wot childrens books still haunt your imagination

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Brambly Hedge!

These books are just about the most lovely and gentle thing ever created. I almost feel like I want to have kids purely so I can read these books to them.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
The Weirdstone of Brisinagmanen
Not sure - re-read this quite recently and it was kind of disappointingly generic fantasy, most of the concepts reheated from Tolkein. Dark is Rising series and Earthsea books much better for that sort of thing imo.

Swallows and Amazons was ace, and is only enhanced when you subsequently realize that a) the books still read well and plausibly, and are actually quite socially conscious (Coot Club / The Big Six in particular - with the sense that the author's aware that there's social distance between the boat builders' kids and the doctors' and lawyers' kids, but the kids themselves don't really care and get on with it) and b) Ransome was friendly with Trotsky.
 

Dr Awesome

Techsteppin'
decline_and_fall_of_the_roman_empire.jpg


Chilling apocalyptic fantasy tale for children aged 3-5.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I like it, yeah I know exactly what you mean regarding the disparity between the richness of emotion that you can recall and the completely lacking physical thing. Infact I experienced exactly the same thing when I stumbled across a youtube video of 'World of Illusion' - a game for the sega megadrive with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. I watched the first couple of levels and it looked so shitty and basic, and yet I remember being 6 or 7 and being amazed by it and the expansive world it implied. I hadn't seen it since then but I was immediately there.

Yeah, computer games are rich in this kind of thing, although I played Myth on a Spectrum emulator a few months ago (that game being my view of the apotheosis of gaming as a kid) and it held up quite well really.

I'm desperately trying to remember haunting books I read when young....I must have just suppressed them all, which explains a lot of things.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
Not sure - re-read this quite recently and it was kind of disappointingly generic fantasy, most of the concepts reheated from Tolkein.

Not really from Tolkien, more Welsh and Irish myth. For instance, the Morrigan (more-ian) comes in numerous Irish stories; and The Owl Service is basically a rewriting of part of the Mabinogian.

It's been a while since I read the Weirdstone, but the bits underground are powerfully done as I remember (and far more claustrophobic than the related parts of Tolkien).

The main fault with Garner I always found was that the stories end in such a rush, leaving you feeling a bit unsatisfied.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Not really from Tolkien, more Welsh and Irish myth. For instance, the Morrigan (more-ian) comes in numerous Irish stories; and The Owl Service is basically a rewriting of part of the Mabinogian.

It's been a while since I read the Weirdstone, but the bits underground are powerfully done as I remember (and far more claustrophobic than the related parts of Tolkien).
The Owl Service, totally. (And the Mabinogian is fantastic.)

The bit in Weirdstone where they're trying to get through the horribly narrow tunnels is fantastic (as well as totally playing up to my slightly claustrophobic side) but the orc-things and the elf and all that sort of stuff seems very very tolkein-esque.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
the orc-things and the elf and all that sort of stuff seems very very tolkein-esque.

Perhaps it's just that the various myths and legends overlap. For instance, the Mara (also in the Weirdstone and related to the Morrigan) come from Old Norse and Old English, which was Tolkien's main area of (professional) interest. And elves, goblins, dwarves, etc figure throughout the various Germanic branches (not sure about Celtic ones).
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
While we're talking fantasy, I'm sure there are more than a few bods here who dug Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy...though their status as strictly "children's" books is questionable. I was a stoodent myself when I read them.

And as the complete polar opposite, a few years ago on a whim I pulled out the old Chronicles of Narnia box set I still have at home for some reason...it's just hilarious, talk about moral absolutes...makes Tolkien look like some glibly amoral po-mo relativist. Also reminded me of some old interview with Pullman, where he talks about reading the Narnia books as a kid and coming across the bit where one of the girls starts to wear makeup, becomes interested in boys etc. (starts turning into a woman, in other words) and is 'punished' for this transgression by being no longer able to visit Narnia: "It was at this point that I realised C. S. Lewis was full of shit". :D
 

sufi

lala
The Borribles.
...great covers!
yes absolutely ... as recommended my mr barrow iirc for my first book review, what i liked a lot was the way it subverted the wombles into filthy horrible giant rats with pointed stakes, and that there was a wandle tribe, yeah!! - i remember vividly the description of biggest bastard womble's fate - drowning in a cauldron with his final squeals bubbling up 'like a fart in a bathtub'

