the all-embracing children's literature thread

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Obscure fave from my childhood - the 'Uncle' bks by J.P. Martin, brilliantly illustrated by Quentin Blake before he sold out to The Man (Roald Dahl...) Uncle, a v. rich elephant who lives in a gigantic castle called Homeward, spends his days visting obscure parts of his property and meeting a huge cast of wizards, dwarves, wolves, 'the respectable horses', badgers, monkeys, foxes etc. His chief enemies are the Badfort gang, led by proto-lager lout Beaver Hateman (!) Martin was a Methodist minister, and even as a young pup I sensed that there was some kind of Christian allegory going on - apart from the Narnia series, can anybody else think of other kids books that are more or less religious parables? (Enid Blyton's version of 'The Pilgrim's Progess' - can't remember the title at the mo - also counts here. And while we're on the subject of E.B., I was v. fond of her 'Faraway Tree' series - have always wanted to live in 'The Land of Do-As-Please' !) BTW, if anybody has a copy of 'Uncle and the Treacle Trouble' they want to get rid of, I'll be forever in yr debt...

Other, slightly more 'mature' faves: Alan Garner (particularly 'The Owl Service' - wld love to see the SCARY tv version again) and Robert Cormier.

One author I didn't read at the time but have since come across is Malcolm Savile - quite liked the one I read.

I can only remember one scene, tho, from LONE PINE FIVE, when glasses-wearing bookish [boyX] hides in the villains' van, is transported to London — a MEWS: I didn't know what it was!! —; is caught, tied up and beaten up. Then (this is more hazy) rescued by the girls arriving in the nick of time. Yes, well, the idea of being tied up, beaten up and recued by girls was v.hot and, um, imaginatively helpful INDEED to small mark s (tho few elements remain remotely to my taste today). So yes, thank you, Malcolm S.

ps the thought of the heroic stoicism was much more to the fore than any idea of pain

David: still huge Jennings fan not least for Buckeridge's adaptability to social change, compare the cosy post-war world and bumbling local firemen of the early books with the 70s south London scenes of "... At Large" and computer game references of "...Again" and you see the man's versatility and adaptability (he's actually a strong Labour supporter, you can sort of tell). Garner, obviously. Also influenced from 88-93 or so by Lucy M. Boston, Philippa Pearce, Jill Paton Walsh, Robert Westall, Jan Mark ...

Read a late-period (1978, I think) Saville book for school in early 90s and couldn't avoid seeing it as end-of-era / elegiac. He's a quintessential post-war middle English writer, I think.

Was mad for Tolkien as a kid, re-read LOTR incessantly at around 7. This is probably why I think of it as a kid's book now and am kind of perturbed by it being not treated as such.

The Moomins, as mentioned elsewhere.

A series I was really fond of: the short story books by Ruth Manning Sanders. These would be A Book Of Monsters, A Book Of Witches etc. and would each have ten bash-em-out fairy tales on the titular theme. I doubt they'd stand up to rereading somehow.

Mention must be made of the Three Investigators, great scooby-doo stuff with spurious involvement of A. Hitchcock. Loved loved loved the idea of secret hideout in rubbish tip.

Book I remember enjoying when young which now seems really disappointing: Phantom Tollbooth. Just incredibly didactic.

Paul Berna: French kid-gang stories, most famously A Hundred Million Francs , tho again I remember one I got from the library, where the gang of HMF go on holiday in the South as teens, and discover a cave full of the frozen bodies of a Résistance army, vanished since the war years before...

James Thurber: The Wonderful O

Andre Norton: wrote dozens of SF books for teens, many dealing with "issues of race and culture-clash" (as I'm glad to say no one pointed out at the time). The one I got out of the library so often that mum started to comment sarcastically on my plans for the future was Star Ranger, which had a cool picture on the front of the lizard-man (= ZACATHAN) who was one of the main characters. The Galactic Federation (forget org's actual title) was all falling apart, and these mixed-species Rangers (inc.some humans) were stranded on this backwoods planet, which of course turns out to be Earth itself, the long-forgotten home of the race for some but not others. ANYWAY, I remember an incredibly vivid dream I had (age 14?) after reading SR one of many many times, in which I was one of them, and we were standing by this shimmering plant in this amazing silvery night-light (which = all me, since in the book it was all very earth- like, obviously) discussing fellow rangers we would never see again. Blimey. Also good = Victory on Janus, an allegory of the Vietnam War (as I didn't then know).

