Allison's Book Bag

Favorite Book from Childhood?

Posted on: January 11, 2012

What is your favorite book from childhood? How did you encounter it? Why is it important to you?

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7 Responses to "Favorite Book from Childhood?"

Trixie Beldon Series. I wanted to be Trixie!

I liked those too and felt disappointed that our library carried only a few of them. :-)

Hi Allison! My favorite book was a Richard Scarry Treasury. And it was so fun that I was able to find a reprint to share with my own kids. Even though they both loved also the Thomas the Tank Engine treasury. And my favorite to read to them was “I am a bunny.” and there was one, a little golden book, called The Egg Book . . . I loved that one.

Thanks for sharing your favorite books! Most of my picture books went to my siblings to have while they were growing up. One book with which I never parted was Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. I should review it here. :-)

Thanks for sharing your favorite books! I have enjoyed reading them too, especially Alive. You and I have even see a couple movies based on it.

It must be said that the movie from 1993 doesn’t do the story justice. (The other movies about the incident have been documentaries, I believe.) I think it’s very difficult for a two-hour movie to capture a seventy-day ordeal. I think a TV mini-series would do a much better job.

Anyone who has neither read the book or seen the movie, therefore, should start with the book. After that, they can feel free to avoid the movie. ;-)

When I was around four or five years old, my favorites were: Space Carnival: The Story Behind Our Space Trips, and The Monster at the End of This Book. The latter is still in print because it’s so awesome (I still love the pictures of Grover’s attempts to keep kids from turning the pages and of the after effects of their having done so anyway, and the ending is great), so everyone is probably familiar with it. The Space Carnival is so out of print that I can’t even find any pictures of it, nor are there any copies on Ebay. But I did manage to get ahold of one a few years ago. It too is awesome, if you can ever find one. A boy goes to a space carnival, and the reader uses a spinner to decide what happens to him next.

When I was older, I was in love with the Danny Dunn science-fiction-adventure series. Time travel, smallifying machines, swamp monsters, invisibility, anti-gravity. Great stuff. Also not in print, of course, but easily obtained from Amazon sellers and Ebay and the like.

You know you’re old when your favorite books are no longer in print.

Now, you did ask our favorite books from childhood, not our favorite CHILDREN’S books. So… When I was a teen, my favorite book was Alive, by Piers Paul Read, which tells the true story of a plane full of rugby players that crashed in the middle of the Andes in 1972. The MIDDLE of the Andes. Surrounded by nothing but mountains and snow. After surviving for two full months on very little nourishment, two of the survivors set out to rescue themselves. Seventy-two days after the crash, a Chilean farmer spied a ragged man across a roaring river. The man threw the farmer a rock with a note that began: “I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan.” There is no greater story of survival. As a teen I read it three years in a row while out camping in the blazing heat of summer, and it never failed to whisk me away to the frozen Andes. Every few years I have to read it again.

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Looking Ahead

The end of my thematic review months is coming to a close. Starting mid-May, I'll review an assortment of books.

  • May 13: Every Hill and Mountain (Legacy trilogy) by Deborah Heal
  • May 17-18: Interview, Review of Coyote Winds by Helen Sedwick
  • May 22: Zoo Station, true story by Christiane F.
  • May 25: Regine's Book by Regine Stokke
  • May 29: Boy 21 by Matthew Quick
  • June 1: Sort of Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick

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Thirty days. Average of 2000 words per day. A total of 58,600 words. I am a NaNoWrimo Winner in 2012.

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