also
john wyndham .... brilliant

and
(not books, but) those disney wildlife movies with talking animals on over-bright 70s film, they always used to be at the pictures before the main feature
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Wow, so many memories in this thread - Weirdstone, Dark Is Rising, Narnia, Box of Delights, The Night Kitchen, Wizard of Earthsea, The Borribles (but not The Borrowers - could never got on with them for some reason) and so on and so on.
Not seen E Nesbit mentioned, used to love her stuff, also, The Neverending Story was pretty scary as a child - the nothing that was eating everything, a difficult concept to get your head round back then I think. The Lewis Carrol stuff was also magic and headfucking and I think someone mentioned Milo and The Phantom Tollbooth. I used to LOVE reading when I was little.
Also, does anyone remember something about a kid who had nine lives and there was kind of a magic school and stuff (bit like Harry Potter I guess) but he was the best because he was unique and had nine lives in this one dimension instead of one each in nine different dimensions like most people. There was an older magician called Chrestomanci who was the only other person with nine lives and he was the most powerful guy in the world. The young kid with nine lives had them stored as matches in a special book but he refused to believe it was true so he lit one of the matches and he caught fire - that bit stuck with me.
Also, was there something called The Silver Sword trilogy or similar, guess it was sub-Arthurian legend but I loved it at the time.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
And Swallows and Amazons - what was the one where the guys were accused of unmooring boats but they managed to catch the culprits in the act with one of those new-fangled camera things? The satisfaction I got at the end when they turned the tables on the bad guys was amazing.
 

CHAOTROPIC

on account
Also, does anyone remember something about a kid who had nine lives and there was kind of a magic school and stuff (bit like Harry Potter I guess) but he was the best because he was unique and had nine lives in this one dimension instead of one each in nine different dimensions like most people. There was an older magician called Chrestomanci who was the only other person with nine lives and he was the most powerful guy in the world. The young kid with nine lives had them stored as matches in a special book but he refused to believe it was true so he lit one of the matches and he caught fire - that bit stuck with me..

Charmed Life, by the awesome Diana Wynne Jones! This one totally haunted me for years too until I figured out who it was by a few years ago & picked it up. It's part of a series of books (the Chronicles of Chrestomanci) that includes the awesome Witch Week ... another one that totally blew my head off when I was still in single figures. For teenage witches & wizards she totally demolishes that awfully overrated Harry Potter botox hag.

Oh, & 600 million times YES to The Borribles as a bona fide classic!! :cool:
 

petergunn

plywood violin
i remember reading a book about a boy who turned green, it was almost like a sub-phillip dick sci-fi sort of thing that tripped me out when i was like 11... can't remember the name of it...

also the Tripod series (city of gold and lead, the white mountains, the pool of fire) really stock with me...
 

petergunn

plywood violin
my favourite kids book involved a kid who looks through a magic telescope and ends up in a strange, frankly psychedelic world full of weird logic, some kind of Captain America type superhero and much oddness. Wish to fuck I could remember the name..

l.

this sounds familiar to me for some reason...

i liked books like that when i was 9-12, books that would sorta blow my mind...

i also used to read the "young adult" books from the 70's when i was a kid in the 80's... i remember reading one i found in the stacks at school when i was 8 where the first story was all about a kid ODing on heroin.... ah, that 70's heroin epidemic!

that's a whole genre in and of itself; 70's antidrug books aimed at teens... squalid tales of shooting galleries, crash pads, and the acid casualty who thinks he's a container of orange juice... "Suddenly, I realized I could actually SEE the sound coming out of the speakers. The wailing electric guitar seemed like a bright yellow to me....."
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Charmed Life, by the awesome Diana Wynne Jones! This one totally haunted me for years too until I figured out who it was by a few years ago & picked it up. It's part of a series of books (the Chronicles of Chrestomanci) that includes the awesome Witch Week ... another one that totally blew my head off when I was still in single figures. For teenage witches & wizards she totally demolishes that awfully overrated Harry Potter botox hag."
Nice one - I read the whoie lot of them I think but I've never been able to remember what they were lately.
 
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