Re books borrowed often enough for comment: when MUCH smaller, I repeatedly checked out from the travelling library (a van which stopped outside the house) a Ladybird book called I Want to be an Airline Hostess.

The Green Knowe books by Lucy M Boston. Stories about an old English house, generally involving kids from our time and kids from old times having extremely placid non-adventures. They were very boring, I was aware they were very boring, I was aware that their boringness was working for me in a kind of positive sense. They were kind of ambient lit, almost. I remember the only one I didn't read was one where a gorilla got loose in Green Knowe, which I avoided because it looked to be Too Exciting.

The Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder - undoubtedly common cultural currency in America but less known here (I had to harass library many times). I loved it to sentimental bits, particularly earliest books. I guess I wanted an idea of what growing up a girl might be like but only in the most abstract sense i.e. I wasn't arsed to read anything about real nowadays girls: 19th c. American ones seemed way more real.

Nobody has mentioned Fighting Fantasy books yet and perhaps it should stay that way.

Just thought: The Silver Chair ALSO has a tied-up-and-tormented scene, tho this time the tormentor is the slinky witch who turns into a snake. But Prince Trillian was a weed and a wet, and I identified with Puddleglum, who thort all the world was rubbish and all glamour a sham (v.punky!!) and bravely put out the fire with his bare foot. Hurrah! The gnomes in SC were fab too: they lived in a firecrack called Bism.

Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time = fantastically evocative (and useful) phrase.

(In how-to-pronounce mode, I referred to Aslan as Alison for some time, until finally persuaded this was a mistaken reading.)

What's the story on these non-Christian rewrites which are being planned?

I'd forgotten about these. I liked them a lot, had them in Puffin editions I think. The tv series was horrid though.

Say-its-name-and-it-will-appear concept is hugely powerful and frightening in all folklore/literature. Google search of course allows you to catch a bit of this buzz for yourself. You have called upon Tash and Tash has answered (your thread question about bicycles in pop).

The Xtianity never put me off either - in fact Dawn Treader (which has the textual zenith of scary human culture, in the Island Where Dreams Come True) came as near as anything to converting me via the sheer wonder of the sea turning to flowers near the end.

Silver Chair: Robin would have plenty of fun w/Experiment House, I'm sure. Pound-for-pound in the ideas sense it's probably the best. But my favourite is Magician's Nephew for, oh, just too many reasons to go into. (Yet)

Mark: was read Shadow the Sheepdog at infant school. Hugely important for me at a tender age. Though, however much I admire her in pure storytelling terms, I think I read *far* too much Blyton in subsequent years, and have come to partially blame her for my own outdated attitudes / distance from the real world for much of my childhood.

William Mayne is very great. "A Swarm In May" is up there with Pearce's "Minnow on the Say" as evoc. within children's literature of a lost England before Major and Hitchens put their dirty discrediting hands on it, though he obv. achieved much more in literary terms later on.

Tom: the Green Knowe books, oh yes. Loved them enough to have visited the house that inspired them (The Manor, Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire) twice in recent years. See what you mean about nothing happening ... indeed, for me *the whole point* is that nothing happens, and yet everything happens, the continuity of life overshadowing anything as mundane as generations.

(sorry, you can tell I've just been listening to the Incredible String Band. Mumble mumble off he goes ...)

the Greene Knowe series... Oh, I lived for these, they were practically unobtainable in the States, so I used to beg my family to send them over from the UK. They *weren't* boring! Oh, they were full of ghosts and floods and mysterious earth beings... and you learned a little bit about history in every single one! I trace my lifelong love of architecture, especially the rambling type of slowly evolved English country houses specifically to those books.

The Three Investigators- RAWK!!! Oh, they were brilliant. I loved mysteries, but I found Nancy Drew and Trixy Beldon and the Hardy Boys all so mind-numbling boring. The Three Investigators were KEWL, they were HIP, and best of all they lived in a junkyard. It was like the Hardy Boys with cool, hip, 60's pop culture references thrown in.

C.S Lewis Narnia books - All very cool, very mysterious and fantasy... but they got slowly madder as you went along the series. And I'm not just talking about the more and more blatant mystic Christianity thrown in. I mean... The Last Battle... what the FUCK was that about? the Last Judgement or something?

Tolkien- Classic. Enough cannot be raved about. Not just as childrens books, but also for adults- not the stupid, mind-numbing hippy shit, but because Tolkien was trying what he believed the "original" "English" mythology would have been like, had the lore not been destroyed by successive invasions and Christianity. This may have nationalistic or racist overtones, but I don't read LOTR as such any more than the Gilgamesh Epic or the Icelandic Vedas or the Bhagavad Ghita (sp?).

