The other day I was talking to my sister about how we were both always afraid someone we knew would get killed by a bee sting, because there was a book we had to read when we were kids where someone dies from getting stung by a bee. We couldn’t remember the name of the book but finally after googling it we figure out it was called “A Taste of Blackberries”.
For some reason, books and short stories from middle-school really stick in my head: The Most Dangerous Game, The Monkey’s Paw, Charles, Animal Farm, Flowers For Algernon. What stories do you remember from middle-school and early high-school?
Also a bleg: what’s the name of the story where kids are on a bus, horsing around and hitting each other on the back of the head to make each other see lightning, and one gets hit too hard and dies? And another: what’s the book about the family where there’s one crazy kid who poisons some other family members because they made her to go to be early (or some other small thing)? I want to say I Capture the Castle, but know that’s a different book.
Turgidson
You know what I haven’t had in a while? Big League Chew.
kindness
You read odd books growing up. Bee stings that kill. Smacking each other to see stars and dying.
spudvol
I think the head smacking thing you are remembering is actually an NCIS episode. You old guys get stuff mixed up all the time.
Steppan
Ender’s Game – 6th grade.
shell
That last one is Shirley Jackson’s ‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’
That one stuck with me cause it starts so innocently , the narrator, a young girl coming back from the library cause she loves to read…and I’m thinking ‘She’s just like me!’
Later on then….Hoo-boy
gogol's wife
@kindness:
Yes, very gruesome. Although as I recall, Oliver Twist and Romeo and Juliet (which we read in ninth grade) were pretty violent too.
Elliott
jeez DougJ, you need a hobby
Duncan Watson
Short stories tend to be powerful fiction. It is sad that more collections don’t get published nowadays. I also have a lot of memories that gestated from short stories. Novels are for those who enjoy the process of reading. Short stories are for the writers who want to embed a concept in your brain.
FYI- Ender’s Game was originally a short story published in Analog.
I can’t help you with your specific examples.
SiubhanDuinne
Definitely “The Monkey’s Paw.” Also, “The Man Without a Country” and “The Lady, or the Tiger?”
OzarkHillbilly
Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye. Plus some really trashy stuff (Louis L’Amour, etc)
Major Major Major Major
Ender’s Game, The Lottery, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy et al., Bone…
Good Country People…
Eric U.
funny, I read a lot of books (starting @6 when my mother let me stay up an extra half hour if I read) and I don’t think anything really stuck with me.
One book I read to my kids that I really liked featured a birthday party for a cat. They didn’t know when the cat was born, so they had two birthday parties a year. And they made the cake out of pancakes since that’s what the cat liked. Wish I could remember the name of that book.
sophronia
I was discussing this with a book-loving friend last week, and we both agreed that we will go to our graves still in love with Nathaniel Eaton from The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
OzarkHillbilly
@SiubhanDuinne:
That too.
TaMara (BHF)
Perfect timing.Maybe you can help: I read a book in 6th grade that took place in swamp country. Strange things happen in an old house, boy gives girl a bracelet that shrinks to her arm and puts her in a trance. There was voodoo and travels through swamps…
Fun book. Anyone know what it might be?
Middle School – 1984, The Pearl (never read Steinbeck again), To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm
And also, why is YA so dark?
Nicole
I remember “13 Is Too Young To Die.” I grew up thinking lupus was always a death sentence. There was one called “Can I Get There By Candlelight” about a girl going back in time on her horse. She meets a girl her own age in the past, and then the girl falls off a horse and dies. I found one in my grandparents’ house called, “Follow My Leader” about a kid getting blinded by a firecracker and then getting a guide dog.
I think these books are memorable because horrible things happen to the kids in them!
And thanks to “Can I Get There By Candlelight” I now associate tollhouse cookies with death. Death and time travel.
Betty Cracker
I read a book in 4th or 5th grade (I think) that I really wanted to find again later, but I was never able to recall the title or even enough of the plot to search on Google after Gore invented the Internet many years later. All I remember about it now was that the main characters were two naughty brothers who stumbled into some horrible dystopia where they were forced to drive vehicles in a race, and one of them was killed. Ring a bell for anyone?
blackcatsrule
Can I jump on the book bandwagon? About 20 years ago I read a book (not a children’s book as will soon become obvious) about a young Irish girl who falls in love with a tinker, lives with him through the winter in a bleak cabin by the sea, has a baby and returns home to her aunt (I believe her mother drowned herself and her aunt raised her). Every so often I think of this beautifully written book but so far my searching hasn’t found anything remotely resembling this description. Thanks in advance.
gogol's wife
@sophronia:
Oh, yes. I bought a copy of it recently so I could reread it. It turns out I ended up living not far from where it’s set, although as a child I had no idea where that was.
gogol's wife
By the way, I googled I Capture the Castle and it looks quite good.
TaMara (BHF)
I forgot to mention the Madeline L’Engle books. I loved those.
Also, I stopped reading young adult books when everyone was reading Judy Blume and Go Ask Alice. Just ugh.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
I read some books way too young because I was a very advanced reader. Let’s just say that “The World According to Garp” is a pretty fucked up book to begin with, and it’s worse when you’re about 10 years old.
I missed “The Bridge to Terebithia,” but “Jacob Have I Loved” by the same author is also pretty depressing.
dedc79
Ton of books about animals dying for some reason:
A Day No Pig Would Die
The Yearling
Where the Red Fern Grows
The Red Pony
Turgidson
Atlas Shrugged.
….
….
kidding.
@TaMara (BHF): good call on Madeline L’Engle books. Definitely got really into those for a period.
jl
I sure do remember The Lottery and The Monkey’s Paw.
The Scrivener by Melville, but that was high school. Probably only because we saw a short film dramatization afterward, which made the story stick in my mind. Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog, and Puddin’ Head Wilson, though that is actually a novella. We dang kids thought the aphorisms, wisecracks and sarcasm in Wilson were HighLarious LOL ROFL. Haven’t read it again so not sure how it holds up.
Edit: OK,if novels count: animal farm. If longer novels count, Green Gables (correction: Green Mansions) (which everyone thought was sappy), and Little Women (which the guys hated) and Little House on the Prairie, and the novel was better that any of the TV version I watched. Some cool thrilling adventures in House on Prairie, enough to get us through the sappy boring parts.
glory b
Do any of you notice how dreadful, maudlin and tragic these stories can be? Until my kids started middle school, I didn’t realize how unrelentingly sad (at least in the Pittsburgh public schools) the reading material is.
Don’t get me wrong, I read the same stuff. But I can understand why some kids don’t want to read, the stuff they give them is sooooo sad and leaves you feeling worse than you did before you started.
So, the book I love, becasue it is hilarious, is A Dog’s Life by Peter Mayle, the same author of A Year in Provence. For all the dog lovers out there, it’s laugh out loud funny, and I gave it to my kids to read after all that fairly well written but depressing stuff they made them read. As if 7th grade wasn’t bad enough already…
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne (tablet): When I was a kid, my mom had a rule that I could read anything in the house — she was just happy that I was a reader. Well, she forgot to hide the copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” that she had to read for a lit class, and I read it when I was 12. Yikes! I also smuggled her copy of “The Exorcist” into bible camp!
