... embarrassing or not. I will likely edit this post as I remember books I'd forgotten.
Formative books I read as a young girl between the ages of 6-12:
Watership Down
The Book of the Dun Cow
Stranger in a Strange Land
I will Fear No Evil
Duncton Wood
Asimov (issue unknown)
The White Dragon
Clan of the Cave Bear
Flowers for Algernon
The Earthsea Trilogy
The Jungle Book
Little Women
Tom Sawyer
Huckleberry Finn
The Tripod Trilogy
Quote from: Pope Fred St. Pete St. Fred on April 23, 2009, 06:49:26 AM
... embarrassing or not. I will likely edit this post as I remember books I'd forgotten.
Formative books I read as a young girl:
Watership Down
The Book of the Dun Cow
Stranger in a Strange Land
I will Fear No Evil
The Book of Silence
Asimov issue unknown
The White Dragon
Clan of the Cave Bear
Flowers for Algernon
Nothing embarassing about that list.
Anne McCaffrey? It's been years since I read the the Dragonriders or Harper Hall trilogies. Very enjoyable though.
"Alergnon", and most Heinlen are always good ones too!
When I was a kiddo I was a huge fan of the series, "Alfred Hitchcock & The Three Investigators" Essentially it was Nancy Drew for boys.
Encyclopedia Brown (the series)
A House with a Clock in It's Walls
Aha!
Philosophy in the Bedroom (stolen from Dad's bookshelf)
The Earthsea Trilogy
Everybody Knows What a Dragon Looks Like
Where the Sidewalk Ends
The Three Investigators (series)
Great Glass Elevator
A Cricket in Times Square
James and the Giant Peach
Loads of Horror / Mystery / Digest magazine back issues.
Nate the Great (chidlren's detective series)
Dragonriders of Pern
Arthur C. Clarke (most of it)
Aliens (novelizations of the graphic novels)
Heinlen (Starship Troopers, Tunnel in the Sky, Between Planets)
Dune
Lovecraft / Derelith / CA Smith
Poe
Wait... what's the cutoff age here?
Niven, Lovecraft, Analog magazine, The Story of O...
Mine was:
Lord of the Flies
Anthem (I know)
Watership Down
Consider Her Ways
The Stand
Breakfast of Champions
Schrodinger's Cat
Oh, I almost forgot...
Every Stephen King Book up until "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"; although I was kind of losing interest since "Rose Madder".
Superfudge
MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER.
Quote from: RWHN on April 23, 2009, 03:25:56 PM
Superfudge
Shit yes.
Also: "Where the Red Fern Grows"
Suddenly, Middle School is flashing before my eyes.
Quote from: LMNO on April 23, 2009, 03:23:27 PM
Oh, I almost forgot...
Every Stephen King Book up until "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"; although I was kind of losing interest since "Rose Madder".
I lost interest after Insomnia.
Quote from: Dr Hoopla on April 23, 2009, 03:58:11 PM
Quote from: LMNO on April 23, 2009, 03:23:27 PM
Oh, I almost forgot...
Every Stephen King Book up until "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon"; although I was kind of losing interest since "Rose Madder".
I lost interest after Insomnia.
King's stories and characters are great, but I could never get into his writing style.
For me, his writing style was the best part. I see a lot of his conversational style in my own writing.
I started getting bored when he tried to pull out of direct horror/fantasy, but just couldn't get past the Deus ex Machina of some "mystic good" force that saves the day in every single book, even when it wasn't needed.
Quote from: LMNO on April 23, 2009, 03:14:24 PM
Wait... what's the cutoff age here?
Niven, Lovecraft, Analog magazine, The Story of O...
I was posting stuff I read mostly between 6-10, but I guess whatever you consider formative?
ok, that was mostly Dahl, Encyclopedia Brown, Earthsea, et al.
I almost forgot about John Christopher and the Tripod trilogy... man I loved those. Creepytastic.
I read The Book of the Dun Cow, Watership Down, and Duncton Wood in rapid succession in first grade, and since then have spent 32 years looking for Duncton Wood because I misremembered the title as The Silence of the Stone. Somehow, miraculously, I finally found it. I'm still a little confused about the title, and whether that is actually the book I read.
The Babysitter's Club #1-80
Through the Looking Glass by Molly Flute
The Secret Garden
-toa,
didn't read anything cool until... ever
TOA, are you female? I've always assumed you were male for some reason.
Not that it matters, just curious.
Quote from: Dr Hoopla on April 23, 2009, 05:14:04 PM
TOA, are you female? I've always assumed you were male for some reason.
Not that it matters, just curious.
Male. All the books in my house were either my Mom's or my sister's.
-toa,
knew who Fabio was before the not-butter incident
The bird incident is MUCH funnier.