And to add to those, cause I'm a GURL and girls love HORSES:

The Black Stallion series, by Arthur Ramsay (sp?) - Oh god, did I love these. The Black Stallion, son of the Black Stallion, the Island Stallion, the exciting world of horse racing and all that seen through very rosy, horse-loving eyes. I mean, Black Beauty (really a Victorian social class commentary, and not really about horses at all!) had not a patch on it. Especially when Ramsey started to bring in all sort of mystic Arabian and Voodoo elements into the stories you could tell he was going a bit mad. I actually heard from a fellow devotee that he *did* go mad- as evidenced by latter books such as The Black Stallion's Ghost, and The Black Stallion Meets The Devil and the Black Stallion At The Apocalypse (or whatever the final books were actually called...)

I loved Hans Andersen. The proper stories, not the Disneyfied / daft Danny Kaye film versions. The book I had had pretty scary illustrations specially of the dogs that came from the Tinderbox to tear people apart, or something.

Irony intentional, surely. ;)

The best thing about the HP adult editions is that they're TWO POUNDS MORE EXPENSIVE. Adulthood has a price.

Kate: do you want me to do my Green Knowe / Ice Cube story, which I don't think I've *ever* done on any of these forums?

Not to pooh on your parade, but in the spirit of sharing, I though I'd offer my childhood reading materials (age 8-12ish), consisting of the following (which will HOPEFULLY be displayed in proper HTML format):

- The Bunnicula series (vampiric bunny rabbit + hijinks = oh, yes)
- Choose Your Own Adventure books (combined the usual hack fantastical trappings with various different endings, and watch as kids CHEAT to try & find the proper path - it's booktastic!)
- The Dark Is Rising series (my version of the Lion/Witch/Wardrobe books, I guess - written by Susan Cooper, I think - though I haven't checked them in the past 10+ years, I don't think they'd be too embarrassing to read, even now)
- Comic books ('nuff said - I wanted to be Peter Parker; me, & every geeky maladjusted boy in the US, I'm guessing)
- Stephen King / Dean R. Koontz (not "children's literature" - duh - but the "bridge" between the kid stuff & the "serious" stuff, for lack of a better description - used to swear by _It_ & _Strangers_- now, I can'ts STANDS it!!)

Maybe those folks are reading the Harry Potter books so they have something to discuss with their kids? Hmm? Good parenting? Wishful thinking on my part? Hmm?

Variants I really got with: Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, esp. The Tombs of Atuan. (Part of the project of approval of Other- Possible-Narnias included me producing large-scale self-drawn wall-maps of the end paper maps in these various books: Earthsea, being an Archipelago, was v.fiddly, but I was rather pleased with the result, and coloured it in with some fantastic new space age felt- tips I had got for Xmas at the same time. Cooper's error may have been not to have made up a MAP...)

A very scary book: John Gordon's The Giant Under the Snow (a saxon godking is raised from his rest — ie physical features of the local English countryside — and sets his Leathermen marauding). I was so frightened by this book I never tried his follow-up The House on the Brink, said (by Puffin Post) to be EVEN MORE SCARY. I read THotB abt three years ago and can remember nothing abt it.

Last throb for me of this kind of thing (my easy&obvious segue from intense solitary puffindom to intense solitary punkdom is just round the corner) was E.R.Eddison's The Worm Ourobouros, a very strange endless circular war fantasy (Witches vs Demons vs Goblins vs Imps). Best character: the Lord Gro, who keeps switching sides.

I will admit the The Three Investigators were better, though.

I've resisted replying to this thread so far because there's probably a kajillion books from childhood that inspired me, to go on that long about them would be boring to all. Above all probably the Narnia chronicles, but as I mentioned there's also a tedium-inducing amount of others.

Sweet Valley High annoyed me, though all the other girls in my class adored the series.

Bagthorpes - yes I read it and loved it. I still suspect bits are quite sharp: it even fits (thread x-over) my def'n of sitcom hell, in that Mr Bagthorpe is clearly the eternal victim. Best bit: outrageously parasitic Uncle Parker winning vast holiday with the slogan "Get Tough With Sugar Puff". Memories of Mr B.'s rage at this recurred today when someone in the office won a bottle of champagne for coming up with the name "in-touch" for our staff newsletter.

Also: I AM A GENIUS AND ALWAYS RIGT. and of course ALL THE BEES ARE DED. Best character: William, particularly his attempt to break world drum solo record.

