Did you read the Little House on the Prairie Books as a kid?

I Once Had a Master, by John Preston.

I was a very curious child.

Beverly Cleary.

I read all 14 original L. Frank Baum "Oz" books. Some of them many, many times over.

And the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series. Over, and over I read them.

All the Madeline L’Engle books and the Great Brain series

Oh, shit, and YES, several of the Little House books, too! I even met the illustrator, Garth Williams at a book fair as a child and he SIGNED a copy of one of my books for me!

I read The Day of the Jackal in 6th grade free reading period. I got a hardon more than once. My teacher gave me some funny looks.

Several of the Narnia books.

The Princess and the Goblin

Choose your own adventure books

The Old Man and the Sea

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

Alice in Wonderland

Flowers For Algernon (cried sooooo hard)

Old Yeller (Ditto with the crying - I cried on the school bus all the way home)

Sorry not Old Yeller. It was "Where the Red Fern Grows." Sob-fest.

Johnny Tremain

Lord of the Rings

Island of the Blue Dolphins

- Ramona Quimby

- Encyclopedia Brown

- The Hardy Boys

- Nancy Drew

- everything by Christopher Pike

- The Babysitters Club

- Paula Danziger

- Anastasia Krupnik and everything else by Lois Lowry

- Everything by Cynthia Voigt

I read most of the books from the series, Farmer Boy is a favorite.

Oh, I did read Chronicles of Narnia but it was after I read LOTR so, meh.

Yes, and believe it or not, many of my students in 2024 read them, too.

R7 Flowers for Algernon just wiped me out - total ugly cry!!

Books I remember reading: The Hardy Boys (loved these - their chum Tony was a favorite and i think he was gay), the Lloyd Alexander's series with The Black Cauldron, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (oh to run away from home and hide out in The Met! I know, I know, "Mary!"), Harriet the Spy, The Hobbit + Lord of the Ring series, The House with the Clock in its Walls, All Creatures Great and Small (plus a couple of others in the series), Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and a real favorite, The Cricket in Times Square. I loved The Cricket in Times Square... still own my original copy.

Encyclopedia Brown was THE BEST!

After EB, there were the Three Investigators.

R4 "A Wrinkle in Time" won the Newberry Award and astonished me as a kid. L'Engle believed she wouldn't have had so much trouble getting it published if the protagonist of a science fiction book wasn't female.

I read Valley of the Dolls in the fifth grade. Fuck those Ingalls whores. Especially the blind one.

Goosebumps, Point Horror and the Sweet Valley University Thriller series.

[quote]I read Valley of the Dolls in the fifth grade.

Never read it myself, but from a young age I remember my mother telling me how she hitchhiked up to Northern Ireland to buy a copy as it was illegal to buy in the republic.

Yes, I read all of the Little House books. I have the set even now, and I'm 60 years old. I've read the book Farmers Boy at least a dozen times. There's a charm that all of those books have that I really enjoy.

I still read The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder around Christmas every year.

Gravity’s Rainbow in second grade. I found it trite and derivative.

I read the complete works of John Rechy.

I really liked and still like Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maude Montgomery, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The Happy Hollisters

Loved "The Worm Orouborous" by ER Eddison. Lloyd Alexander Prydain Chronicles were great. Lord of the Rings was magical. My fav book as a kid was Ernest and Trevor DuPuy's Encyclopedia of Military History.

We read "Little House on the Prairie" as a class in the third grade, which led me to "Little House in the Big Woods" and then "The Long Winter." I was inconsolable when Mary went blind. She seemed like a bit of a bitch in the books but I always found her fascinating. Supposedly she was the prettiest as well, with her golden locks.

I loved all the Little House Books. I loved how Ingalls’ described Almanzo’s childhood.

His family seemed super well-off compared to Ma and Pa. They had a fully functional, successful farm. All the kids were very well fed.

It’s too bad Almanzo and Laura weren’t as successful in their own farming endeavors. I loved how Laura described the pantry with those tiny drawers that Almanzo built for their home pantry.

