This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is top ten books from your childhood you’d like to revisit. Now, I’m a bit odd in that I jumped from very basic books right up to adult books in a pretty short space of time. So there are some adult books mixed in here which I nonetheless read as a pre-teen.
- Magician, Raymond E. Feist. Man, it took me forever to get through this doorstop, but I loved it. And promptly reread it when the extended edition, with more material and tiny font, came out.
- The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien. Okay, I frequently revisit this one, but there’s nothing quite like the thrill of encountering Smaug by the light coming through a crack in your curtains after your parents have threatened to take away the book if you don’t go to sleep now.
- The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Maybe it’d just be a disappointment, but there’s still a sort of breathless romanticism about the idea of the shut away garden. And it’s set in Yorkshire, which I know well, and occasionally miss.
- The Positronic Man, Isaac Asimov. My most epic library fine ever was accrued on this one. The library wouldn’t let me take it out, because it was an adult book, so Mum took it out for me. And then had a lot of trouble getting it back from me. I didn’t have my own copy until I was dating my current partner and she tracked down a copy — all I’d been able to find was the book of short stories which contained the original.
- The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff. Another book I read to bits. I think I went through three editions, and even the fancier edition I won as a prize from school quickly got a battering. I loved the Britain underneath the Roman occupation that Sutcliff brought to life — accurate or not, I was happy to believe in it all. And there’s some really, really powerful stuff here.
- Animorphs, K.A. Applegate. I never did stick it out and get to the end of these. I loved the concept, though, the way you could let yourself believe that it could be real (or is that begin to fear that it is real?). Maybe I should just look on Wikipedia for how it all panned out…
- Clockwork, Philip Pullman. This one creeped me the heck out. I never actually owned a copy, which is weird, but I loved reading it. Sometimes I’d whisper the words, because somehow it worked really well as a whispered story.
- Across the Nightingale Floor, Lian Hearn. I remember being enraptured by these books. I should read them again and see if they stand up to my remembered fondness. I suspect they were quite appropriative culturally, though…
- Just about anything by David Eddings. I really have a craving to reread his stuff. Just one trilogy/series will do; there’s so many similarities between them that after that it’d drive me nuts. But I did adore Sparhawk.
- The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula Le Guin. Or all the Earthsea books, really. God, they were an enchantment for me!
That’s ten already? Yeesh! But I have so many more I could mention…