That said the he-is-really-Merlin plot hook thing was bogus.

The Dark Is Rising... hmm, sounds familiar. I read so many of those damned fantasy series I can no longer tell them apart. Was that the one with pseudo-Arthurian overtones? I went through a stage when I was about 13/14 when I became obsessed with the Arthurian legend, and read every single thing to do with it- even crap historical treaties like Geoffrey of Monmouth and the like. The Crystal Caves series was really really good, though, as was The Mists Of Avalon.

Oh! And The Wolf Bell... I think it was called. It was another fantasy series, did anyone else read them?

God, I am such an unreformed geek! We'll be talking about Star Trek before long!

Anyone ever read Tolkein's The Silmarillion? I remember thinking it was pretty heavy-going but fascinating when I read it straight after LOTR. May be the reason why Middle-Earth is not considered a children's realm - that and all of Christopher Tolkein's books of notes and technical details.

(and Tom, yes the irony was half-intentional, but I don't really see non-fiction books as being part of the problem. They're supposed to be talking points. For the record, a good companion piece to Klein's book is an Australian book by a writer called Mark Davis called Gangland - focuses on generationalism, and the various methods by which the baby boomer cultural elite have regulated and undermined generation X and youth culture)

My Enid Blyton days were mainly spent devouring my sisters Mallory Towers books in a vague attempt to understand girls - probably set me back ten years that one. Whenever I get a girl home I always wake them at two in the morning for a belated midnight feast. However in the brief moment when I imagined myself to become an auteur film director I always thought The Enchanted Wood / Faraway Tree would make a fantastic movie. The Land Of Spanks....

Favourite kids book? The Borribles, merely because it was so London. And was tragic and noble and took place primarily in sewers.

Narnia: Loved the books when I first read them with without noticing Christian thing. Later did pick up on it, but it didn't repel me as much as the tweeness and upper-middleclassness. Can't stand them now.

Earthsea: YESSSS! I still read the first three occasionally. Characters feel much realer than those in any other of the kids fantasy books I read when I was at primary school. Fourth book was bollocks though.

Dark Is Rising: Thought it was great at the time. Might have been a bit stodgy, but I was obsessed w/realism in magic at the time or at least plausibility so lots of mundane stuff happening appealed to me. Contrast w/Narnia where children end up being kings and queens.

Bagthorpes: I remember them being pants wettingly funny, but not much else. I think there was TV series made but I don't think I ever saw it.

Maps: Like Mark, I drew out maps of the worlds in the books. I also drew large scale maps of my own imaginary worlds to the point where I was obsessed with the A4 sheets of paper that I used to pin down to my bedroom floor. I'd spend hours editing them and just looking over them, determining the histories of the places from their geography. I'm still unhealthily interested cartography today, one reason I didn't think Bill Drummond came across as totally mad in 45 (qv thread on ILM).

Anyway: I was super-super-super-obsessed by the Brontes' own (= real-life historical) collective fantasyland operation as wee 'uns: I think their country was called GONDOR (or do I have it mixed up with LotR somewhat: Gondolin + Mordor?). They wrote and illustrated (and mapped) great elaborate dynastic gothic-romantic fantasies, complete with wars, plagues etc, in teeny-tiny letters in childish notebooks, some of which (not enuff) were on show in a book abt the Brontes (as grown-ups) which my grandma had. The 12 soldiers were the 12 kings of the rival kingdoms in Gondor. I think I planned to create MORE BETTER GONDORS so that when I wuz being writ abt by Historian-Academics of the Fuchure, this wd emerge and amaze and impress!!!

Except that I realise now that I *very much* felt that when Brontes graduated from teeny-tiny fantasyworld for mere grown-up litcherachure, that they had SOLD OUT!! (This being the FORGOTTEN CORE of my long-standing puffin-club = punk- rock equation, forgotten becuz 12&Genii not actually a puffin book...)

I think this is the reason today that I am able to navigate so well. This is why every time Paul and I get in a minicab in Tooting, I get out the A to Z, and we get where we want to go. Every time he gets in a cab by himself, he ends up lost somewhere in Clapham. ;-)

See, I told you I had vast mental repository of useless Tolkien info.

The Twelve and the Genii (= The Return of the Twelve), by Pauline Clarke, 1962 (winner Carnegie Medal for children's lit).