Archon
The Good Earth was a captivating book for me when I first read it in 7th grade. I’ve read it a couple times since then, it’s a masterpiece in storytelling.
scav
@dedc79: Black Beauty.
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve got a book memory like that, except it was a much gentler book probably written/published in the late ’40s or early ’50s. I cannot remember the author or the title, but it was about a huge family of boys, stair step in age ranging from 18 down to 2. I remember some of their names: Dave, Steve, Thaddeus Christopher (always called T.C.) There was one girl (a cousin, I think) named Katie, and there was a cranky old strict great-aunt who, of course, had a heart of gold. The mother was off somewhere (probably having another baby), and the father was an artist, kind of vaguely present.
I would give anything to identify this book and have the chance to track it down and read it once again. If I remember correctly, there was a sequel (mother was back in the family) where they all went to live in a lighthouse or something and the artist father painted a mural/diorama which featured caricatures of every member of the family.
justawriter
I lived in a town that was probably smaller than your high school class, so most of my own books were from the Scholastic Book Service we ordered out of the Weekly Reader. My mom liked that I read a lot, so every order my class put in, about a third of the books were mine. One I remember because of the topic of the thread was call Follow My Leader, about a boy blinded when the town bully accidentally throws a fire cracker in his face. The boy gets a guide dog named Leader. We follow the kid through his learning to cope and thrive with blindness (there was even a Braille alphabet embossed on the back cover – so cool). Boy even starts his own little newstand. Tragically, Leader bites the bully and is danger of being put down until the bully tearfully confesses that he has been cruelly taunting the dog for weeks. Bully reforms, everyone lives happily, if blindly ever after.
MaryRC
@gogol’s wife: It is, actually — one of my favorites as a teenager. But a million miles apart from “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”! That book was utterly chilling and so was another work of Shirley Jackson’s — “The Haunting of Hill House”.
currants
@shell: Well, that’s Shirley Jackson for you….
gogol's wife
@Betty Cracker:
I too read Portnoy at a tender age. Have never liked Roth ever since. I still like liver, but just barely.
mapaghimagsik
Robert Cormier — I Am The Cheese and The Chocolate War were dark, powerful reads.
TaMara (BHF)
@Betty Cracker: Oh, I forgot about the adult stuff I read when I was in middle school. Jaws and The Godfather got passed around because of the dirty stuff (I was about 12). I read Gone with the Wind before high school, so probably about 13. My mom belonged to a book of the month kind of club and I read anything that arrived at the door. There was some pretty racy stuff.
jl
We read a Steinbeck short story about some guy on the lam, got shot, dies.
Yearling: yuck. I remember that thing. I hated the pet animal stories where you either already knew, or could figure out halfway through that the poor animal was going to get snuffed. Same for Old Yeller, which I had to suffer through.
DougJ
@justawriter:
How small was your town? My graduating class was about 50 kids.
dedc79
@scav: Yes, didn’t read that one in school, but did read it around the same time. I suppose books like these provide one way to introduce kids to the topics of death and loss without leaping right into discussing the death of people.
currants
@sophronia: and I loved Kit!
scav
@DougJ: What grade? Mine was at most 4 from 8th grade. 2 of them were imports.
mai naem mobile
Death.Be.Not Proud – John Gunther. Sad sad memoir of.his son dying.from.a.brain tumor.
OzarkHillbilly
@Eric U.:
I did the same with both my sons. They are now both avid readers.
K488
@jl: I’m trying to imagine a movie of Bartleby, The Scrivener. Lots of action sequences! I actually have the vocal score of an opera based on the story – the lead does nothing by stare into space and sing, “I’d really rather not.” Reminds me of the My Dinner with André action figures in Waiting for Guffman. Re books, I was given a fantasy book called Islandia when I was a teenager (1960’s). It dates from the ’20’2s (I think), and was written by a Boston lawyer. Wonderfully imagined culture and customs, although there were some dated stereotypes in it apparent even to my green self. Another book series I remember from even earlier involved a boy making a spaceship in his back yard. Ring any bells?
Tree With Water
The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie- it’s a ripping yarn of the far west and the mountain men. A bit more than a few years later the movie Jeremiah Johnson came along, and I yearned to be free and off the grid because… well, you know. Turned out I like the perks of the grid too much, however, starting with central heating, and I was soon after disabused off my conceit. Indeed, at the moment I’m in front of my computer with a San Francisco Giants game on TV in the background..
Ken
The Ray Bradbury story where the kids live on Mars and lock the girl in the closet so she can’t see the sun.
gogol's wife
@TaMara (BHF):
Yes, the “operation” that Sonny’s girlfriend had to have . . . .
Belafon
@TaMara (BHF): Judy Bloom’s Forever for steamy middle school stuff.
Brachiator
I think I read a lot of mysteries, SF and trashy adult books, along with classics during this period. Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Solar Pons, some Dickens, The Count of Monte Cristo (I remember because it was the longest book I had ever read). Dune, Childhood’s End, lots of Andre Norton, some Heinlein. Catch-22, an eclectic mix now that I think about it.
Never cared for YA books or other books that were supposedly “age appropriate.”
And lots of comic books.
jl
@Ken: I remember reading a science fiction story about two teenagers in love, and one has to leave, the heartbreak of it! Twist was, at the beginning you thought they were human, then more and more hints that they were aliens on an alien planet, with no idea at all about any humans or earth. Which full descriptions of what they were at the very end. That stuck in my mind. Don’t remember if I read it on my own or for school.
Don’t remember the title.
justawriter
@DougJ: We are exceptions, I think. My town was 400 people when I was growing and has faded to less than 200. I keep running into more and more people, those who have moved to far flung Dakota, who went to high schools that had thousands of students.
jl
One teacher assigned a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, and we all liked her just for that. They were fun, though I don’t remember the short stories very clearly. I do remember Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5.
srv
Clearly there is something wrong with your childhoods if you weren’t reading Ayn Rand by Jr. High.
No wonder this country is so screwed up.
Bill
A few months ago I took my kids to the zoo and remembered a book I read in middle school. It was about some kids who befriended an old man. The old man visited the same monkey at the zoo every day and considered him a friend. In the end the man and the monkey died. I was telling my kids about it, but couldn’t remember the name of the book.
When I got home I looked it up on the interwebs. It was called the Pig Man.
I posted about it on Facebook, and was met with a long string of people remembering depressing Middle School books including: The Cay, City Of Gold and Lead and Death Watch. I was kind of surprised, looking back, how many depressing stories they made us read. But also how much they had stuck with us even in to middle age.
scav
One good thing about really small schools is that grade discipline is sometimes basically impossible to maintain, so they may just point you at the library and let it rip. (There’s also a fair bit of inevitable repetition.)
gian
@Bill: the city of gold and lead. The tripods books. My 4th grader just read that one. There is a prequel now “when the tripods came”
Tree With Water
@Bill: The man and the monkey died on the same day? Was it a suicide pact-type scenario? I mean, what are the odds of that man and a monkey he ritually visited on a daily basis actually dying on the same day?
jl
@K488: The teacher kind of dragged us through the story. I think we were too young to get Melville’s sly digs at the dreariness of the externally driven commercial life and modern office work (ahead of his time?). The film was NOT action packed, but there was something about that really hit a nerve with the class. Maybe we saw it as a dramatization of the dreariness of much of life at high school. Anyway, when the class saw the film, we suddenly ‘got’ the short story and had a lively discussion about what it all meant, or maybe did not meant.
