Name your 3 favorite children's series.
Trixie Belden
by Kathryn Kenney
These were my favorites when I was a kid. Though a close runner-up would be the Boxcar Children. Oddly, I don't think my kids have read any Trixie Belden books. They don't carry them in any of the bookstores that we frequent.
Emily of New Moon
by L.M. Montgomery
IMO, much better than Anne of Green Gables. Besides that, Emily is an aspiring writer and has cats. 'Nuff said :)
It seems to me that there were far fewer "series" of books when I was a kid. There weren't Babysitters Club, or Goosebumps, or Animal Ark like there are today. Not to mention no Harry Potter or Eragon, etc. Nowadays it's almost a given that books are serialized. Must be a good sales tactic...
Name your 3 favorite non-series children's books.
Bargain Bride
by Evelyn Sibley Lampman
Strawberry Girl
by Lois Lenski
Roller Skates
by Ruth Sawyer
Name 3 favorite children's book characters.
Jo (Little Women
)Like Jo, I was so sure I would grow up and marry an eccentric German professor and write novels..
Harriet (Harriet the Spy
)Harriet is so sneaky cool! I wanted to go up and down the neighbors dumbwaiters just like her!
Meg Murry (A Wrinkle in Time
)Meg and her family were my heroes. I wanted to be a scientist like her mother--cooking dinner on a bunsen burner in my "lab," and have eccentric kids and adventures, etc. I was pretty sure that I would grow up and have a big dog named Fortinbras.
I'm not going to tag anyone with this meme (I don't want to annoy people with continual tags), but I'd love to hear any of your responses to these questions--put a response or a link in the comments. :)
2 comments:
I'm not quite going to answer the question you asked. It's hard because my favorite books were not quite the same as my daughter's. It's easier to identify the books we most loved to share together at different ages. She tended to like books that were not series. As she got older, we shared books that we either read together, or that I had also read as a child, or that were connected to community theater shows in which we both performed.
When my daughter was young, the picture books we read over and over were the Jan Brett books, the Katie Morag series, and Robert McCloskey's books. She particularly liked "Make Way for Ducklings" and "Blueberries for Sal" because the settings (Boston Public Garden and Blue Hill, Maine) were very familiar to her.
I actually read the Chronicles of Avonlea when I was young, the original edition, well worn and cherished by my mother. My daughter was the third generation to read it and loved it more than the other Montgomery books. II never told my friends about it because it was "girls' book."
We read The Hobbit, Five Children and IT and the other E. Nesbit books, the Narnia books.
We read and performed Heidi (more loved by my daughter and me), A Winkle in Time, Charlotte's Web, and Secret Garden. Speaking of Burnett, we read The Little Princess many times as a family.
I had completely forgotten about Strawberry Girl. She loved that one too, but I have not read it.
Little Women was a favorite in our house, particularly because we often contradance in Concord, Mass., and my daughter is quite familiar with the Alcott house where Little Women was written and many other locations connected to the Alcots, the Emmersons, the Hawthorns, and Thoreau.
Sarah Plain and Tall was also read many, many times.
My daughter devoured Babysitters Club, Boxcar Children, and most of the American Girl books. I was surprised to find out that one of my childhood friends wrote some of the American Girl books. The American Girl series is much better than I would have expected.
Le Petit Prince was cherished in English and tolerated in French in 6th grade.
Since seventh grade she has enjoyed the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and its sequels.
Our daughter is 15 now, and she had long moved beyond young adult books. I know you didn't ask about older kids, but some of the books that have most moved my daughter are surprising. On family car trips we often read aloud. Watership Down and, believe it or not, Les Miserables were enjoyed by our daughter during her middle school years. Last summer our most successful road books were The Secret Lives of Bees and Cry the Beloved Country.
I don't think that there are more series these days. My mother had many series books from her childhood, most of which seem the have been completely forgotten. Many of them would be quite unacceptable now, often containing racial and sexist sterotypes that are really quite shocking.
I really didn't answer your question, but it was fun to think about.
I love this! There was a similar thread on the Happy Feminist a while back, so I've been thinking a bit about the books I loved best as a child.
I never read Trixie Belden or Emily of New Moon; I did read Anne of Green Gables and liked it well enough. I liked Strawberry Girl OK, and as for Harriet, well, I've never met anyone who doesn't love her, which is a good thing because I totally think she deserves to be loved by one and all.
I'm going to tag myself and post my answers on my blog, though it may take me a while. When I do, I'll come back and post a link.
thanks for posting this!
P.S. The secret code I have to type to post this comment is "dtmypthy." It's not a word, but I wish it were.
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