want to read them again now.
15] Lucy M Boston - the Green Knowe books, gently creepy paranormal stories set in an ancient manor house. I was enthralled to find out, quite recently, that the house is REAL and everything mentioned in the books is in the house exactly as described.
I could add odd things like how Mum took 'From Russian with Love' away from me and gave me Dickens [which was bloody crazy because the sexy bits of Fleming went right over my head but horrible things happen to KIDS in Dickens]. Or Gone with the Wind - taken from the library because it was thick. Or that I developed a passion for the Picadilly Cowboys - English writers who had never been west of Cornwall who made a good living writing Westerns - but they are adult books so don't really apply.
I haven't mentioned Tolkien because I didn't come across him until I was - actually I was 15 which qualifies but everyone's got Tolkien.
1] A A Milne - I loved the Winnie the Pooh books and also the poetry.
2] Kenneth Grahame - Wind in the Willows. The child's version always concentrates on that oaf Toad, but I far preferred Ratty and Mole. I read the unabridged version for the first time when I had my own children and was reduced to tears by Dolce Domum, The Seafarer and Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Pan - what a benign god. [Going to lump in Henry Williamson and Denys Watkins-Pichford with this because they are similar in their luscious description of the English countryside. Sadly they are period pieces now and much of what they describe is gone forever.]
3] Enid Blyton - yes I know she's horribly dated and very very non-PC but I loved the books as a kid and since I never identified with any of the girls, not even George, I didn't notice the unfairness of it. Spies and adventures and I had such a crush on Barney!
4] Rosemary Sutcliffe - who wrote the book The Eagle was loosely based on. The books are infinitely better and in Sword at Sunset she included the first sympathetic depiction of a gay couple I had ever seen.
5] Mary Renault - The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. I read them again recently and was surprised how short they were for how much action and incident were packed into them.
6] Primrose Cumming - this lady wrote stories about ponies. Silver Snaffles with its subplot about 'people with no horse sense' has been republished recently but her other books - the Silver Eagles series, The Wednesday Pony etc - are long out of print. The only one I still have is "Ben, the story of a carthorse".
7] C M Enriquez - Khyberie, the Story of a Pony on the Indian Frontier. I read and re-read this. The historical detail is rose tinted but I just lapped it up. Rivers in spate, rabid gharri ponies, amazing rock climbing feats. Highly recommended. I looked it up to check the spelling of the author's name and found a photo of the edition I had, illustrated by K F Barker who was an author of books about dogs..
8] I'm going to lump some more 'pony' authors together here because there were so damn many of them. The ones that stick in the mind are Veronica Westlake who wrote The Ten Pound Pony, about the efforts of a bunch of kids to raise enough money to buy a neglected pony, and Flame, a piece of sheer melodrama that I LOVED about a pony stolen by gypsies, that was written in 10 weeks by 12 year old Daphne Winstone and published almost as is. You can imagine what that gem was like but the illustrations were superb.
9] Earnest Thomson Seton - Wild Animals I Have Known. I got this from the travelling library - a lorry that visited the little villages once a week. I was only allowed 3 books on my card so I used to pick thick ones. Almost all the stories in this ended sadly. I wept buckets.
10] C S Lewis - I wanted to move to Narnia when I was small and have a horse just like Bree. I didn't much like Pauline Baynes drawings, dunno why.
11] The Arabian Nights - no idea who wrote the edition I had but I used to pore over the illustrations by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. [ok I know that's Androcles not Sindbad or whatever but isn't it gorgeous?]
12] 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, also illustrated by the Grahame Johnstones. I remember being very upset that none of my animals seemed inclined to talk.
13] Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, illustrated by Cecil Aldin.
14] Alan Garner - Weirdstone, Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, the Owl Service - SO GOOD. I want to read them again now.
15] Lucy M Boston - the Green Knowe books, gently creepy paranormal stories set in an ancient manor house. I was enthralled to find out, quite recently, that the house is REAL and everything mentioned in the books is in the house exactly as described.
I could add odd things like how Mum took 'From Russian with Love' away from me and gave me Dickens [which was bloody crazy because the sexy bits of Fleming went right over my head but horrible things happen to KIDS in Dickens]. Or Gone with the Wind - taken from the library because it was thick. Or that I developed a passion for the Picadilly Cowboys - English writers who had never been west of Cornwall who made a good living writing Westerns - but they are adult books so don't really apply.
I haven't mentioned Tolkien because I didn't come across him until I was - actually I was 15 which qualifies but everyone's got Tolkien.
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Date: 2011-08-07 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-07 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-07 10:11 pm (UTC)Especially Sutcliffe, Garner and Lewis were favourites. Renault, I only read when I was almost grown up -- I was 17 when I discovered 'The Persian Boy'.
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Date: 2011-08-07 10:52 pm (UTC)DO! I re-read them again recently and they really are amazing.
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Date: 2011-08-08 09:51 am (UTC)*g* My Dad tried to get my teacher to take Asimov away from me and give me Solzhenitsyn instead, so maybe your Mum was motivated more by reasons of literary snobbery? (It didn't work in my case either - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch just confirmed me in my belief that classics existed entirely to bore people to death.)
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Date: 2011-08-09 02:55 pm (UTC)Classics *sigh* no wonder I developed such a love for genre.
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Date: 2011-08-09 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-13 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-09 04:03 pm (UTC)