Edit: What I remember now is that everyone identified with Bartleby, who we saw as, totally, the hero.
I wonder if the film is on the intertubes?
Mike in NC
@mai naem mobile: That’s one I remember from high school (or maybe junior high); very depressing.
the Conster
Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov. I loved The Foundation Trilogy. Loved Tom Tryon. My junior high reading was my older siblings’ racier books, then sci fi which is all I liked.
Ghost of Joe Liebling's Dog
How odd! I had no idea there was such a book as “A Taste of Blackberries” – I was sure you must be thinking of “A Taste for Honey,” because the title’s almost the same (“misremembered,” I said to myself) and it has a great deal to do with deadly bees … but no, two very different books as it turns out.
I remember “The Witches’ Bridge” very well from my YA years, and “The Horse Without a Head” …
WRT your bleg, the story about the boys on the schoolbus is A Ride on the Short Dog, by James Still. I looked his name up a year or two ago, and IIRC his bio was worth reading.
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
still kickin
jl
Bartleby The Scrivener (Movie), Herman Melville 1853
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUBA_KR-VNU
GregL190
O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre and The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester.
Seriously. In seventh and eighth grades. I was a big-time history nerd back then.
RSA
The Forgotten Door, Alexander Key. Fantasy, with some Cold War undercurrents I completely missed when I was a kid.
The Enchanted Castle, E. Nesbit. Another fantasy, and I remembered it being much scarier than it actually was when I re-read it as an adult.
I guess I liked fantasies. The Narnia books, of course; the White Mountain/Tripod trilogy; battered Tom Corbett novels…
Central Planning
I remember My Brother Sam Is Dead from when I was a kid – 5th or 6th grade.
Spoiler alert: I think Sam’s death at the end is what makes me remember it. I think it was probably the first story I read about someone being killed (or at least the first one I remember)
burnspbesq
I started reading Camus, Falukner, and Dostoyevski when I was was a sophomore or junior in high school. Camus, especially The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus, has stayed with me.
I’m so old that I remember when Solzhenitsyn’s fiction first started being published in the West. I think I read The First Circle in ninth grade, and Cancer Ward not long after. Scared the crap out of me.
I associate Shostakovich’s late symphonies, especially the 13th, with reading Solzhenitsyn. Not sure why. The first Western recording of the 13th (with Tom Krause as the soloist and Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra) came out my sophomore year, my chorus director recommended that I check it out, and I did. My vinyl copy is beat to shit, but I was able to find a high-resolution download recently, and it’s as good as I remember it to be.
The Golux
One of my favorites from that time is “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster, with brilliant illustrations by Jules Feiffer. It’s full of clever wordplay. Sometime later I gave my younger sister a copy for Christmas, and she turned it into an excellent theater production when she was in high school.
I’d also nominate James Thurber’s “The Thirteen Clocks” (the source of my screen name), but my affection for that started much earlier, as my father, a theater buff, used to read it to us about once a year starting when I was about six or seven.
Although I didn’t read them when I was a kid, I also loved anything by Roald Dahl or anything by Gary Paulsen when I was reading to my kids.
gene108
Lloyd Alexander is a favorite author. Prydain Chronicles is still an all time favorite.
So enjoyed the Prydain Chronicles that in middle school I read the Westmark Trilogy and I was never an avid reader as a youth, rare that I would actually seek books to read on me own.
Ben Cisco
Encyclopedia Brown books.
p.a.
@jl: oi! The Lottery and The Monkey’s Paw indeed.
Remember ordering Scholastic Books paperbacks in elementary school? A Wrinkle in Time. Mystery on Nine-Mile Marsh. The Moonball.
Jr/Sr High School: Wieland. J.F.Cooper’s The Prairie. The usual suspects: A Separate Peace (doppelganger!), Lord of the Flies, Catcher…, The Stranger, Julius Caesar. French class: Micromegas, Candide, Si le Grain ne Meurt.
beltane
What about the Judy Blume books?
It’s strange that I was an English Lit major in college because I heartily disliked most of the assigned reading in middle school. One book I partially remember is A Day No Pigs Would Die. Well, the only thing I remembered about it was a cow with a goiter. The goiter must have made an impression on me.
Central Planning
@Ben Cisco:
Makes me think of The Hardy Boy series and Nancy Drew, and then the television series that went along with them.
Mike E
The Scarlet Letter…Arrgh!
Central Planning
@beltane:
I remember kids whispering about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, probably around 6th grade. I read it in the public library. I had no idea what it was about. Ah, to be young and naive.
EthylEster
@gogol’s wife: By the way, I googled I Capture the Castle and it looks quite good.
the movie IS quite good…funny and quirky.
the first time i ever noticed bill nighy.
burnspbesq
@Ben Cisco:
I remember those as being fifth or sixth grade. Same time frame as the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Chip Hilton, and yes, I also read Nancy Drew.
DougJ
@Central Planning:
I remember that one too!
GeriUpNorth
My age-inappropriate book was Carrie by Stephen King. My mom never tried to restrict my reading, but she read that one after I finished it and said it was probably a bit too old for me, but it was too late by then. The Thorn Birds was getting passed around at school around that time too.
I used to order books from the Scholastic Book Service too, and I remember getting Follow My Leader! I also had gotten a book on the Donner Party through them – I have no idea why that was in a book catalog aimed at high schoolers.
The Borrowers series by Mary Norton was one of my favorites. I think I still have the omnibus edition stashed away. My grandmother got me into the Little House series, and also the complete works of Zane Grey. She’d have me check them out from the library for her, and I’d read them before I brought them back.
tazj
@Ken: “All Summer in a Day” was the short story (set on Venus) by Ray Bradbury and that story was memorable for me too. We read that in the 7th grade and I remember the teacher saying that the short summer on Venus reminded her of the summers in Buffalo. I liked Ray Bradbury and remember reading “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “The Martian Chronicles”. I also remember reading “Ragtime” and “The Grapes of Wrath” in school.
DougJ
@scav:
Senior year graduating class.
beltane
@Central Planning: I also remember those horrible “Flowers in the Attic” books being very popular.
p.a.
How could I forget Faulkner. Had an English teacher who pounded us with Faulkner (this is NOT a complaint).
As I Lay Dying
The Hamlet
The Sound and…
Light in August
Mostly wasted on us high school cretins.
KS in MA
Any Farley Mowat fans here? I remember a couple of his books from middle school, like “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be” and (I think) “Owls in the Family,” that I just loved. Funny, charming, and not depressing, if I remember right.
