What treasure have you found?

I didn't read it as a kid, but someone v nice bought me a 'Barnaby' book for Xmas. There is a really, really, really (I can't recommend it highly enough!) great site here:

http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/purple/index.html

'Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever'! God I loved that book as a tot. Upon re-reading I can say that the plot, as it were, meanders slightly, but the characters are compellingly well-drawn. Any friend of mine starts 'expecting' and they can be sure to get this book. BTW, Robert Sabuda's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-up' and 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: A Pop-up Adaptation' are, all kidding aside here, two of the most incredible things I have come upon in the last year.

Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever is fuckin' bulletproof. Terrific illustrations, and all those funky images of houses without walls, the country mouse-city mouse story that I'm almost sure is in there (right, Michael? or am I tripping?), and most of all, its clear moral distinctions--when you read Scarry, blue is really a deep blue, just as purple is dark yet unambiguously not black, and green positively unalloyed by any compromising admixture of yellow. It is truly The Best Storybook Ever.

Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knowe is a great children's novel from the '50s about a boy, Tollie, who comes to live with his great-grandmother at this old castle that turns out to be sodden with ghosts and with about 700 years of English nostalgia. Amazing book. Read it around 7 or 8 or maybe 9, forgot it, then when I was in college, a prof who had also become a dear friend, to whom I was a research assistant, announced that she'd decided to do the first real scholarly research into Lucy Boston--had I ever heard of the Green Knowe books? I was one of the last five children who had, I think. They're out of print, or were at that point. I reread them, and the first two are great, though they begin to dwindle after that, especially after the lost panda or whatever gets involved around book three. What was that shit? That is called jumping the shark, Lucy Boston.

"Epaminondas and his Auntie" by Sara Cone Bryant. The first book I ever read (or, was read to me). I thought it was hilarious. Other books I remember with great fondness are "The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew," and "Mr.Popper's Penguins." Oh, yes, and "The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes," by Du Bose Heyward. That was my first experience with the Women's Lib movement. Hey, she was LIBERATED. A modern feminist tale, to be sure!

Just checked Amazon--actually, the Green Knowe books have all been brought back into print, and I urge them, especially "Children of" and "Treasure at", upon you. The final one, "Enemy at Green Knowe," is some freaky shit. This demon-possessed woman moves in next door and starts saying Satanic spells on the house--Boston never comes out and puts it that way, but that's more or less it. It's very The Exorcist, and if parents had any idea that all this took place in a perfectly unassuming children's book from about 1965, maybe they'd be a little less stupid about Harry Potter.

I recently found a book I used to read at the dentist's office when I was little, Helga's Dowry: A Troll Love Story by Tomie De Paola. All I could remember was that it was about a troll who had to earn a dowry for some reason and ends up with a prince. Google and Amazon searches were no help, but I ran across a book with the same style illustrations one day in the campus bookstore (a literature for children course) and finally found it.

My problem is that I have only the vaguest of memories for the plot and title, usually only remembering that I really liked the book in question. For example, another one I have been looking for is a Newberry award winner (odd that I remember this and not much else) and has something to do with cranberries and possibly cranberry muffins. And a town and an award of some type. You can see why I can't figure out what book this is :)

I'm a storyteller and I frequently perform "Tailypo" or "Tailybone". I've found with younger kids I have to change some things so it's not so scary. I tell it using my guitar for the screeching sound effects and scare the bejeezuz out of people. I first heard it live from another storyteller and only this last year found it in a picture book.

As far as books that made a huge impression on me as a child, I would say "Up a Road Slowly" by Irene Hunt. Stepfamilies, an alcoholic uncle, a spinster literary aunt- I still have huge paragraphs planted in my brain.

When merely a nipper, I read a Pan Horror collection of non-fiction short stories. Of all the bizarre and laughable tales, two stick in my memory. The first researched the history of Spook Hill in Florida (you put your car in neutral, release the handbrake and roll uphill), the second was called Ghost Car. This second story is terrific, a history of the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assasinated in. Basically every person who owned the car, died (mostly run over by the car itself).

So there you go, the First World War was started by a car. Let no-one tell you different.

"So there you go, the First World War was started by a car. Let no-one tell you different."

LOL! Well, that car now resides in Vienna's Museum of Military History, along with the uniform the Archduke was wearing at the time of the assassination...with bullet hole and all! It's a really creepy room to visit. There's probably a great ghost story there as well.

Another coincidence...I gave a lecture about this just yesterday, in the Western Civ course I teach.

I'd love to know more about that story, though. Do you remember the author?

