#BookBlogWriMo Day 6: #TBT – Favorite Childhood Books

By Jen in Bookland - November 06, 2014

Day 6: #TBT – Favorite Childhood Books

Oh this is a fun one today. Favorite books from my childhood. As I said before I have always been a reader. From as far back as I can remember books have always been a part of my life. So let's see what books I remember as being favorites from different times in my childhood. There will be a few from before I could read up/learning to read up until high school.

I had two favorite books that my parents would read to me. First was It's Bedtime by Anthony Rao. There is one part I remember where the kid gets a book from the bookshelf to read and the book he picks is this book and I loved that.

Next is When Dog Was Little by Lucille Hammond. I don't know why I loved this, but I did. There is at least one more book featuring Dog and I remember my mom bringing it home when I was in high school and loving it. Definitely a favorite.

Then when I was learning to and reading myself an early favorite was Harry Takes a Bath by Harriet Ziefert. A simple story of a hippo taking a bath which I really enjoyed. I had a few other books that were the same reading level, other Penguin Young Readers, but those didn't stick with me as much and I didn't read them as often (one was a cat that goes upstairs and down I believe, and it was not for me).

I also liked The Poky Little Puppy by Janette Sebring Lowrey. I think I had a thing with animals. I still love animals, dogs especially so it apparently started when I was young. My mom was not a fan of this story. She didn't think it taught a very good lesson, but it was the Poky Little Puppy! I also liked The Pokey Little Puppy's Wonderful Winter Day by Jean Chandler and a lot of other Little Golden Books (like the Saggy Baggy Elephant). We had a collection of them and I would read them often.

I also loved the Serendipity books. Pretty much any of them that I could get my hands on. Buttermilk was a favorite as I was a very scared little kid. I was afraid of everything for a long time, until I just wasn't anymore. So Buttermilk learns that all of the scary things she sees in the woods late one night are actually not scary when you see them in the daylight since it was just her imagination running wild. Loved these books.

Then one of my favorite authors when I was younger was Avi. Read all of his books and loved them. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and Blue Heron stick out as two of my favorites, though until I read the synopsis' I couldn't even remember what they were about. Nevertheless I remember them being favorites.

Then one of my all time favorites was Deadly Stranger by Peg Kehret. As I said I was afraid of everything growing up, but my biggest fear was being kidnapped. I was always afraid someone would break into our house in the middle of the night and kidnap me. So I loved this book since the main character was kidnapped and was able to outwit her kidnappers. It gave me some hope that if it did happen to me I could find a way to escape. I am pretty sure my parents found it very strange that this was my favorite book.

Then in middle school my one bff moved to another state and the Friends 4-Ever books by Dierdre Corey were favorites of ours. The story was just like what was happening in our lives! We would read them and write each other just like the girls in the book. We especially enjoyed the closings as they were super fun. Like Yours till the meatball bounces or yours till the ocean waves and stuff like that. We had a lot of fun with it.

Now I am going to skip ahead to high school. I really enjoyed most of the books we read in my latter English classes, but my favorite was Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Really if you had asked me for my favorite book this is what I would have said for a long time. Now I don't have a favorite really, but I loved this story, loved everything it meant, just it was great. Most people in class would complain because it is not a book that you can just breeze through. You actually have to think about it to really get to the meat of the story. Really a great read, but not if you want something light and easy.

My second favorite book from high school was An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. It was an interesting read as the main character is trying to find the american dream and it doesn't go the way he wants it to in the end. I really loved it and Dreiser's other works.

So there you go. A selection of books that I remember loving growing up. When I first started writing this post I couldn't think of that many books, but the more I thought about it the more I thought of other books I liked. It really was hard to not just keep listing books as they came to me. It's been a lot of fun remembering some of my favorite books through the years. Hope you enjoyed reading.

Update:

Oh man, I can't believe I forgot about Stephen King. As a teen I read all of his books. I didn't like all of them, for example I found Salem's Lot to be incredibly boring, but for the most part I loved them. I was and still am a huge horror fan, it is just harder for me to find good ones now a days. My favorite King books though was The Dark Tower series. I came into the series after The Wastelands and had to wait a few years for Wizard & Glass to be released. Man I was so excited for that book 4 to come out, and all of them that followed. I loved the way the series ended and it was just a great story. I haven't read the newest one that just came out like two years ago, but now that I am thinking of it I really need to! Man, so many great memories of Stephen King/Richard Bachman stories that I loved so much. Good times.