Another aunt sent me Faber & Faber poetry anthologies which I didn't so much as open for about five years and then really got into. The F&F aunt also sent me a copy of Over Sea, Under Stone and I loved it so much I went to the library, took out the rest of the series and read them all in a week. I think that's a book a day, something I didn't do again until my finals.

Poor old Dad did his best to influence my reading habits but introducing me to Dickens at the age of ten was unforgivable (I gave up after a couple of pages and didn't try him again until a couple of months ago) and I ended up going through a rebellious Judy Blume & Betsy Byars phase to spite him. To his credit, he gave me The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, about three chaps stranded on a desert island and having to fend for themselves, which completely captured my youthful pre-Survivor imagination.

Another book I loved was The Family From One End Street, which I think was by an illustrator called Eve Garnett. I can remember the pictures being great, but the story was good too - plenty of adventures and scrapes.

When I was very, very little I loved A Child's Garden of Verses by RL Stevenson. There was a poem about going to bed in summer when it's still light outside and another that begins "The moon has a face like the clock in the hall/She shines on thieves on the garden wall".

And then there's my Anne of Green Gables obsession...

It's not my fault, don't hold my class and prep school background against me. Humph! Having riding lessons and all that was all part of being a young lady! However, unlike most of the annoying Fairfield County types I went to school with, my parents couldn't actually afford to *buy* me a pony so I had to hire a horrible, recalcitrant nag by the hour for my lessons. Oh, the shame.

Madchen: I *adored* the One End Street books (there were three in total) when young. I think what resonated to me about them was the utter distance of that social set-up from anything I've experienced (my already being a budding historian) plus the fact that it presented a working-class milieu in a totally unstereotypical and unpatronising way, having been written a time when the whole inter- war middle-class thing still dominated children's literature. And then it all shifted to the countryside ... (don't get me started on the wonders of "Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn").

Mark: my favourite mention of Thelwell was Mary Anne Hobbs sitting in on a daytime show, playing Ginuwine's "Pony" and describing it as "his tribute to Thelwell, I suppose". Most off-kilter out-of- context comparison *ever* on daytime Radio 1?

You people would all be very welcome on , by the way.

Books on horses: anything by Marguerite Henry, who wrote things like Misty of Chincoteague. Black Beauty. The Black Stallion books and books on early C20 racehorses like Seabiscuit and Man O' War. My school had a cult of horse which combined very neatly with...

The Little House series. All of them. Very big in Minnesota, as many of the books are set there. The television show was running concurrently (Michael Landon, sanctimonious fucker!) so people dressed up for Halloween as Laura, Mary, Nellie Olsen. We spent lunch hours playing Pioneer Horse Traders and had a valuation system that would terrify stockbrokers. When I got to university, one of my classmates (megatwunt Melora Hardin, star of Lambada! and peripheral Little House child actress) dragged Matthew Laborteaux (Albert Ingalls) to a seminar when he was visiting her. It was all the class could do not to call him Albert. Some did.

Judy Blume series. All of them, including Forever and Wifey. My grandparents gave me the non-Forever/Wifey ones for my birthday when I was seven and I spent many a rainy afternoon reading about bullying, periods, and wet dreams. Which led easily enough to...

SE Hinton (Rumble Fish etc.) and Go Ask Alice. Then, Flowers In The Attic et al by VC Andrews. Mwahahaha fifth grade in lit terms was Filth Grade for us. Not *for* kids but read by nobody else.

Watership Down. Talking rabbits with own language, excellent!

Tolkein, I'm not so hot on. Same with CS Lewis, although Lion Witch and Wardrobe OK. I would read anything about Greek or Egyptian myths, ghost and witch stories.

But I was mad on Fairy Tales, the proper ones with not so happy endings and/or Oscar Wilde stuff (fairy tales and The Canterville Ghost). Grandparents also gave me folk tales books with Anansi the Spider and weirdly, histories of labour movement which gave out Cesar Chavez biog in kids' terms.

I was a Very Hungry Caterpillar...

"It's all in Plato: what do they teach children these days." Oh fuck off.

CSL's take on faith is completely wack: of course it's silly not to believe in tash or aslan when chances are you BUMP INTO EM LARGE AS LIFE (if twice as see-thru, in T's case). Aslanism = BETTER than Xtianity, obv. As is any religion where the elder gods walk among us and can be ARGUED WITH (such as punk roXor)

The non-talking animals represent the virtuous pagans surely (see monoculture thread).

Books and authors for the discussion.