Culture of Truth
The Tripod books – yes. Also Watership Down, Robinson Crusoe, 1984, the usual books about kids dying of various disease. I recall one about teenager who got ALS / Lou Gehrig’s and gracefully died.
imonlylurking
I remember a paperback sci-fi book, I read it in probably the early 80s. Got it from the high school library , so it couldn’t have been too subversive. It was about a man that kept encountering this really violent person and about halfway through the book you realize he is moving forward through time meeting himself moving backwards through time. I have no idea who wrote it or anything-I’d love to read it again but I can’t find it!
Bill
@Tree With Water: As I recall, the monkey died and when the old man found out he had a heart attack.
gian
7th grade they had us read Hiroshima.complete with graphic descriptions of death by radiation poisoning
raven
Street Rod and Hot Rod by Henry Gregor Felsen. I thought of them a few years back and found that his kids had reissued the books and made a website. I had a brief exchange of emails with his son and learned of (LETTERS) TO MY SON IN UNIFORM, DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, 1967. I figured it would be right wing rah rah shit and was surprised to read how Mr Felsen wrote to his son that, even though he might disagree with anti-war folks, he needed to respect their positions.
gogol's wife
@Bill:
Man, I’m glad I skipped these YA books and went straight for Portnoy!
Central Planning
@beltane:
I don’t, but then again, I’m a guy.
One of the others that comes to mind is Shel Silverstein’s Different Dances Again, I had no idea what was going on with some (most?) of those pictures. Too young to get it.
And just to think of other books I read as a kid but haven’t really thought about: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH or Jonathan Livingston Seagull
I also remember reading Shakespeare and other “classics”. I never liked any of them. Still don’t.
burnspbesq
I was down for almost a month with mono the summer between junior and senior year. IIRC, I read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, Brothers Karamazov, and Gravity’s Rainbow that month. And watched a ton of baseball. Started Ulysses, but never finished it (and to this day, I still haven’t).
Culture of Truth
Oh yes also Lord of the Flies – that had a big impact.
raven
@KS in MA: I read “And No Birds Sang”. Brutal book about his experiences in WW2 Italy.
Tree With Water
@Bill: You were lucky to have read it as a youngster. But truly it sounds like a book that children of all ages will enjoy… the book’s got it all: love, lust (yes, lust! monkey-man lust!), loss. No wonder you remember it all these years later.
jacel
In high school (circa 1970) I saw a friend who looked unusually depressed. I asked her what was the matter. She replied by pulling out a copy of “Beautiful Losers” by Leonard Cohen and said, “Read this!” I did so. Two days later another friend asked what was the matter with me, and I said, “Read this!” This chain continued for some time among my friends.
ixnay
@Ken: “All Summer in a Day” is that story.
eemom
@Archon:
Wow — same here. I’m 52 and I reread it to this day. You are the first kindred spirit I’ve ever encountered.
scav
@DougJ: Senior year was flatlanders, so either 400 800 or so, alas.I honestly don’t remember, it was just lumped under way too many.
Anne Laurie
@K488:
The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet?
Or possibly one of the Danny Dunn books?
Apart from the general range of ‘inappropriate’ reading — including my dad’s SF and John D. MacDonald paperbacks, and my mom’s Mary McCarthy novels — I read everything I could find by Mark Twain (including the Autobiography of Joan of Arc) and Ambrose Bierce.
We weren’t allowed to read “crap” like comic books or Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy novels (of course, we did anyway), but the no-kid-series rule didn’t apply to the big batch of moldy-smelling 1920s titles like The Radio Girls and the Girls Automobile Club that a friend of my grandmother’s passed on, because those were… historical?
The only book my English-teacher mother ever punished me for reading was her copy of the Decameron, which she had strictly forbidden us to touch, mostly because she knew I’d bring it up with the nuns at my parochial school, and by the time I was in the sixth grade she was very, very tired of being in the middle of those discussions!
Betty Cracker
@beltane: OMFG, were those terrible! I read them all, though. I think someone actually made a movie out of them fairly recently, and when I heard about that, I thought, “WHY?!?!?!?”
eemom
Also like Shirley Jackson, with We Have Always Lived in the Castle being my favorite. The woman had an amazing, if dark, imagination.
I read an early novel of hers called Hangsaman last summer, about a young woman going to college in the 1940s. It was interesting, but kind of scattered.
schrodinger's cat
Dracula, Animal Farm, Nancy Drew series, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities. I remember reading a sad short story by Oscar Wilde called The Happy Prince. Books by Agatha Christie, I especially like the ones with Poirot and to a lesser extent Ms. Marple, can’t stand Tommy and Tuppence, P. G. Wodehouse, the complete Sherlock Holmes.
ETA: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Gerald Durrell’s books.
schrodinger's cat
@p.a.: I was reading Light in August for a book club, I found it extremely depressing, I did not finish it.
Scott
I tended to read all the non-school books which I stubbornly didn’t want to read. I now read all my kid’s assigned books and I find I enjoy them. East of Eden, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.
As a jr and high schooler, I read all of Heinlein, especially was wowed by Stranger in a Strange Land and the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Loved Roger Zelazny (Lord of Light still holds up). Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert. To me that was the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
K488
@jl: Thanks!
eemom
@Betty Cracker:
Ha — my parents wouldn’t let me read The Exorcist, which came out when I was about 11, so I pasted a cover of Oliver Twist over it.
Didn’t read Portnoy until my 20s, but thought it was hilarious.
scav
@Anne Laurie: Oh, those old series. The school library had those, so I’ve not only read all of Sue Barton, but also the Dave Dawson War Adventure Series, Red Randall, oh there were a few others. The really old Bobbsey Twins editions had at least eyebrow raising attitudes even then. Sherlock Holmes, Peter Whimsey, those were the good stuff but otherwise it was anything that wasn’t nailed down (apart from the Durants, I never somehow attempted those).
K488
@Anne Laurie: Holy Crow! That’s it! Thank you, thank you!
scav
But, on an early title hunt, anyone else remember a fairly young kids book that had brothers mowing a graveyard and inventing fake gravestone rhymes? Utterly forget the story, but I remember liking the rhymes as pure doggeral.
realbtl
I was turned on to On The Road as a senior in HS in 1966. For a naive loner who hated HS it was, um, interesting. I think it warped me for good.
Roger Moore
I’m amazed that nobody has brought up The Lord of the Rings, which is one of the few books I read as a teen that made a really lasting impression. A non-fiction book that I still remember is When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which was one of the few religious books I read back then.
Birthmarker
@scav: My husband and I called our second child Number Two Son til he asked us to stop!
Mnemosyne (tablet)
I somehow managed to read the Wrinkle in Time books in backwards order — I read “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” first and then the other two.
boatboy_srq
Chronicles of Narnia (funny that I mention that first), Wierdstone of Brisingamen, Hobbit/LOTR, Nightbirds on Nantucket, Johnny Tremaine, The Dolphin Crossing, Flatland, Sphereland, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Sounder, anything by McCaffrey, Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series, Moonstone, Death Comes As The End, Nicholas Nickleby, lots of mysteries and military history… I think I went straight from Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry to the nearly-adult stuff. I suppose it explains a lot.
