Earlier today, a tweet floated through my Twitter stream that brought back some of my earliest childhood memories. It mentioned that the person’s young daughter was reading Little House On The Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I immediately flashed back to childhood as this is one of the first books I remember reading on my own. It’s amazing how one rather insignificant statement can immediately bring you back (way, way back) in time. Libraries and books make up some of my earliest memories and it got me to thinking about the other books/series that I loved and read over and over again.
Little House On The Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House series is based on decades-old memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood in the Midwest region of the United States during the late 19th century. The books are told in the third person, with Laura Ingalls acting as the central character and protagonist. The first of eight in a series was written and published in 1932. I love that 83 years later, kids are still reading this series.
Trixie Belden series, Julie Campbell Tatham and Kathryn Kenny: Trixie Belden is 13 years old in the earliest books of the series and later has her 14th birthday. Trixie’s age remains 14 for the remainder of the series. The first Trixie Belden books take place in real time, with the seasons changing naturally from summer to fall, winter, spring, and summer again. Trixie, her brothers Brian and Mart, her best friend Honey, Honey’s adopted brother Jim, and friends Diana Lynch and Dan Mangan all attend school in Sleepyside-on-the-Hudson in the state of New York. The characters form a close-knit group and are truly the best of friends. They are all members of a club called the Bob-Whites of the Glen, and their motto is to help others whenever they can. Trixie manages to find mystery wherever she goes, and so the Bob-Whites find themselves devoting much of their time to helping Trixie solve mysteries or helping her out of various scrapes which come as a result of her overenthusiastic investigations. I doubt that libraries still have this one on the shelf (it was first published in 1948) but it looks like you can buy some of them from Amazon.com. I have the entire series on the bookshelves in my office and every once in a while pick one up and read it again.
Encyclopedia Brown series, Donald J. Sobol: Perennially ten years old, Encyclopedia lives in Idaville, Florida, often referred to as a typical American town. He’s aided in his investigations by his best friend, Sally Kimball, who plays Watson to his Holmes, and occasionally supplies a little “muscle.” The perennial villian in many of the stories is Bugs Meany. This was another “read over and over again” book for me when I was kid even though it was published long before I was born (1963). The author died a few years ago and the last of the series was published in 2012. I may need to add this to my bookshelf collection as I never owned any of these books; they were all borrowed from the library when I was kid.
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis: Set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals, the series narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of that world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world, magically transported to Narnia, where they are called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil and restore the throne to its rightful line. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician’s Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle. These were first published in 1950 and have been turned into movies in the recent past.
What book is your earliest memory of? Have you shared them with your kids?
One minor tweet in a stream of many and I’m now transported back to the Oak Square Library in Brighton, Massachusetts…
