Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Books that moved you as a child

The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Got me interested in British myth and legend, and in "psychic phenomena". An excellent trilogy about the ancient battle between good and evil.

The Green Knowe books by Lucy Boston. These really brought a lump to my throat as a kid because the characterisations were so good that you really felt for the protagonists.

Time Trap by Nicholas Fisk. The best childrens'/young adults' book on time travel I read. Also takes into account causality and the nature of addiction.

Anything by Alan Garner, because it scared the shit out of me.

An awful lot of Diana Wynne-Jones' output, because whatever she turned her mind to, she usually hit the nail on the head. An especially big HUZZAH! for "The Eight Days of Luke", "Dogsbody", "Power of Three" and the Dalemark series.

The Earthsea trilogy.

And loads and loads more by Rosemary Sutcliffe, Joan Aiken and a host of other authors.
 
hot air baboon said:
...this thread is depressing me at the inane rubbish I consumed none of which did anything other than pass the time.....I do though very clearly remember being taken as a very young kid to see the film of Kes when it was released & being in bits at the end of that...
Click to expand...

Oh I consumed a lot of inane rubbish as well :D
 
Idris2002 said:
H.M. Hoover wrote what would now be called 'young adult dystopias' - I don't think I finished any of them (!) but I remember vividly one scene where the degenerate descendants of a US army missile unit descend into the depths of their abandoned base to worship their god, a nuclear missile.
Click to expand...

I remember reading one of Hoover's called "Children of Morrow". Quite creepy in a post-apocalyptic way.
 
I'm so glad The Dark is Rising gets a few nods on here. I read the series at least three times as a young 'un and was completely transported by it. I re-read it sometime in my 20s and was pleased to find I enjoyed it just as much.

John Wyndham's The Triffids (and most of his others), John Christopher's Tripods and LM Boston's The Children of Green Knowe I remember being very obsessed with. Also Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series - I'm very excited that bob_jr's almost old enough to start having these read to him (a bit beyond his solo reading as yet...)

The one I most vividly remember upsetting me was something I cannot remember the name of, which we read as a class when I was about ten. It's about the famine in Ireland but set, I think, in contemporary times. A family goes on holiday to Ireland and all these weird supernatural things keep happening - food going rotten and stuff. Does anyone have a clue what that might be?
 
billy_bob said:
I'm so glad The Dark is Rising gets a few nods on here. I read the series at least three times as a young 'un and was completely transported by it. I re-read it sometime in my 20s and was pleased to find I enjoyed it just as much.

John Wyndham's The Triffids (and most of his others), John Christopher's Tripods and LM Boston's The Children of Green Knowe I remember being very obsessed with. Also Joan Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series - I'm very excited that bob_jr's almost old enough to start having these read to him (a bit beyond his solo reading as yet...)

The one I most vividly remember upsetting me was something I cannot remember the name of, which we read as a class when I was about ten. It's about the famine in Ireland but set, I think, in contemporary times. A family goes on holiday to Ireland and all these weird supernatural things keep happening - food going rotten and stuff. Does anyone have a clue what that might be?
Click to expand...

That rings a bell :hmm:

ETA: Is it this? Black Harvest by Ann Pilling?
 
I really fell in love with books after reading the Chronicles of Narnia. It was literally a whole new World to escape to and fuelled the imagination. Of course I didn't get the Christian theme going on at the time. Just loved the stories. I remember looking forward to watching the animated version of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when it came on during the school holidays.

The other books I use to lose myself in were the Borrowers books. Loved imagination of the author with regards to the use of the borrowed items for their miniature homes.
 
I have to say, I was very proud of my niece when she worked out on her own that der-Narnia-mythos was a Xtian allegory.
 
I used to really love books about animals, especially cats! Anyone else remember Carbonel and The Kingdom of Carbonel about a young girl & a cat with magic powers?
 
dialectician said:
Which version did you read? The unedited manuscript? Repetitive as fuck.
Click to expand...

I love The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

It's not great as a novel, in terms of it not being fantastically well-written - Tressell's style is pedestrian and narrative, and has not stood the test of time.