Interesting juxtaposition: 7th grade summer reading: LOTR and the Dragonriders trilogy. First one: lots of politicking, lots of poetry (but not much music), heavy on the derring-do, no sex; second one: lots of politicking, lots of music (but not much poetry), heavy on the sex, little actual derring-do (but what there was rocked). Read both sets back to back in that order: put the last volume down EXCEEDINGLY confused.
Emma
I was twisted by my teachers. I was taught to read at age 3 by a great-uncle who was as much of an insomniac as I was, as well as a voracious reader. His idea of a primer was The Odyssey, and it was followed by Jules Verne and Sir Walter Scott. Then my father gave me a book from his bookcase to read. I was four. It was The Martian Chronicles. Arriving in the US and discovering shelf after shelf of science fiction was my idea of heaven.
On the other hand, my great-aunt taught sewing and tailoring and kept an armoire filled with fashion magazines, including the famous Vanidades, that would send sketch artists to all the fashion shows in Paris and London to sketch the dresses so the seamstresses and the women who made their own clothes could get a clear idea what the “bones” of the dress was and reproduce the pattern. I know more about 1930s-1950s fashion than is healthy.
Can you say split personality?
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: I think I was adding that one as you were noticing the lack…
maeve
“knigt@p.a.:
Also too, my English teacher loved Faulkner (small school so I had her for several years).
We started with “A light in August” as the most accessible – then “As I lay Dying” then “The Sound and the Fury” (over different years)
I also got in :”trouble” in the class for reading “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest” – not because it was bad to read but because I had the book concealed within another book during class which we were actually supposed to be reading something else – she forgave me for it – it was a book they were actually using 2 years beyond my level.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Arm of the Starfish killed my interest in L’Engle’s stuff: seriously weird book.
Tenar Darell
I’m not sure how old I was but A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was an early favorite. I also remember very clearly reading Interview with a Vampire in 7th grade and going to see Saturday Night Fever too. My mother didn’t really believe in restricting my media consumption, except maybe horror movies.
@mai naem mobile: I read both DBNP and The Diary of Anne Frank the summer I was 10. My mother gave them to me to read; I think mostly to get me out of my own head.
p.a.
@burnspbesq: Read A Portrait on my own; no schooling involved. The description of hell almost un-atheisted me.
KS in MA
@raven:
Ah, I missed that one as a kid. Maybe I’ll go find it now that I’m old enough….
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Never read it. Still have not read it. But for some reason, I recall reading the parody “Bored of the Rings.” I tried to read “The Hobbit,” but it never resonated with me. On the other hand, I tremendously enjoyed the Rings movies. I acknowledge those who loved the books, though.
On the other hand, I have read Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” and a boatload of Renaissance literature. Go figure.
scav
Wandering into the on beyond Brideshead portion of Evelyn Waugh’s stuff was amusing for the cynical age. Scoop and whatever that one was where he ended up reading Dickens in the jungle at the end of it.
Tenar Darell
@Roger Moore: Heh, I tend to forget those, because they’re like so foundational to all my future reading. I read the Foundation Trilogy and The Lord of the Rings the summer before 6th grade and was caught forever by the genre.
the Conster
In The Shining, Stephen King posits that a lot of fatal car crashes that are attributed to suicide or are otherwise unexplained, the reason is that the driver was contending with a bee in the car. Which escapes, naturally on impact. Like the Dalai Lama says, if you think you’re too small to make an impact, try sleeping with a mosquito. Or driving with a bee in the car.
mellowjohn
was in jr hi in the late 50s. loved “an occurrence at owl creek bridge,” but i was a civil war geek. also too, “the lottery,” “the grapes of wrath,” lots of mark twain.
Omnes Omnibus
Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, the James Bond novels, all of the Sabatini novels, Dumas. Stuff like that.
ETA: This is probably more 5th through 8th grade than high school.
Central Planning
@Tenar Darell:
I read LOTR and the Foundation series relatively recently. I wish I had known about them earlier. Last year, my daughter read the LOTR trilogy in 4 days (was her second or third time reading it).
I remember being a member of the Science Fiction Book Club when I was a kid. The only books I remember are ones about Elric… some sword/sorcerer combo by Michael Moorcock. Maybe my kids who like sci-fi would like it.
Currently I’m in the middle of the David Brin Uplift trilogy. Pretty good, definitely different.
cckids
@beltane:
Ah, yes. People (like me) who bitch about how horribly bad Twilight is have (blessedly) forgotten the Flowers in the Attic. In my defense, I only read the first one. Yikes.
Also a big trashy novel from junior high days: The Amityville Horror. Kept me awake for a weekend. I was too imaginative.
p.a.
@schrodinger’s cat: not a Faulknerphile but I don’t know any of his works that could be classified as uplifting or a rousing tale. Or ‘a rip-roaring good yarn’. ;-)
Birthmarker
@Betty Cracker: Could it be Rocket Jockey by Philip St. John? I don’t see where a brother dies though. There’s a wiki article about it.
cckids
I also had that book that I read & loved, but had forgotten the title/author. In my defense, I read it in second grade. For years, that book was what I thought of as a REALLY good story. It was set in England, with an 11-year old “seventh son of a seventh son”, lots of arcane English myth-type touches, time travel, and a Dark Rider.
I was lucky enough to find it, reprinted for some anniversary of it’s original printing, when my kids were in elementary school – it was The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper. I’d never known it was one of 5 books; I’ll never lose it again! :)
Mike J
@maeve:
Didn’t go to HS in Memphis did you? Our Faulkner loving English teacher would always take a class to Oxford. It was pretty cool when our 10th grade English teacher got a paper into an academic journal. Most HS teachers don’t live by publish or perish. She was just a mega fan.
Brachiator
Another thing. This must have been junior high school years. I read a lot of SF, but did not have friends who read this stuff. But there was this mom and pop store, and a liquor store next door, that for some reason had a lot of second hand books for sale. This is how I ran across “Dune.”
They also had these pocket mags with porn stories and nude pictures. This is how I discovered Bettie Page. But that’s a story for another day.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
Soft minds run together.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: I read the trilogy after I saw the first movie. I fond the second novel in the trilogy interminably boring.
Ha Nguyen
@TaMara (BHF):
“Perfect timing.Maybe you can help: I read a book in 6th grade that took place in swamp country. Strange things happen in an old house, boy gives girl a bracelet that shrinks to her arm and puts her in a trance. There was voodoo and travels through swamps…”
The book “The Mystery of the Witch Who Wouldn’t”, sequel to “Sinbad and me” by Kin Platt.
I love those books. I have the 2nd and am debating about getting the 1st although it wasn’t as good.
schrodinger's cat
@p.a.: I also found the portrayal of women in that book a tad sexist and one dimensional.
muddy
@beltane: I read a horror story in the Flowers in the Attic days, it was in a historical setting. In it, the evil husband cuts the feet off his young bride so she can’t leave him or something, and when she goes along she leaves these round blood circles like she’s doing a stencil with the cut ends of her legs. I don’t think they addressed how she did not just bleed out in one big puddle. Anyway, in a later generation, the heroine in jeopardy sees these round blood circles across the floor as her warning.
