Kiddy lit (No, not kitty litter!)

[vanillafluffy]

Purloined from adventurat because it's just too tempting to pass up...

1. What book or books were special to you in your childhood?
Most of what I read before I started high school was good old Stratemeyer syndicate stuff---The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames---and other young-adult detective series: Trixie Belden was my favorite, and I liked the Three Investigators and the Happy Hollisters as well. And anything with horses! Mary O'Hara---technically not children's books at all, but I never noticed that at the time---the Black Stallion books, and anything from the Scholastic book club that mentioned horses in the summary.

2. What was particularly special or memorable about those books?
They got to go to exotic places and have adventures! All I ever did was go to school and other boring stuff. The adults in those stories were background noise, they weren't always telling the protagonists what to do. Life was never too complicated; the mystery was always solved in 120 pages. Or the kid got the horse despite the odds and it became a champion (race horse, show jumper, rodeo star, etc.).

3. Have you re-read any of them as an adult?
I've never stopped reading "kids" books. Not necessarily the ones mentioned above, although I still have the whole run of the Trixie Belden series (up until #16 or so, and a few of the more recent ones). But if it's a well-written book, I think of it that way---as a good book that just happens to have young people as its focus. In high school, I encounted some lovely books by Margot Benary-Isbert, that deal with post WWII Germany, and I've tracked down more of them since. The characters are so sympathetically written that I don't care whether I'm supposed to be "too old" for their stories. I reread them, and Mary O'Hara, and others when the spirit moves me.

4. If so, were the books as good as you remembered them?
Sometimes it's a real hoot to reread them. A couple years ago, I almost peed my pants when I read an edition of an old Nancy Drew book that predated politically correct rewrites and came across "Nancy's gay ways made her very popular with the fraternity." Uh...yeah. What's interesting about reading childhood classics in adulthood is the perspective of distance. When I look at the copyright dates, I know what was going on in the world in 1950-something and I know that it's going to have a subtly different outlook from someone writing about the 1950s in the year 2000. One of my favorite juvenile authors is Elizabeth Enright. Many of her books are still in print fifty years later---I have a few of them with contemporary covers---and although there may be a few things that stand out today as awkward, like mentioning a "TV tree" on the roof, they hold up because the situations are interesting and the characters are well drawn. It's all about the writing. Always.

5. What do you think about movies being made out of children's classics (like the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of The Rings, etc.)?
(I've never been into either of those. I saw each of the LotR films exactly once. Well done, just not my cup of tea. Harry Potter, on the other hand--I know, not a classic in the sense of having been around for generations, but still popular with all ages and nicely executed.) I understand someone's recently done a remake of "My Friend Flicka" that sounds like complete and total crap---they kept the title, and that's about it. I adored Mary O'Hara's books---I'm not going anywhere near that movie! It's really a question of how faithful the movie people are to the original material, which is the bottom line for any book-to-film adaptation. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's drek.

Comments

[sorchar.livejournal.com]

HAPPY HOLLISTERS REPRESENT!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Do what?!

[sorchar.livejournal.com]

Dude, I loved those books growing up!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Our school library had a boatload of them...one of the ones that stands out for me was where they found an emerald inside a broken ceramic statue and visited the potter and discovered a treasure in the place the clay came from. Perpetual vacation, that's what was so cool about all those juvenile detectives....

[sorchar.livejournal.com]

No kidding! They NEVER went to school! And Joey Brill and his friend Will were always trying to bug them (because they were secretly in love with Pete, no doubt.)

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

LOL! No doubt!

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

THE THREE INVESTIGATORS!!!!

*squee!!*

I actually have every one of the original 46 titles in my collection. :-)

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

I regret having given mine to my nephew about a decade ago. I had most of them--all of the Hitchcock ones, I think--and I *so* wanted to hang out in Jones' Salvage Yard and have Worthington chauffer me around in the gold-plated Rolls Royce. I wanted to carry a piece of pink chalk in my pocket to draw question marks with, and solve mysteries involving stars of the silver screen. I wanted to be the Fourth Investigator--!

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

You and me, both, girlfriend. And I had the biggest "crush" on Pete. ;-)

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Pete definitely had sex appeal going for him. (Bob's never really been my type.) Jupiter maybe for smarts...it would depend on who they cast.

Here's a question for you: Who do you think they'd grow up to look like?

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

OMG, what a thought! Do you realize that, based on when the books were written, the boys would be older than US now? *mind boggles*

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

That's okay. I like older men. I mean hell, look at Kurt Russell--the man is still fine.

Depending on how old we were trying to cast, I think Oliver Platt would make an interesting Jupiter. Too old? There's always Jack Black.

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have absolutely nothing against older men, either, believe me. It's just that, I can't believe I'm as old as I am, sometimes!

Oliver Platt would be PERFECT as Jupiter!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

*grin* Now we just need a blonde and a brunette of comparable age for Pete and Bob. Figure Pete maybe had a career in Hollywood too---as athletic as he was, a stuntman. (Y'think?) Okay, he's a wee bit older, but how about John Schneider?

(Yes, I *am* insane, and I *do* have a one-track mind.)