But it's readable and (I think) enjoyable, and its essential premise (of workers driving themselves into the ground for a system that abuses them and eats them up) is radical and still extremely relevant today.

I read it at 20 (early 1980s) and recently (since Cameron's bunch of fuckwits came to power) and its relevance and message still resonate really strongly.

Not really a children's book, though it can be, so I'm maybe going a bit off-thread.

One interesting thing about it is it's set on the South Coast (Hastings area), not the industrial North or Midlands, as so may books with a similar theme are.
 
Orang Utan said:
I dunno. Some scrappy copy that my parents had. Probably published in the late 70s/early 80s
Click to expand...

Oh that's the lawrence and Wishart version, like 300 odd pages IIRC? 150000 words.

Trust me, if you'd read the 670 page version you'd comprehend just how tortuous that experience was...
 
oryx said:
I love The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

It's not great as a novel, in terms of it not being fantastically well-written - Tressell's style is pedestrian and narrative, and has not stood the test of time.

But it's readable and (I think) enjoyable, and its essential premise (of workers driving themselves into the ground for a system that abuses them and eats them up) is radical and still extremely relevant today.

I read it at 20 (early 1980s) and recently (since Cameron's bunch of fuckwits came to power) and its relevance and message still resonate really strongly.

Not really a children's book, though it can be, so I'm maybe going a bit off-thread.

One interesting thing about it is it's set on the South Coast (Hastings area), not the industrial North or Midlands, as so may books with a similar theme are.
Click to expand...

He could make that point in 150 concise pages though. It's needlessly prolix. He reminds me of Orhan Pamuk at his worst (in Turkish) though I like Pamuk's proustian deconstructions of istanbulite bourgeois life... esp. Museum of innocence. :hmm: difficult...
 
dialectician said:
He could make that point in 150 concise pages though. It's needlessly prolix. He reminds me of Orhan Pamuk at his worst (in Turkish) though I like Pamuk's proustian deconstructions of istanbulite bourgeois life... esp. Museum of innocence. :hmm: difficult...
Click to expand...

That's another of my all-time favourite books. Slow, fantastically detailed chronological historical description of an obsessive romantic crush! I read it just after coming back from Istanbul which may have fuelled my love of the book.
 
oryx said:
That's another of my all-time favourite books. Slow, fantastically detailed chronological historical description of an obsessive romantic crush! I read it just after coming back from Istanbul which may have fuelled my love of the book.
Click to expand...

The anthropological imagery and comparisons are pretty fucking great.

I must confess I haven't read it in English. In Turkish it has this odd poetic quality, like swimming along a gentle river and then, bam. colliding with a bolder. I note that many English-speaking reviewers thought it slowed around the 200 page mark and then sped up during the last hundred pages, but in Turkish, i thought, it was slow and immersive until the last 100 pages and then there's a caesura, an immediate jolt.

It's not even about a contrived ending, i think. There's quite a dasein-esque element to the whole thing — it's quite good at illustrating, on an emotional level, the pull of authenticity.
 
oryx said:
I used to really love books about animals, especially cats! Anyone else remember Carbonel and The Kingdom of Carbonel about a young girl & a cat with magic powers?
Click to expand...

And Carbonel and Calidor! Loved them all :) and spent much time wishing our local chemist had magic cats communication fluid in big glass bottles on its facade :hmm:

quiet guy said:
The Titus trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Click to expand...

This also, it was one of those early adolescence whack-round-the-head perception shifters for me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

ska invita
Comfortable chairs you can read books in
2
Replies
35
Views
759
Hollis
Hollis
Wolveryeti
Films / TV that have scared you
2 3
Replies
69
Views
3K
krtek a houby
krtek a houby
N
Great books that have never been given faithful treatment on screen
Replies
6
Views
223
mojo pixy
mojo pixy
Orang Utan
Short Books
2
Replies
37
Views
980
Orang Utan
Orang Utan
J
Books about British folklore & customs?
Replies
3
Views
182
Johnny Vodka
J
Back
Top Bottom