I guess it made some strong imagined visual impression because now whenever I see the yellow caution street signs with stick figure children playing, it looks to me like their feet are cut off and they should be making this little trail. “Slow children” – of course they are, their legs are cut off!
Origuy
@Ken:
Venus, not Mars. “All Summer in a Day”
There was a collection edited by Isaac Asimov called Tomorrow’s Children that had a lot of stories I remember. The one that still freaks me out is “It’s a Good Life” about a little boy that people have to be very careful around. It was made into a Twilight Zone episode.
TaMara (BHF)
@Ha Nguyen: YOU ARE MY HERO. You have no idea how many times over the years I’ve thought of that book and wondered…. Thank you.
Cckids
@Mnemosyne (tablet): yes, me too. I got smacked by the nun teaching me in 2nd grade for reading Wuthering Heights.
First, for proving her wrong when she insisted that I couldn’t read it, then she got pissed that I could & was.
Not that its a dirty book, but it definitely gives an 8 year old a messed up view of love & romance.
Bill
Anyone else remember the “scare you straight” genre of books from the 70’s? Like Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack or Go Ask Alice. Terrible tales of kids making questionable decisions.
Kind of like ABC After School Specials in print.
shell
I started the Lord of the Rings in middle school.
‘Where the Lily Blooms’ by Vera Carver.
Read a lot of biography and history too.
**********
Someone complaining about too much dying in these YA books?
For younger readers, howz about Aslan in ‘The Lion, the Witch…’ And ‘Charlotte’s Web’?
WereBear
I was always sneaking into the adult section so my dad could check out books for me. (And probably make sure they weren’t too adult.) I read Eddie Rickenbacker’s biography in 5th grade, stuff like that. History and psychology.
Around middle school, I discovered science fiction — all the greats were either revered or coming along — Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Cordwainer Smith were favorites. Bradbury too, Asimov of course.
That was when I could choose and had a library handy. Summers at my grandparents got weird. I mowed through a whole collection of Reader’s Digests from the 1920’s on up. That’s when I’d read the kid’s classics: Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Robin Hood. I don’t know why they were considered kid’s books, probably because of the movies.
But one of the few age appropriate books I remember loving were the Trick books. It started with the The Lemonade Trick and there were five or six of them. These two boys picked up an old magic set from a garage sale… and it really worked! Only… there was a trick to it. Adored them, managed to get a hold of some a few years ago through Interlibrary Loan, and they are still awesome.
And The Three Investigators! Alfred Hitchcock short story collections — I loved those.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator: Bored of the Rings was a hoot to read – only once.
boatboy_srq
@Bill: Go Ask Alice was required reading (9th grade I think).
raven
@KS in MA: It’s an unflinching look at the fight for Italy. Well written but not pretty. I am glad when I see people like him and E.B. Sledge survive such horrors to become valuable members of society with a great deal to offer.
sacrablue
OT: tornadoes near Soonergrunt AGAIN. Stay safe.
raven
Alas Babylon, The Ugly American and The Ninth Wave were good reads in the 60’s.
SiubhanDuinne
@scav:
That sounds vaguely familiar. Vile Bodies perchance? I’m not home so can’t check my bookshelves.
boatboy_srq
@cckids: Susan Cooper: The Dark Is Rising. Will Stanton (the 11yo 7th son) figures in four of the five books. I reread all five not so long ago: a little simple for an adult, but I can see why I was so fond of them at 10. I think The Grey King was my favorite.
shell
Omigod! When I was 12 I got one of those collections- Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful. I loved it. Just googled it now and yup, there’s the cover illustration I remember, his lugubrious face as part of the haunted house itself.
boatboy_srq
@the Conster: My family has a very nasty (true) tale about a carful of people, a bee, and a tree. No fatalities (thank FSM), but some nasty scars.
WereBear
@shell: I understand they used his name as a marketing device; he didn’t have anything to do with them. Robert Arthur was the editor, and could he pick some spine-tinglers!
I’ve never found out the title of one that sticks with me — would have to read all the collections again, there was like 20 or 30 of them — and I’d be ready!
But it was about a little boy who caught a very unusual moth in his killing jar. And he shouldn’t have.
raven
If I am having an MRI to investigate at “lesion” on my forearm/wrist do they just do that appendage or the whole shooting match?
raven
@boatboy_srq: I was riding a 58 Harley with a suicide clutch and my old lady on the back when a bee flew in my shirt and started stinging the shit out of me. I was lucky to land that sucker without killing both of us.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator: Hobbit left me cold the first couple reads: I think it was because Tolkien talked down to his readers a bit with that one. LOTR if you liked the movies, fills in a lot of gaps, and makes some of the decisions make more sense – although I admit I’m POd at Jackson for omitting a) Buckland, the house at Crickhollow and the conspiracy of friends; b) Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs; c) the Scouring of the Shire; and d) that Sam and Rosie move in with Frodo in Bag End and live there afterward (not in the little hole on Bagshot Row). Adding those – even just to the extended versions – would have done a lot.
Example: it only now dawned on me that Boromir – played as such a he-man – was the biggest whiniest crybaby in the books. Caradhras: “Can we light a fire? I’m freezing.” Moria: “I don’t wanna go in there; it’s dark.” Lorien: “I don’t wanna go in there; there’s elveses.” Rauros: “Frodo has the best toys.” Waah. Faramir was not only the greater man – he was more mature.
Mary G
I read through the children’s section of the library fairly early – it was lame – and managed to convince the lady that worked on Tuesday that I was allowed to read the grown up books. I started with the humor section for some reason and fell in love with P.G Wodehouse and James Thurber in 4th or 5th grade. Some ninny left a book called “Going Steady” at my house and my dad pitched a fit. I informed him that it was trash and I had stopped at the third page.
Does anyone remember a big white book for younger readers about a girl named Caroline who could talk to animals and traveled all over the world by herself? I used to read it in the church day care and loved it, but I have never been able to find it. She goes to India and falls into a tiger trap with a tiger in it and talks the tiger out of eating her and help her escape with him. It was really feminist for the times. I read it in the early 60s and it was old then.
shell
Fred Branbury was the illustrator for quite a few of those anthologies. The same guy who did ‘Paddington Bear’!
A link to some of his wonderfully creepy illustrations.
http://jaargang.blogspot.com/2009/10/creepy-beautiful-illustrations.html
Mohagan
@The Golux: And The Wonderful O and my favorite, Many Moons. I didn’t discover Gary Paulsen until much later, but love his memoir of training and running the Iditarod Winter Dance. I can remember reading a lot of historical fiction (I grew up to be a history buff), mainly James Michner especially Hawaii, and lots of Leon Uris Exodus and Battle Cry.
boatboy_srq
@raven: I believe it. My story had lots of broken glass (pre-safety-glass horseless carriage) and uncounted sutures. No bee stings, but I think those might have been preferable to the actual injuries.
eemom
@shell:
@WereBear:
Forgot all about them until now, but I did too.
