Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The books you read when you were young...

I remember reading "The Chrysalids" in elementary school and thought how crazy it was for them to want to ban/send away/kill those who were different.

My favorite part was where some of the kids had telepathy. I wanted that!

Tom's Midnight Garden perhaps?

Books were my best friends and my escape growing up.

All of the L'Engle books have a very warm place in my memories. A Ring of Endless Light and A Swiftly Tilting Planet made the most impact on me. I think I read both of them around age 11.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books.

The Little House on the Prairie Books.

I remember reading a book about a ghost girl who was a murdered child living along a river bank. While I can't remember the title, I know I was about 8 when I read it and even thinking about the book today makes me shiver

The Riverside Shakespeare at age 11. I was probably much too young to get many of the jokes, but I loved the flow of the words. I started reading it out loud to my older sister as she drove me around since she had to read it for homework. Then I started sneaking her English Lit textbook. She finally brought the Riverside home for me from the high school library so she could do her homework without hunting for her text book.

Anne of Green Gables.

The Westing Game.

A Summer to Die.

A Cricket in Times Square.

DeeDee

loved Anne!!! Loved that she was smart, knew she was smart and knew not everyone appreciated it!

DeHe

I insisted on PEI for my honeymoon.

Mon, I also read and re-read Bless the Beasts and the Children.

Other books (among literally thousands, as I was a very bookish kid) that made a significant impact:

Meet the Austins by Madeleine l'Engle. D1 and I agree, we strive to make our family like that. Even succeed sometimes

Treasure at Flying Spur by Shirley Sargent. I loved the idea of the summer projects they did (sort of an intellectual stretching, I think that is why it appealed to me so much)

THANK YOU-- I think that really may be it!! It's the same kind of story as in the classic movie Portrait of Jennie. My absolute favorite book as a child.

Other favorites from about that same period of time include Gone Away Lake, and The House of Thirty Cats. (About 8yo, I think.) There aren't too many books that I can actually stand to read over and over, and never have been. Those are among them, however.


Someone else mentioned A Summer to Die; I also remember that being one of those books that I found profoundly moving, but that nobody else I know seems to have ever even heard of.

What a wonderful thread this is.

You're welcome! It's a very well-known book over here, but perhaps not there given the author and setting. There was a very good BBC adaptation of it when I was a child, and I think I read the book in between episodes of that; I'd have been 7 or 8. It was one of only a few books I remembered from my childhood that I bought when DS was a baby because I knew I'd want a copy (I think I read it from the library). It still made me cry as an adult. DS also enjoyed it, but it didn't make him cry - maybe he's just that bit too young to get it in that way.

Richard Peck's books featuring Blossom Culp. Probably too much for kids <8, though, and there is a lot of emotional content that would be highly disturbing.

(I was probably about that the first one that I read, and a lot of it simply didn't make sense to me at the time, or didn't resonate with me because I was not yet an adolescent.)

Of course, this is the path that led me to read Peter Straub novels at 13-14, which I think are so not appropriate content-wise for a girl that age. Just so others know that. LOL.