Great Books For Kids

Did anyone else read "The Great Brain" books as a kid? My father read these to me - and I think he read them as a kid too. They're all about growing up in Utah at the turn of the century, but full of very funny scams and cons run by the title character, who is the elder brother of the narrator. I seem to be the only one of my friends who remembers these books... I'd love to read them again.
http://www.vpr.net/camelshump/library/images_season4/The_Great_Brain.jpg

I'm typing pretty well considering I'm drunk and it's 2:09 p.m.

At six and seven, I loved the Young Folks' Shelf of Books" 10-vol. set that came with our encyclopedias.

At eight and nine, I loved the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators and Asimov's Lucky Starr.

At ten and eleven, I loved sports biographies, Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie novels.

After that, mostly SF, but also Travis McGee and 87th Precinct novels.

but I remember liking the boxcar children, I think they were fairly recent books. I also like the Princess and the Goblins, but I don't think that is too recent.

pullman YES. reading them for the first time 4 years or so ago i wished i had been 10 reading them for the first time

susan cooper's 'the dark is rising' series trumps pretty much everything. also her stuff for slightly older kids like 'seaward'

narnia obv - i can honestly say i didn't pick up any of the xtian weirdness until it was pointed out, but then i wasn't brought up xtian

'milo and the phantom tollbooth' by norton duster

'a wrinkle in time' and the others in that series by madeleine l'engle

anything by alan garner

'chocky' by john wyndham, obv

'grinny' by nicholas fisk as mentioned by others on other thread

'tom's midnight garden' by philippa pearce (this one is superb)

'children of the dust' by louise lawrence (i had a huge thing for post-nuclear war shit)

'the obtuse experiment' by malcolm rose (out of print but i have no idea why because it's GREAT - if you see one grab it)

'daz 4 zoe' by robert swindells - despite appalling title it's a decent enough CLASSISM-IS-BAD-KIDZ! lesson and v readable, i read it again a few months ago

'the silver sword' by ian serraillier

'the otterbury incident' by cecil day lewis (don't remember a thing about this but i know i read it often - actually i do remember one scene where they made invisible ink out of lemon juice! yay!)

'ninety-nine dragons' by barbara sleigh

many, many more which will come back slowly

ah shit a couple of things everyone else claims not to remember:

1) a kind of muffled otherworld adventure where there are dangerous beings wrapped in pink fog ??? i WISH i could remember more abt this one

2) a story where they're cleaning the canal and go a bit too far and pull the plug out as well (cue stories abt h's and my old housemate f - "trying to get her to go anywhere is like trying to pull the plug out of the bottom of the canal!"

Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Hating Alison Ashley - Robin Klein
Came Back To Show You I Could Fly - Robin Klein
Penny Pollard's Diaries - Robin Klein
Which Witch? - Eva Ibbotson
George's Marvellous Medicine - Roald Dahl
The Twits - Roald Dahl
Charlie & The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The BFG - Roald Dahl
Unreal, Unbelievable - Paul Jennings
Harp of Fishbones, Necklace of Raindrops - Joan Aiken
Magic Pudding - Norman Lindsay
Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum
Playing Beattie Bow - Ruth Park

oh oh oh! arthur ransome, the swallows and amazons series.

i read this book several times, i too had a thing for the post-nuclear war young adult books which stretched into university. but this novel in particular either kept me awake at night or gave me nightmares for years and years. i was convinced the apocalypse was going to come while i was asleep.

Also:
the Swallows and Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome
The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill (nonviolent revolution for kids! Awesome!)
Homer Price, by Robert McCloskey (for little kids, it is mandatory to get them Make Way For Ducklings and Time of Wonder)
Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kastner
The Good Master, by Kate Seredy (the sequel, The Singing Tree, is very good, but much heavier - it's set in WWI)
Peter Graves and The 21 Balloons, by William Pene du Bois

For middle-schoolers, check out Anne Lindbergh - Nick of Time and Three Lives to Live. They're wonderfully funny and underappreciated.

And if you ever come across a copy of Merlin's Magic, by Helen Clare (aka Pauline Clarke), buy it and treasure it. It's amazing, and it's been out of print for 50 years.

snotty nyc kidz vs. TEH DESERT

also WOW 'emil and the detectives'! i had forgotten about that one! damn. i don't remember a thing about the story but i do remember the bright yellow cover and a sweet pic of emil with his funny hat.