What about Lloyd Alexander and his retelling of the Arthurian romances in Taran the Wanderer, et al. (Don't get me started on that awful movie The Black Cauldron). While on the Arthurian kick--what about The Once and Future Kind and The Book of Merlyn--the helped me formulate alot of my ideas about things (helps when you get a neotomist education from the Brothers LaSalle).

Loved Narnia, and LotR (and all)--read them when I was 10 and 11 respectively. Loved the Borribles--my brother turned me on to that. Wasn't there a sequel? Loved the Borrowers and Doctor Dolittle. Strangely enough I got into reading Fantasy after reading myths and legends for years and years. LotR got me into reading Dune. So much to say--won't be a pig (as they would say in Narnia). If interested in CSL's viewpoint as an anglican and christian--try the Screwtape Letters. Really a very interesting man. Not nearly as "good- two-shoes" as one might think. Thanks for the chance to contribute.

I really loved the Emily trilogy by L.M. Montgomery.

As for a suggestion of my own, they are not strictly literature but how about the English translations of Goscinny and Uderzo's Asterix books? I always enjoyed them and I'm sure I read somewhere that the translation to English gave them a different, darker humour than the originals....

Thanks for the memories, everyone!

Penelope Lively. The Driftway, The Wild Hunt, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe... I LOVED these books when I was a kid. The way that she peeled back layers of British history behind very ordinary things and made them spooky and mysterious.

Heh! And I actually found the house that Green Knowe is based on in this Secret Britain guidebook that HSA bought me last weekend!

My sister loved the Herrimon All Things Great and Beautiful series. I thought it was pretty boring. She also loved the Narnia books and the LOTR. I never got as into fantasy as she did. She also loved detective stories a lot more than I did. She used to go through the Agatha Christie books like crazy.

One birthday my mom and my sister got me The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I said that it looked boring. They said that meant that I was probably not old enough for it. I knew that they were psyching me out but it worked and I read it, and it was pretty boring after all.

We also had Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boy and also a ton of the horse books. I really liked the Misty stories. Also, that Blueberry Hill picture book--I remember reading that--or having it read to me a lot.

Then my taste got more pop and I read the Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and the Choose-your-own-adventures, which my mom tried to discourage me against. A good friend of mine had every SWH book ever published--she had like a bookcase full of them so we used to read them together.

I never really liked the YA books that they forced on us in school--they seemed either mawkish or moralistic or both. We had Bridge of Teribithea read to us after our recess in sixth grade. What a strange book. In junior high they were all books about Indians or the civil war or a guy who went to a roller skating parlor.

I did like the Outsiders books though. And Catcher in the Rye.

My dad had all these old books from his childhood which were all dusty, a bunch of the adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island.

-- gareth (garet...), June 18th, 2001.

Was there actually a time when g. needed to tell people this? Is there some post out there where I first mention my Canadaphilia, or where Ned mentions that actually he enjoys MBV?

I only know one person outside my family who's even heard of my favorite children's book (whoa so indie) - Merlin's Magic, by Helen Clare. Helen Clare's a pseudonym for Pauline Clarke, author of the slightly more well-known Return of the Twelves. Anyway, Merlin's Magic is about a group of kids going off on a treasure hunt, that happens to be organized by Merlin. They split up, and go north, south, east and west, ending up, respectively, on Mercury, in the South Seas with Sir Walter Raleigh, in the court of Kublai Khan, and in Arthurian legend. It all comes together in the end. There's a hippogriff as well, and countless references to poetry - at one point, one of the kids has to journey down Alph the sacred river to a sunless sea, and the fact that Coleridge "dreamt" the poem is a key plot point. Anyway. It's amazing, and it's been out of print for 50 years or so.

Reading through this thread, all I can say is that: I still find the Bagthorpe Saga pant-wettingly funny, The Dark Is Rising series is wonderful indeed, and I really should find all my Three Investigators books and reread them, because (despite being written by about 20 different people) they really were the best of their genre.

starting to seriously think that Michael Morpurgo is a more pernicious force for evil than any of the YA writers

Been discovering a lot of great authors/illustrators that I missed out on as a kid through my 4-year-old daughter.

James Marshall in particular has really been striking a nerve with me lately as both author and illustrator. We started with his George & Martha series but have branched out to automatically picking up anything he was involved in, which recently led us to the work of Harry Allard. The Miss Nelson trilogy is really something else. I am apparently a sucker for a well-written Stupid Adult in a kids' book (see also the contemporary Mercy Watson series for probably my favorite example of this). We read The Stupids Step Out last night and she laughed pretty much straight through the book.

dammit i meant to post that here.