The Wenches' Favorite Children's Books!

. . . Imagine eight little Wenches as small girls, each curled up in a big comfy chair, lost in the pages of some wonderful book . . . Anne's recent post about A. A. Milne and our beloved bear-pal, Winnie the Pooh, inspired us Wenches to think about our own favorite books when we were just small.

Here are our lists and thoughts on the subject -- as you read through, think about your own favorite children's books -- we'll be asking about your favorite reads when you were kids!  

 

Jo Beverley:

1. The Blue Fairy Book, Red Fairy Book, Pink Fairy Book, Green…and so on. There were lots of different colours!  
2. Various "horsey" books by Christine Pullein-Johnson and her sisters, Diana and Josephine
3. Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield 
4. Slim Tales, a series about anthropomorphic mice

... Though most of the time I just grazed the library shelves!

Joanna Bourne:

I loved Tom Corbett.  And Lucky Starr.  And all of Heinlein's YAs.  I guess I was ten or twelve ...

This is going back a ways.  I know I read about anything I could get my hands on.   I loved the Narnia books.  They're magical.  I read all kinds of traditional fairy stories and legends.  The Once and Future King.  Oh.  One book I remember enjoying when I was very young was Kingsley's Water Babies.

And I indulge myself with this, from Milne (it is better read aloud):
The King asked
The Queen, and
The Queen asked
The Dairymaid:
"Could we have some butter for
The Royal slice of bread?"

Pat Rice:

I grew up in a house with only four books--classic plays like Ibsen that no one read but me. I can remember as a toddler grabbing Little Golden Books at the grocery so I got The Little Engine That Could and The Poky Little Puppy. I had no school library until fourth grade, where I remember starting on one end and working my way around, but if they had A. A. Milne, I was too old to consider it by the time I reached “M.”  When I was able to order from Scholastic, I started with Pride and Prejudice. No one read to me, so I was completely on my own in my choices. When it came time to read to my own children, I had no background to call on. I started them on Seuss and Berenstains and they were reading on their own before age four. Dr. Seuss books are the ones my family quotes. Want to hear Red Fish, Blue Fish? My kids did eventually get Winnie the Pooh, but they read those books to themselves. So while my childhood reading material might have covered everything from Walter Farley to Dostoevsky (because I found a classic literature reading list), I missed out on all the favorites. 

Mary Jo Putney: 

Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, yessss!!!!  That was Asimov in YA mode!  The school library had only that one Lucky Starr book, but did have all the Heinlein YAs.  And I read and reread and RE-read them. And I read all the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books.

I've never read A. A. Milne or Paddington Bear or even Maurice Sendak.  Nor The Secret Garden or the Wizard of Oz, among many others.  A lot of the kid classics simply didn't come my way.  If they had, I'd have read them, because I went through books like locusts through a field!  

Anne Gracie:

I read every horse book going. Pretty much all our reading matter came from English publishers in those days. There were some home grown — the Billabong series, old fashioned even when I was reading them, and various others. But I read everything I could get my hands on, didn't matter what kind of book and quickly went through all the books belonging to my older brother and sisters. Some books made it to Australia from the US. The Bobbsey twins and Cherry Ames came from the US, but I wasn't keen -- they belonged to my older sister. I was more about the animals. So, Thunderhead, Flicka, The Silver Brumby (brumbies are wild horses in Australia), Finn the Wolf hound, Wild Brother (Mary Patchett), and more.

The first stories I remember having read to me — probably because they were family favorites and we read them over and over again — were Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne. And loads of AA Milne poetry read aloud, much of which I still remember and can quote. I also loved the Pookie stories by Ivy Wallace. Pookie was a white rabbit with wings, who lived with a little girl called Belinda. I read pretty much any Enid Blyton book I could get my hands on — she was an incredibly prolific English children's author, who went out of favor for a while —political correctness, some of which was justified and some was plain silly. And also people thinking kids need to read only "good" literature, instead of fun reads. She's available again now, but some books are pretty dated. She was writing in the 40's and 50's and there's a bit of residual racism in some of the books. When I was little I liked Enid Blyton's Faraway tree series,and later it was the Famous Five, the "Mystery of" series (the Five Find-Outers and Dog) and her "of Adventure" series - Valley of Adventure, Mountain of Adventure etc, which had four children and a cockatoo (Kiki) and various other animals.

Cara Elliott/Andrea Penrose:

My early favorite picture books included Dr. Seuss, especially The Cat in the Hat and To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I just loved the zany play with language. 

I started reading early on and quickly moved on to longer books with pictures. Stuart Little and The Wind in the Willows (with drawings by Arthur Rackham) and Howard Pyle's books on King Arthur, Robin Hood and Otto of the Silver Hand stick out in my memory. Even back then, I loved a rollicking good story! Winnie the Pooh was one of my early favorites too!

Susan King:

Fairy tales, first and foremost! I had a Tall Book of Fairy Tales that I adored, and also a big book of Greek myths that I hauled around everywhere with me. I loved Winnie the Pooh and Milne’s poetry, and I read my mother’s poetry books when I was very young—I remember Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” R. L. Stevenson -- I loved the rhythms and word beauty, though I didn’t understand them then. (My highest praise of a book when I was very young was to draw a princess in crayon on the flyleaf. To me, a flyleaf was just a blank sheet of paper begging for a princess, and the best books got the best princesses!) 

My favorite children’s books, besides dear Pooh, were all the Pippi Longstocking books, which I read over and over, as well as Beverly Cleary’s Ellen Tebbits. I moved on to The Five Little Peppers, then Little Women and Little Men, and kept on going….