Marissa, you an I are in sync today. Just as you posted, I was googling Franz Ferdinand's Car. This took a while due to the band monopolising returns. But, I did find this.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/jinxlimo.asp

It's a kind of summary of urban myths about the car.

And you have yourself an anecdote to end future lectures on the Archduke!

Well, you can see the car here: http://www.hgm.or.at/eng/ (It's in the Tour section of the website); rather nondescript, but classy.

To bring the discussion back on track, one of my earliest horror reads was Stephen King's Christine, another killer car; and then I read Cujo, which also features a scary car scene. There's something about vehicles that makes for some great horror stories. And at the same time, I very fondly remember "The Phantom Tollbooth"; I read the book and also watched the half-live/half-animated movie that was made of it many times. I still remember it as a very charming, very moving story.

Another real treasure for me was reconnecting with Margaret Hamilton's "Mythology". I became a mythology fanatic in my pre-teens, and checked out every book in my small school library. I finally received (as a gift, I think) Hamilton's collection, plus a Cliff's Notes anthology of world mythology; don't laugh, it was an excellent collection! I wore those two books down to pulp from reading them so often (I found the illustrations in Hamilton's book especially inviting), but eventually lost them during one of my several relocations around the world.

And then last year I was browsing through a local bookstore (and here I must point out that I like in a small town ian eastern province of Thailand), and there was a copy of my beloved Margaret! Needless to say, I didn't think twice... Reunited at last!

Damn, I'm getting sappy in my old age ;-)

I very fondly remember "The Phantom Tollbooth"

Yay! Loved that book.

It's The King of the Copper Mountains for me. Now out of print, I was so happy when a copy of it turned up in the shop recently, even if it was in tatty condition. It's a great book. My brother always liked The Eggbox Brontosaurus, now also out of print and seemingly impossible to come by. But I didn't really read a lot of older children's books. I didn't have a lot of money to buy them and I didn't live near a library, so it was out of Enid Blyton and straight into my mother's and uncle's Wodehouse and Freddie Forsyth books for me. Uncle Dynamite was the first Wodehouse I ever read. I almost died laughing.

My favourite book was Bottersnikes and Gumbles but i've never found another copy. It makes me sad to think that my children won't be able to read it as it is great.

I'd completely forgotten about Tailypo! I first remember my older cousin telling it to me and it scared the living ya-yas out of me. I also remember being about 12 and starting to read Jurrasic Park, and as the book opened and started to pick it, a huge thunderstorm started. It scared the crap out of me . . . suffice to say, I *loved* it.

This is what I'm saying. Tailypo was the scariest kids book ever written. I don't know if the publishers realized how many kids were going to be messed-up for the rest of their lives over it.

I read "The Westing Game" by Ellen Raskin as a kid and thought the book was genius. Not only does the mystery get solved at the end but then they follow the characters for like another 25 years in the last chapter. You get to find out what really happens next and next and next.

And the hero is a nerdy girl with a long braid...

So a fortnight ago I sat down and read this book to my kids. And it has problems. The narrative is all over and difficult to follow. There are too many characters to keep track of and some are just too fuzzy.

But what really blew my mind was how dated it is. Judge JJ Ford is the first black judge on the supreme court of Wisconsin....

My sentiment is shifted...

Hm. I loved "The Westing Game" when I read it in third grade. I'll have to go back and reread it.

I'll never forget that I ruined The Westing Game by peeking ahead; my first genuine lesson in how to read a book properly.

Recent discoveries of books that I'd repressed:

The Book of Giant Stories

Kneeknock Rise (28 pages? I can barely remember books that short anymore.)

I have yet to read either of them again, but just remembering that they exist makes me happy.

Think I read Lord of the Flies too young. Frightened the arse off me. Haven't been back since.

You can't beat Garfield. Or Tintin. Or Asterix and Obelix. Yeah, They all kicked fucking ass.

When I was a kid I had a small fairy-tale book called The Yellow Fairy Tale Book--not the Andrew Lang one--that had some terrific stories I've never read anywhere else. They were pretty gruesome--I remember that one featured a tree at the boundary of a kingdom where evildoers' severed hands were hung like apples (there might have been an illustration, or just my mental image). One of the stories was called Cinderella's Daughter. But somehow that book disappeared, and I've never found it--and searching the Internet doesn't work, because the only thing that comes up is Andrew Lang.

I am in the 7th grade, and i have to read "An Enemy at Green Knowe" for a book report!! I didnt want to so i went to a site that told me all about it. But it sounds pretty weird!! Well thats all i wanted to say so Bye!