Chapter Books

Rosemary Sutcliffe - wrote historial biography for middlegrade/YA, mostly set in Roman Britain. Adolescent narrators come of age surrounded by battle/rebellion/empire. I am very fond of Eagle of the Ninth and The Mark of the Horse Lord but there are also others. Very VERY good "boy books", serious and human and incl violent struggle but not thoughtlessly violent, not thoughtlessly ANYTHING in fact. Reading her books at the right times I am overcome by sorrow & hope & pride.

E.L. Konigsburg - The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler is the obvious classic, although I remember quite liking The View from Saturday, too, and The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper. Mixed-Up Files probably started my lifelong fascination w/ sneaking into places & seeing the normally inaccessible. I know ELK did more and I don't think I've read 'em but I'll bet they're all great.

The Trumpeter of Krakow - just re-read this one last week and wow, how did I ever forget what a gem it is?? Brave & tender and uses so much subtle implication which fills out scenes even more if you know any background -- you could maybe say that's to appeal to the "older reader" but I prefer to think it gives children something to unpack that isn't insultingly obvious for which HUZZAH!

The House with the Clock in its Walls - I KNOW I have gone off about John Bellairs before but honestly, there's no such thing as too much. Deliciously creepy suspense-horror for middlegrades that owes NOTHING to RL Stine or what-the-fuck-ever. Just the right combination of threat & safety & adults who are Looking After Things but maybe the child narrator goes off just a bit on his own, just to impress a friend or to see what happens or because his parents are always fighting about money and what if his father's heart can't take it, and SOMETHING evil results but it's NOT a morality lesson in The Painful & Varied Demises of Children Who Don't Do As They're Told, oh no, there so much adolescent agency and intuitive goodness & rightness.

Huh. For some reason I'm really into "boy books" right now which is a bullshit designation anyway since most of them are by female authors and it's more the VALOR and COURAGE and so much heart that I'm feeding on these days.

Picture Books

My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World - a Russian folktale about a small child who's separated from Mother during a day in the fields. Very sweet. Always stuck with me. Nice "old fashioned" block-print-like illustrations.

Trina Schart Hyman - my favorite children's illustrator ever EVER EVER. Died earlier this year of breast cancer, I think. Mostly fairy tales although I have found a few old middle-grade chapter bks which she did spot illustrations for. Hyman's St. George and the Dragon (actually written by Margaret Hodges) is a beaut, a little bloody and all, all wonderful. I have always thought that all princesses should look exactly like Una in the last scene. Hyman's Snow White (by Paul Heins) is another of my loves and has the gory ending that I mentally apply to anyone who thwarts me.

A is for Annabelle, writ & illus. Tasha Tudor - this one is hopelessly, stupidly girly and I apologize, but I learned to read from this book while my mother sewed and made me read aloud to her (I had to repeat the whole thing if I stumbled -- it's a miracle I didn't grow up to be illiterate in protest -- come to think of it I probably would have but the rewards were so much greater on the other side of the fence, the bastards won me over). Goes through the alphabet, each letter standing for an accessory or accoutrement possessed by Grandmother's girlhood doll, Annabelle. Tasha Tudor is probably a crazy old bat (she keeps goats and corgis and never wears shoes) and I love her.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Pish, Posh, said Hieronymus Bosch both writ. Nancy Willard and illus. Leo & Diane Dillon - okay, first of all the Dillons are CLEARLY geniuses, which is really the appeal of this gorgeously fractured art in which big double-page spreads are full of Bosch-ian constructs made of shears and thimbles, and flying fish, and clockwork gnomes and people with great noses. Go read both of these.

My head is spinning. You realize I would really like to review the entire contents of the Hackley Public Library's children's section for you? Yes.

I liked the roald dahl and the chronicles of narnia when i was young and then there seem to have been an awful lot of other books but i can't remember them. I don't know if this means everything else i read was rubbish or if my brain has stopped working.

I read dickens when i was abt 8 or 9 and thought he was incredible, i'm not sure if i read an abridged for kids version of the books or just didn't understand half of what was going on but it was still great.

I always wished there were more Tommy and Tuppence books.

Michael Bond - Paddington Bear series

Astrid Lindgren - I liked the Pippi Longstocking books but my real favourites were the Bill Bergson Master Detective ones.

Gordon Korman - Macdonald Hall series, Bugs Potter, the one where the kid kept trying to escape from summer camp. They were always lots of wacky schemes being plotted.

I just bought The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton for a child's birthday present.

I'm putting together an order for my 4-year-old godson, and I have to admit, this cracked me up.

https://bookoutlet.ca/products/9781626722958B/woke-baby

Aw. Cute cover - 2018 publication, so it must have been written before the right started strawmanning the term