@WereBear:
IIRC there were Introductions that were written in his name, though….
And this reminds me of the Rod Serling Twilight Zone story collections….loved those too.
Along those lines — and speaking of BEES — anyone remember the Roald Dahl story, Royal Jelly? I think it might have been in one of those Hitchcock books.
phein39
7th Grade (1972): Butterfly Revolution
Two American summer camps, a boys’ on one side of a lake, a girls’ on the other. The kids revolt and take over the camps, jailing the adults. Think Lord of the Flies with less atavism.
It all ends in tears, of course. But for 7th graders, it was quite a concept.
raven
@boatboy_srq: I’m sure they were!
Roger Moore
@raven:
I think for something on the forearm/wrist, they should be able to just stick the arm in the machine, but I’m not 100% sure. They may put your whole body in so they can slide you back and forth on the table.
boatboy_srq
@raven: Best line from the tale: “Oh my gawd, my face, Catherine.”
And one family member associated with the tale (but not in the car) was an MD – and a good one – so no permanent scars, either.
raven
@Roger Moore: Yea, I guess I just show up and see. I had the shoulder looked at a year ago and it wasn’t bad.
wonkie
The Horse Without a Head. The movie sucks, but the story is gritty and unsentimental. No one dies however.
Mohagan
@KS in MA: Oh, yes, I adored Never Cry Wolf. Was the start of my life long love of wolves. I’m now a big supporter of Defenders of Wildlife. Turns out wolves are a key species and when you reintroduce them into an ecosystem like Yellowstone, the entire system gets much healthier. And another vote for SF – Heinlein, especially, although the man could not write believable women.
Bobby Thomson
Junior high? War and Peace. WWII nonfiction. Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22. Playboy. LOTR and the Silmarillion.
Roger Moore
@raven:
I just had a couple of MRIs done recently, one on my head and one on my chest to look at my aorta. Fortunately, neither of them showed anything to worry about. I’m just glad I’m not claustrophobic and don’t have any metal in my body.
Amir Khalid
My teenage reading? I remember Nyawa di-Hujung Pedang (A life at the point of a sword), a novella about the WWII Japanese occupation in Malaya. Sherlock Holmes, all the Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels. Little Women and all the sequels. The Three Musketeers and The Man in The Iron Mask by Dumas. (Never knew that Dumas was black, though, until I heard it mentioned in Django Unchained.) The same SF legends Werebear mentions — Clarke and Asimov were particularly big for me. A few Hugo and Nebula winner’s anthologies. Pride and Prejudice. Animal Farm.
Kim
@gogol’s wife: I Capture the Castle is an awesome book by the author who wrote 101 Dalmations. There is also a movie – quite good!
raven
@boatboy_srq: Remember the My Name is Earl when the guy smoked some killer weed and went to the door only to see the bee stung Earl?
raven
@Roger Moore: I have rods on my spine but I guess 40years of crust make them a non-factor on the MRI machine because they haven’t made any difference. The X-ray of my sliced pinky picked up a lesion on the bone they want to check out. I think it’s a scam but I’m going anyway.
Omnes Omnibus
Did anyone else ever read Through the Alimentary Canal with Gun and Camera? There was a copy of it at our cabin when I was a kid and I picked it up one rainy day. Absolutely hilarious. The copy isn’t at the cabin anymore; I don’t know who got rid of it or when it disappeared.
WereBear
@eemom: I do. I think the one with the leg of lamb was in those collections, too.
He lent his name but that was all. I believe there was a magazine, and the stories in the books came from there.
There was another short story I remember that I can’t track down, and I even know the name. “Third Night Out.”
About a ship, where you better lock the doors on the third night out.
BruceFromOhio
Night Shift, by Stephen King. ‘The Mangler’ and ‘Gray Matter’ scared the living bejeezes out of me.
Cervantes
@SiubhanDuinne:
A Handful of Dust, if you happened to read it as a novel.
Roger Moore
@raven:
It depends on what they’re made of. Any metal can be a small problem because passing through a magnetic field gradient creates eddy currents that cause heating. But there are obvious big problems with anything ferromagnetic, since that can get pulled into the magnet and not want to come out. If the rods in your back are titanium or one of the non-magnetic kinds of stainless steel, they wouldn’t be a problem.
raven
@Roger Moore:
Yuck, the website talks about how many break or come unhooked. I’ve been very active for 40 years and nothing has happened yet!
shell
@raven: I have rods in my spine as well, but they can somehow compensate for that. Have had multiple MRI’s and it’s never been an issue.
raven
@shell: Ah, great. Thanks. Scoliosis?
shell
Yup. Partial spinal fusion at age 12. As far as them coming undone, I think by the time I was 20 my orthopedist said they’d become totally fused with the bone. (Knocking on wood.)
Chat Noir
@sophronia: Way late to the thread but this is my all time favorite book. I finished reading it for the millionth time earlier this week. I still want to visit Barbados (and Wethersfield, CT) because of it.
dw
Just a few I remember reading (not always for class)
Hiroshima
Death Be Not Proud
On the Beach
The Graduate
In Cold Blood
The Boston Strangler
Helter Skelter
To Kill a Mockingbird
NotMax
Cannot be the only one here who, when a real kidlet, read Nobody’s Boy and A Separate Peace.
raycharles90
I was just thinking about the “Indian in the cupboard” and all of the Gary Paulsen books. I can still remember my 8th grade teacher reading “red harvest” with a lisp on
whisper’s lines.
CapnMubbers
@imonlylurking: could be one of my favorites: Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination.
@boatboy_srq: Subtitle should have been Farce of Hobbit.
eemom
@BruceFromOhio:
omg, the one with the eyeballs on the cover, right?
Quitters, Inc. — the one about the cure for smoking — always stuck with me.
DW
For some reason everybody I know (including me) also remembers reading The Most Dangerous Game in middle school. (The same way everybody I know seems to remember that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin even if they can’t remember a single other thing they learned in history class.) I remember reading Chekhov’s short story The Bet in either 7th or 8th grade, and it left a lasting impression on me. Both 1984 and The Heart of Darkness were memorable reads in high school. (I still think of 1984 as one of the scariest horror stories of all time, way scarier than almost any “real” horror movie.)
Jay Noble
Flowers For Algernon stuck with me. Poe. An anthology of true and fictional ghost stories in a deep purple cover – that’s how I always found it. Highlight was the lady who’s neck ribbon was actually what kept her head attached. Hardy Boys. Encyclopedia Brown. Encyclopedias – Pick a volume and sit. :-)
I read so much but don’t remember the time period. The one thing that has occurred to me is that I was reading newspapers and magazines way more than anyone my age was. Popular Mechanics to True Romance to Time and Newsweek, I soaked it all in.
Roger Moore
@raven:
A quick search says that stainless steel implants like your Harrington rod are likely to be 316 stainless, which is non-magnetic. Not all piercings are non-magnetic, though, so they could be a big problem. Apparently some tattoo inks use magnetic iron oxides, which could cause problems, too.
