When I was nine years old, I hid under a table and heard my sister kill a king.

[conuly]

Quest for a Maid. That book still holds up after all these years, and is one of the few books of my childhood I can quote from accurately, no matter how often I read them and re-read them. (The only other line that springs to mind is the one about how "Saving the penny and walking was a great feature of their childhood." Yeah, Fossils, me too. Join the club.)

I was re-reading Quest the other day and Eva asked me what it was about, so I quoted that first line to her. She's not big on books with death in them, so she rejected it out of hand, and was a little surprised when I told her that that's actually one of the great formative books of my childhood. I have a list, in fact: Quest for a Maid, Dragon's Milk, So You Want to Be a Wizard, Behind the Attic Wall, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Ballet Shoes, Bridge to Terebithia, and A Little Princess. Oh, and Beauty. That's quite a list, and I'm not sure what it says about me now that I put all the books together like that, other than that I liked to read fantasy - and in my life, escaping the Nazis or being sent to boarding school or being a child actress was just as much a fantasy as saving an intelligent sports car while in company of a talking white hole or raising dragon hatchlings.

Of course, this is the list I made today. Tomorrow or next week I might pick a largely different set of books as "the great formative books of my childhood". Really, I think the important thing is that they were all important in shaping my personality, even the ones I mostly have forgotten. I wonder if my list is very different from other people's lists, though. What books did everybody else peg as being hugely influential to their worldviews?

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Comments

[waterfall8484]

I've heard of too few of the books on your list. (So You Want to Be a Wizard! And A Little Princess, which is a very sweet book.) Hmm... I wonder if I can find them here? As if I need more things to read. :~D

I hear you on the fantasy book thing. I remember reading Narnia and loving most of it (was never fond of the last book). And of course the BBC series was (still is!) awesome. I'm not sure they were formative books, but I do remember them fondly.

Books I know formed me were the ElfQuest comics and The Saga of the Ice People, which very few people outside of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe have heard of. I should probably also put The Deed of Paksenarrion and parts of the Vorkosigan saga on that list. And later the Harry Potter books played a big part too, but that was the experience of fandom and being part of something current and ongoing more than the books themselves I think.

[conuly]

You always need more things to read, that's the human condition.

And later the Harry Potter books played a big part too, but that was the experience of fandom and being part of something current and ongoing more than the books themselves I think.

I quite understand.,

[waterfall8484]

So true. :~D

Waiting in line for the midnight sale, reading one chapter at a time and discussing it with my friend, all the fanfiction that wouldn't be AU for years to come... those were the days.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Using a somewhat loose definition of childhood (as in, into early adolescence) and completely off the top of my head, I would say the books which particularly stuck with me, or in some way shaped my worldview would have to include:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 'Trilogy' - Douglas Adams (I credit h2g2 as the reason I'm generally fairly relaxed about adaptations, having learnt at an early age you can tell the same story in many ways)
The Bear Nobody Wanted - Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Tiger Eyes - Judy Blume
Here's to you, Rachel Robinson - Judy Blume (this is the first instance I can remember of consciously identifying with a character)
Boy / Going Solo - Roald Dahl (his autobiographies)

On a technicality I probably shouldn't include The Animals of Farthing Wood (Colin Dann) because I saw the TV series first and thus that's what really stuck with me. But I'm sure if I'd just read the books, they'd have had the same effect.

And I suppose really I ought to include Harry Potter, given that I first read it 19 years ago (!!!) and the place in my heart, and life, it still holds to this day.

On the one hand, I'm struck by how different those books are to what I read now. On the other, I read a lot of crime, thrillers, alternate-history and generally stuff set in the more dictatorial and/or one-party-state parts of 20th century Europe. These are not, by-and-large, over-represented genres within children's fiction. (The notable example being books set in the UK during WWII which are a huge subset of British children's fiction.)