VC Andrews

I still re-read the Little House books - just read Farmer Boy last month.

I also loved The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald, the Henry Reed books, Encyclopedia Brown, Homer Price, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, all of Beverly Cleary's ouevre, Trixie Belden, the Westing Game, Miss Pickerell, Christopher Pike, etc.

I don't remember reading anything as a child except for assigned schoolwork.

I'm old, last of the boomers. Books I read included-

Madeline

Bread and Jam for Frances

Blueberries for Sal

The Secret Garden

Make Way for Ducklings

The Lucy Fitch Perkins "Twins" series

All of a Kind Family+ sequel

Cheaper By the Dozen + sequel

Misty of Chincoteague

A Wrinkle in Time

James and the Giant Peach

Most Beverly Cleary books, especially Henry Huggins

The Phantom Tollbooth

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

I wasn't so into sci-fi or fantasy beyond these. I liked relatable stories with children and families.

I really only read hardcore gay porn as a small child, but I read it for the articles.

Penthouse Forum

From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Fuckweiler

All of the Baum "Oz" books, The Wrinkle in Time series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, VC Andrews (especially the Dollanganger Saga).

Did you read the Little House on the Prairie Books as a kid?

I did, after watching the 70s series. In the books Caroline viewed Native Americans primarily through a lens of danger or as obstacles to progress- the "In'juns".

Yes, r30. Flowers in the attic.

I tried the Little House books but I just couldn't get into them. I didn't care for the TV program, either. Nor the similar (to me) The Waltons.

I read The Hardy Boys and Narnia books. A Wrinkle in Time. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I loved mysteries, especially Pirot! Thrillers, when I got a little older.

Some prairie gossip: Half-pint was actually somewhat of a bitch in real life, example, her vilifying Nellie Oleson (real name Nellie Owens), a child Laura only knew for a brief time, Nellie's crime was she had pretty things, & Laura didn't. Laura adored her father & sister Carrie, but, reportedly had very little contact with her mother & other siblings after her father's death, & didn't attend her mother's funeral. Also, the reason for the Ingalls's constant moving, they were outrunning bill collectors.

“ Nellie's crime was she had pretty things, & Laura didn't”

And that’s why DL loves half pint

Yes, as a child of the '70s, I read the Little House series. However, I remember that my interest had really waned by the last two books, and I sorta had to be dragged across the "finish-line" by my best friend, LOL. It was almost a little bit of peer-pressure -- a need to keep-up with her/FOMO.

I read all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries (a public library favorite). I was also completely obsessed with horses -- read the entire The Black Stallion series (or however many there were at that point), the Misty of Chincoteague series, etc.

As an aside: During high school, those two interests merged in the most-perfect way when a friend's mom handed me a copy of Dick Francis' REFLEX during summer vacation and said: "I think you'll love this." (She was right, I was totally hooked, read a slew of his novels)

Little House Series

Mary Poppins Series

Oz Series

Me too, R22. But like R21 Farmer Boy was my favorite. I live in Boston and this summer was in upstate New York and paid a visit to the Wilder farmstead. The house is intact, the barns are a recreation. It was pretty cool. I've also been to De Smet SD, where the "long Winter" and the following books take places. I'm not a LIW fanboy, I have family in SD and so was already nearby. But that was cool too.

@R43, wow... now there's a blast from the past - Dick Francis. I never read his works, by my mom did. He was quite popular for a time and I think there was a BBC program about a former jockey turned PI that aired on PBS (was this in the 70s?). Francis was something of an industry for the British racing/horse world, wasn't he?

Man, Dick Francis... a name to google.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were so boring. If they followed the plots for the TV series, it would have been cancelled after a half a season.

They also should have been credited with Rose Wilder Lane as coauthor. Laura's manuscripts are out there and they are written very simply. Her daughter was a noted author and really punched up her mother's stories to make them publishable (yet still boring) books.