Quote from: Dr Hoopla on April 23, 2009, 05:42:09 PM
The bird incident is MUCH funnier.
Larry Byrd and Fabio!? SRSLY?
i was a late bloomer when it came to reading. i started reading when i was eighteen. someone gave me a copy of The Bridge by iain banks then i got into aurthur c clarke, because A Space oddysey had been my favourite film from early on. i gained an interest in physics and read stephen hawkins a brief history of time, which led me to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe (which is a blinder of a book, by the way, though i can only appreciate string theory aesthetically. unfortunatly my math skills aint cut out fot it) then someone, i can't remember who, reccomended me schrodinger's cat by john gribbin(which i still haven't read. that's when i first came across robert anton wilson, but i strayed away from it- conspiracy theorist at the height of political turmoil, seemed a bit cliched so i ignored it. ) .from there into hard scifi like gregg egan et al. then i got into italo calvino and georges perec of the oulipo group, both fantastic writers. from there i spiralled into an obsessive collection, of which i have only actually read 50% of through to the end, and now i have settled into a confused reading habit, sometimes i can read through 2-3 a week and sometimes i don't read at all for months -which i have to sort out.
fuck you if you think my writing's confused aswell...i did it on purpose... :argh!:
Easy there, kiddo.
My favorite book was "The Carriage Returns" by N. Terbutton
I see you have a quote from a bulgakov book; did you ever watch the series? i wouldn't say i hated it, but it was a dissapointment, i was expecting it would translate to a short t.v series quite well, but the translator seemed to rip the soul out of it in it's conversion to a series - it just seemed a little flat.
GOOSEBUMPS
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ :lulz:
I'm still finding them, but I'm counting this from 18 down.
Under 14:
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Harry Potter series (it stopped being so formative at book three :sad:)
The Narnia Chronicles
Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods, et al.
Lord of the Rings
Greek and Roman mythology
Fairy tales
Aesop's Fables
Lanterns and Lances
Tales of Benjamin Bunny
The Thurber Carnival
Touch the Earth
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
The Goops ("The goops they lick their fingers, the goops they lick their knives. They spill their broth on the table cloth...")
The Giver
Wind in the Willows
The Crow Boy
Audubon Game Animals
14-18:
Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
American Gods
The Cobra Event
Grapes of Wrath
Animal Farm
No Exit
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain
The Yellow, Red, and Blue books of Fairy Tales
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Signal to Noise
Freaknomics
Mexifornia
The Language Police
Like This by Rumi
Reviving Ophelia
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman
One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Old Man with Wings
Man's Search for Meaning
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the rest of the series
Tyranny of the Status Quo
Candide
The War Prayer
Good Omens
Death Be Not Proud
The Dwarf
And a story by Mark Twain. I CANNOT remember the name of the story, but a man meets and kills his conscious (which is a twisted little dwarf) and ends up with a collection of dead hobos in his basement, which he offers for sale in the last line.
Not books per se but still formative for me: Wishbone (a kid's TV show that introduces all the classic stories) and stories my friend's mother told us about La Llorena and chupa cabras.
Quote from: Laughtrack on April 23, 2009, 09:30:11 PM
And a story by Mark Twain. I CANNOT remember the name of the story, but a man meets and kills his conscious (which is a twisted little dwarf) and ends up with a collection of dead hobos in his basement, which he offers for sale in the last line.
Halliburton: The Early Years.
encyclopedia brown books (and yay for there being a few others here that listed them)
The Great Brain by John Fitzgerald (series)
the adventures of huckleberry finn
Way-farer by Dennis Schmidt (also kensho and satori)
the adventures of the stainless steal rat by harry harrison (and the rest in the series)
a incomplete list for under 14 (if i think of others i will add them)
Quote from: RWHN on April 23, 2009, 09:32:07 PM
Quote from: Laughtrack on April 23, 2009, 09:30:11 PM
And a story by Mark Twain. I CANNOT remember the name of the story, but a man meets and kills his conscious (which is a twisted little dwarf) and ends up with a collection of dead hobos in his basement, which he offers for sale in the last line.
Halliburton: The Early Years.
:lulz:
Kids Shenanigans: Great Things to Do That Mom and Dad Will Just Barely Approve Of
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
A number of kid and adult-oriented entomology books on spiders and ants
Oversize books of Renaissance art—especially the paintings of naked women, Breugel, and Bosch
The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes
Heinlein - all of it, he influenced my politics philosophy and view on life more than any other.
The Castle in the Attic - I read this until it fell apart.
The Tripod series.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Chronicles of Narnia
Encyclopedia Brown
Isaac Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
several different kid's encyclopedias that I don't remember the name of
H2G2
Atlas Shrugged
Anthem
Lord of the Flies
Lovecraft
Poe
All influenced me around the age of 9-12
The Butter Battle Book