Your turn now! What were your favorite reads when you were just small?  Some of the Wenches are going back to read their favorite children's tales again (and some of us are reading the ones we never got around to!) -- and we'd love to know what you all loved to read, too . . . 

Susan

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Cate S]

I read everything I could get my hands on.. we always had books and magazines.. Science fiction for my dad, women's fiction for my mom... The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys... can you tell when I grew up? Pooh, Madeline, Eloise...some of my favorite younger characters...

[Anne Roller]

I'm there with Heinlein - 'Podkayne of Mars' was a role model - and Asimov. Plus 'The Once and Future King' and 'The Hobbit', 'The Black Stallion', and everything of Edward Eager's I could get my hands on. Oh, and 'Hitty, Her First Hundred Years'. Never cared much for contemporary anything. Fun post - thanks!

[Janga]

The very first books I remember reading alone and to my younger sister were Maud Hart Lovelace's Besty-Tacy books. I read the children's books in the series and moved on to the YA books, and I still have copies of them all from Betsy-Tacy through Betsy's Wedding. I also loved Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne books, Louisa May Alcott's books, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. These girl books along with fairy tales, Greek myths, and Bible stories were favorites. I also loved poetry, starting with Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. I discovered Emily Dickinson the summer I turned ten, the same summer I first read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and the romance novels of Emilie Loring.

I've continued adding children's books to my shelves as I read to two more generations. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Hailstones and Halibut Bones, If I Found a Wistful Unicorn, The Paper Bag Princess, How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, and, of course, the Narnia books and all of Harry Potter and Eva Ibbotson's children's books--these and many more are still rereads in my family.

[Mary Jo Putney]

Susan--

LOL about how the flyleaves were just begging for princesses in your favorite books! Those early books set us on the path to our current book addictions.

I like kid books with strong heroines--girls who -did- stuff, like Trixie Belden and the Dana Sisters. There were others, too. Even as a kid, I didn't believe that girls should sit around and wait to be rescued. *G*

[Susan]

Yes, I bestowed princesses abundantly when I was very little - IIRC, even the family Bible got princess'd!

So many children's books! Thanks for the reminders of some wonderful titles. I loved reading books with my kids, and found some new favorites in those years!

[Susan]

Oh children's books! I read so much. Some of my very favorite re-reads were rather odd, I think. Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. I remember having an old battered paperback of Sweet Thursday.

Swiss Family Robinson was a frequent re-read. Jack London's books, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stephenson's books.

I loved all the Greek myths and checked those books out mutliple times from the library. Mom bragged to her fellow college friends that I was reading the Odyssey at the same time she was in college, the unabridged version.

There was also this adventure story, Many Rivers to Cross. I remember it clearly because it took place in Frontier America. The hero did not want to be trapped in marriage with the heroine, so he ran. She put on her buckskins and TRACKED HIM DOWN and they saved each other from hostile natives.

Then in my teens there was Heinlein, Asimove, Zelazny, Tolkien, and many many more in science fiction and fantasy.

I grew up to become an English Lit major. Surprise! :)

[Cynthia Owens]

Childhood books - so many of them helped me while away the hours. I was a HUGE Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew fan. My favorite fairy tale was Peter Pan. Heidi, The Wizard of Oz. And as I grew older,I fell in love with Irish mythology, which I still love today.

[joanna bourne]

I'm always amazed at how many girls read all the 'boys' books back when I was a kid. For instance, Science Fiction was so much a 'Boys Club House' when I was young. Not so many female role models.

It's better now.

[Anne Gracie]

Joanna, I much preferred my older brother's books, too — so much more fun and adventurous.

I read a lot of science fiction, too — read everything, really — but I was never keen on the kind of science fiction that was heavy on the world-building and light on character - particularly female characters, who were often very cardboard, if they were even there.

Am enjoying these lists -- grinning and nodding and wishing I had time to just take a bunch of my fave kids books back to bed and reread them.

[Jenny]

Oh I loved reading anything I could get my hands on, including encyclopedias, by my favourites were Enid Blyton, Berrisford, Talbot Baines Reed (early boys books), Kipling, Lorna Hill. I could go on and on. When I was about 10 I complained to the town librarian there was nothing to read in the children's section. So she would take me into the adults section, and carefully supervise me while I picked an adult book to read. She would stand right at my shoulder and check! I have often wondered what she would have done if I had picked something 'unsuitable'.

[Cathy Schultz]

That's interesting! I just did my blog today on children's books. I wasn't read to as a child so didn't discover the wonderful world of children's books until I had my own children. I collect them now, especially picture books illustrated by my favorite artists. But one of my favorite read as an adult is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

[JPrince]

As I child I remember loving Little Women, Little Men, etc., Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys. When my children were young, we loved Dr Seuss, The Wind in the Willows and Pippi Longstocking. But some I didn't discover until my kids were adults (introduced through a children's theater where I volunteered) included Anne of Green Gables, The Narnia Chronicles, The Boxcar Children.

[Sarah]

I loved the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer -- multi-lingual school stories with some adventure.

[Linda S]

I, too, read the Betsy-Tacy books over and over, as well as many others listed here. My choice of reading was shaped by the collection in our Public library. I read most of the Little Maid books (girls during the American Revolution) that my mother had read thirty years previously! Didn't read The Wind in the Willows or Pooh until I was much older, but I loved them when I finally got to them.