One of the best things about kids is the ability to relive your own childhood memories through them. Classic toys, Scooby Doo on Netflix, and crafts like friendship bracelets could have a parent perpetually repeating 1983 and being perfectly happy about it.
My most favorite part of introducing life to my children, though, comes through books. Of course we’ve shared Dr. Seuss extensively with our kids. We’ve shared Syd Hoff of Danny and the Dinosaur fame, as well as Ezra Jack Keats, author of The Snowy Day. We crossed into new territory though, when my daughter received a boxed set of Beverly Cleary books, starring none other than Ramona. She inherited a copy of Judy Blume’s Freckle Juice from a friend this weekend, and she’s getting a boxed set of the Little House on the Prairie books for Christmas. I can’t stop reading her books. Reading them brings me back to my childhood bedroom, complete with Holly Hobby bedspread. I read all the time, but I always picture that it’s summertime, when really, all I did unless instructed otherwise, was read. When it got really hot, I moved to the basement, but I kept reading.
After the Ramona books, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, I think we’ll visit the Chronicles of Narnia, and by then she’ll probably be ready for more classics by Ms. Cleary and Ms. Blume. I get excited just thinking about it.
What books are you looking forward to sharing with the kids in your life?
7 replies on “A Childhood Filled with Books”
Eloise! Brian Jacques! Nancy Drew! Artemis Fowl! Robin McKinley! The Moorchild, Esperanza Rising, My Louisiana Sky, Midnight Magic, Ella Enchanted, A Wrinkle in Time, The Thief Lord, The Storyteller’s Beads, The Pirate’s Son. Mercedes Lackey books. A fictional-diary series of girls who lived during important times, like going across the west, or immigrants. The same type of series about princesses in different cultures, like one is Cleopatra and another is Marie Antoinette and so on. Also a series about Merlin.
Everything everyone else said, and the Oz books too.
(I had Holly Hobby curtains and a rainbow bedspread. Â Yay 80s!)
I had a beloved Holly Hobby easy bake oven! I guess she’s not a thing anymore.
Nothing made me sadder than my horse-loving daughter’s total disinterest in the Black Stallion novels I had saved from my own childhood. You could hear my mighty heart breaking from miles away.
But she ended up liking Hero and the Crown, so that made it somewhat ok.
I’m a big fan of all things Elizabeth Enright. Â I just finished the last of the Melendy books with Little Ricky and we were sorry to say goodbye to them.
My mom saved all my old Berenstain Bears books, and I can’t wait until my 2-year-old is old enough to sit still for those and Little Golden Books. When she’s a lot older: Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, the Hobbit/LOTR, Where the Red Fern Grows, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume. (Not necessarily in that order!) And Harry Potter, of course!!
A Wrinkle in Time, Stone Soup, The Boxcar Children, Anne of Green Gables series. Berenstein Bears, The Little Red Hen and Where the Sidewalk Ends.