Jeffro
@BruceFromOhio: Yes…I remember reading a lot of King’s early books under the table in high school when I was supposed to be reading something that my teachers had assigned (which explains why I know of “Red Badge of Courage”, say, but never actually read it).
Same with the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and the first DUNE trilogy. And the occasional Mack Bolan thriller!
NotMax
@Jeffro
*shudders*
There was Dune.
Later (much later) there were a raft of other books which, one by one, eroded the mystique.
Still have the SF magazine in which the first part of Dune appeared, whetting the appetite for the time when the novel would appear.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@NotMax:
I read “A Separate Peace” in junior high and hated it. Boring plus it had a dumb ending.
I discovered Twain’s “The Literary Offences of James Fenimore Cooper” while struggling through “The Deerslayer” and stopped trying to read it, because Twain was so spot-on about why it sucked so badly.
mellowjohn
@WereBear:
the “leg of lamb” story was by Roald Dahl.
DougJ
@Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog:
Thanks!!
Curt
I read Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga” in grade-school, and it has horribly stayed with me ever since. A deaf child encounters the aftermath of a meat-grinder Civil War battle. Just devastating.
newdealfarmgrrrlll
@KS in MA: I loved those books when I was a kid, so did my younger siblings. We wore those books out, we reread them so many times! I bought copies of both about four years ago, a and read “Owls in the Family” to my grandson, who was in 2nd grade then.
A memorable book in 6th grade was “Catseye” by Andre Norton – that was my first encounter with science fiction and I was hooked.
Nash
“A Ride on the Short Dog” by James Still.
If someone already answered your bleg, I’m sorry for the redundant comment
Sandia Blanca
@Mary G:
Hi, Mary G, I did not read that book, but in searching for some of my favorite books I found this comment, which may answer your question.
The Loganberry Books “Stump the Bookseller” is a great site for researching long-lost book friends.
Kaleberg
@gogol’s wife: It is good and much better than the movie they made of it. ‘I Capture the Castle’ is one of those great coming of age, into the world stories.
Kaleberg
@Ken: I always thought that ‘All Summer in a Day’ was set on Venus. After all, it is cloudy on Venus, unlike Mars.
Kaleberg
My mother was a junior high school teacher so she loaded me up with coming of age stories in hope that I would come of age. I remember Bless the Beasts and Children – pretty creepy – and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – maybe to scare me off becoming a schizophrenic. She also got me The Year of the Hairy Spider Monkey and The Summer of the Purple Pants. The latter was a rather lighthearted story of a teenaged girl getting through a rough time of life while wearing weird purple pants. (Later I read Tunes for a Small Harmonica which put paid to that particular metaphor.) The former was set in a black neighborhood and was quite enjoyable, but I mainly remember it for making fun of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’. As the narrator points out, things tend to get hairy on hot sunny summer days, not dreary rainy nights. Surprisingly, I can’t find the latter two books anywhere. I’m guessing they never made it into Books in Print, though I remember reading them in book form. (It is going to get worse with ebooks.)
I had a junior high school teacher who had us read a lot of great short stories – August Heat, The Open Window, A Cask of Amontillado – and she told stories of her childhood in rural Ireland. I still remember how she and her sister once heard the cry of the banshee. (The other great story teller was my Hebrew school teacher who told us how he survived a stay in a death camp. It was a good lesson on practical morality. Lying about one’s age or shirking work wasn’t always a sin.)
There was also a lot of Poe, Lewis Carroll, Isaac Asimov and a host of others. I even made it through The Origin of the Species which drove that nail home, through the earth’s crust, mantle, core, mantle, crust and out the other side. It was written for the lay person, so I could understand it, but it took me years to realize why he drove the nail so hard. The idea, which I took for granted, was so radical as to require that level of argument.
RobNI YNY1957
@p.a.:
The Reivers, maybe.
Anne Laurie
@Ha Nguyen: Ah, the Witch Who Wouldn’t! I still have a paperback copy of that one — read a library copy when it first came out, then picked up my own paperback many years later. Have to admit that I found ‘Steve Forrester’ kind of a twit — the other books in that ‘series’ just didn’t do much for me.
Anne Laurie
@Bill:
Which is one of the rotating tag lines on this blog, actually, because the Blogmaster “just likes it”.
But you’re misremembering M.E. Kerr, because DHSS wasn’t a “scared straight” book at all. The title (the point of the book) is that Susan ‘Dinky’ Hocker’s parents are so obsessed with other people’s unfortunate drug-using children, they don’t notice how miserable their own kid is until she starts acting out — but not by shooting up. It was actually the antithesis of the scared-straight lit, because it was about “fortunate” upper-middle-class Manhattan kids who managed to be just as unhappy as the poor ghetto survivors their parents held up as dire warnings.
Puberty just sucks, is why so much YA literature is “like that”.
Paul Brentano
I really liked “The Great Brain” and the sequels by John D. Fitzgerald. I also found a book of short stories called “Monster Tales” that just absolutely terrified me for days on end
walden
@WereBear: The “moth” story in the alfred hitchcock anthology still sticks with me. Definitely don’t pin a weird moth to your wall in the basement.
The one book I’d like to see again but haven’t heard anyone mention was called “The Blue Man”. It opens with some kid hiding from the blue man, who it turns out is a guy who dyed himself cobalt blue because of some belief that aliens require it…and then goes around all wrapped up in clothes like the classic invisible man — and it’s not clear whether he’s right or a paranoid schizophrenic hearing voices from the radio. The cobalt dye causes electrical appliances and lamps etc. to hum or flicker when the blue man is near them.
Emily B.
The child poisoner novel: Shirley Jackson’s WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE. (Sorry, if I’m repeating an answer that someone else has given—scrolled through the comments pretty fast.) Terrific book, like pretty much everything Shirley Jackson wrote.
rickles
@mai naem mobile: Death Be Not Proud immediately came to mind. It was so beautiful and devastating. Also Old Yeller; I cried like a baby.
Peter Hornby
I read “Raising Demons”, by Shirley Jackson as a teenager – nice “bringing up kids in small town America” memoir. Much later, I was amazed to learn that this was the same Shirley Jackson who wrote “The Haunting of Hill House”.
We had an anthology called “20th Century Short Stories” as a set work when I was 14. Only two stories stick in my mind – “The Destructors”, by Graham Greene, and “The Machine Stops”, by E.M. Forster.
rickles
Also Black Like Me and Huck Finn. Had to read A Tale of Two Cities jn 8th grade. Hated it – didn’t realize it was actually a tale of 2 cities!
JGL
I read ALL the time, so some of it runs together, but some standouts: Anne of Green Gables; Witch of Blackbird Pond; Dune; literally a whole series of books about teenagers with terminal illnesses; trashy fun horror like R.L. Stine; Madeline L’Engle; Little House books when I was younger; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I’ll even admit to reading the Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged at the ripe old age of about 12…though I grew out of it by about 12.5 unlike many middle-aged male politicans.