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

I *love* John Schneider - he's aged VERY well. But wasn't Pete a brunette? And Bob was blonde....?

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

I haven't read them in long enough that it's entirely possible I've got them back-asswards.

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

Hope you can read at least *some* of the titles (I didn't want to make the image too big)...



And yep, Pete was brunette while Bob was blonde (with glasses).

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

*turns green with envy* OMG, I've got to start rebuilding my collection (or at least schmoozing them at the library).

Here's a tasty thought for a brunette of the right general age: Lorenzo Lamas. Mmmm--?

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

As you can see, my books are a combination of paperback and hardbound, but it took me nearly 5 years to find them all, so I'm not complaining! Oh, and I lied before....there's only 43 (not 46) original titles. Oops!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

And looking at the row of titles, I realize I don't think I kept up with them after #15 or so. I think I read a couple, but by then, Hitchcock was out, and the writing seemed more perfunctory. (Or maybe I'd become more discriminating.)

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

I found out much later that the stories were actually continued well into the 1980s, by various authors.....and with mixed results. But when I went about searching for and purchasing the ones in my collection, I concentrated ONLY on the original titles written/published in the 1960s and early 1970s -- in other words, the ones I'd read as a kid. I also found out that I'd managed to read about 30 of the original 43 titles, way more than I remembered! Of course, some of the stories are better and more memorable than others.... :-)

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I remember plots but not titles, other times I remember specific scenes but not which book they're in.

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Same here. My favorites, though, have always been The Secret Of Terror Castle and The Mystery Of The Whispering Mummy. Hee!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Big 'yes' to Terror Castle. The Talking Skull also stands out--that was the one with the trunk Jupiter bought at auction, yes? I remember The Fiery Eye--that was the one with the busts--and the Moaning Cave, which was one of the first ones I read--I got it for the cover, which gave me very agreeable chills! A skeleton! In a sombrero! Ooooh, cool!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

*Goodled it* Damn, you're right. Pete was the brunette and Bob was the blonde. Yikes.... *puts on thinking cap*

http://www.threeinvestigators.net/GG.html

[socialhermit.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, awesome site (with links to even more awesome sites after that)! Thankee!

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

There's nothing like a good blast of nostalgia!

[adventurat.livejournal.com]

Did Elizabeth Enright write the books about the Melendy family? I remember those very well, too (especially Mrs. Cuthbert-Stanley, called "Cuffy")! It was my first exposure to the word 'cupola', which I pronounced (in my head) as "cu-PO-la", and was later astonished to discover was actually "KEW-pu-luh".

I remember my brother and I disagreeing about the pronunciation of 'Melendy'. I thought it was MEL-en-dy, and he insisted that it had to be Me-LEN-dy. Thoughts?

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Yes! Bingo! You got it! She also did "Gone-Away Lake", "Return to Gone-Away", and a few others, not all of which I have.

Randy was always my favorite Melendy--and I tend to agree with you about the pronunciation. Cuffy and her stories were fun, Willie sounded like an interesting guy to have around, and Mrs. Oliphant was one cool old lady. I'm not sure if my passion for Victorian houses can be traced to the Four-Story Mistake, but it certainly contributed!

Did you ever read the fourth book in the series? I didn't find out about it until about twenty years after I'd devoured the earlier ones. It was "A Spiderweb for Two", and it was about an on-going treasure hunt that Randy and Oliver pursued when the older ones went off to boarding school.

[adventurat.livejournal.com]

Apparently I don't remember those books as well as you do, because I didn't remember any other names than Cuffy. And I can't remember how many of them I read, but 'two' is coming to mind.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

I've probably read them more recently, too. There were four kids originally: Mona, Rush, Randy and Oliver. Mona wanted to be an actress and ended up getting a part on a radio serial, Rush played the piano, Randy was artistic and danced, and Oliver was earnest and got into scrapes and ended up dirty on a regular basis. They adopted Mark in the third book after his cruel uncle--well, I won't give too much away in case you decide to ferret out a copy--the title of that one was "And Then There Were Five".

(At one point, I started a "Where are they now?" story set in the early 1960's, but it died on its hard drive and remains unwritten.)

[martian-aries.livejournal.com]

I still read "kids' books," too, namely A Series of Unfortunate Events because it's dead funny. I don't tend to reread a whole lot of the books I read when I was younger, because a lot of those were Animorphs or Goosebumps (my eyes bleed!), but some of them have stuck with me over the years --such as Lois Lowry's The Giver, which I recommend to people of all ages. The really good ones tend to make me happy, but sad at the same time, because I know I can't go back to the first day I read them. Even though I love them, they'll never be "new" again. You know?

And I realize that it's silly of me to be nostalgic at my age. But whatever. :-P

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

You've just put your finger on what makes a really good book--it's one you can go can go back to and reread and still get something fresh from it. Sometimes your perspective changes between readings, and you find whole layers of meaning that you never recognized before. You bring a more sympathetic attitude to the page or you connect with some detail that resonates where it wouldn't have previously. Sometimes I'll grab a book off of my shelves, seemingly at random, and when I sit down with it, discover elements that I must have remembered subliminally because they reflect something I'm currently dealing with. Look for this to happen as you gain age, experience and books.