E Nesbit, definitely! My favourite was The Story of the Treasure Seekers, or maybe The Railway Children but we had so many. Obvious things like Frances Hodgson Burnett, all the Little Women books, Anne of Green Gables...later stuff like Mallory Towers and other boarding school books which I didn't really like, and also various 50s/60s Bunty annuals in which boarding school also featured heavily!
To my eternal shame and embarrassment I was absolutely in love with What Katy Did (the sequels less so but I still liked them) which is of course horribly ableist. In my defense I liked it because I was in love with Katy so at least I get baby queer points??
The Prince and the Pauper, some Sherlock Holmes, a gorgeous huge volume of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales which my aunt had drawn all over when she was a toddler and my mum still held a grudge about...and there were so many others I don't remember because they faded into one, plus we had a leak in our house over the cupboard that they were kept in and a lot of them got eaten by damp and silverfish. If you google 'Edwardian children's fiction' and look at the images there was just a huge pile of books with those sorts of covers, usually about girls having fun but very moral adventures. I was basically given a perfect children's library, albeit a child who was born in 1945. I was very lucky. (I also had volumes and volumes of myths, fairy tales etc and still have a lot of those. Mum would buy them from charity shops whenever she saw them - I even have Russian, Danish and Canadian First Nation ones, in translation!)
This was a long comment! But oh, I loved those books. There was always this gothic tinge because the original owner had died young and of course in Edwardian books people die or get very sick a lot so I'm afraid it sort of added to the whole experience.
I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC about Children's Radio 4 being closed, and it was read out by a very posh, swotty sounding child actress on their Feedback programme. TO MY ETERNAL HORROR my teacher recorded the repeat and played it in class so everyone could see 'how clever Elizabeth is'. This sort of thing is why I had no friends until I was about 15. Of course now we have multiple radio stations and easy access to audio books online but at the time I was very annoyed.
I do love the Night Watch books but they're like candy - you can read them very quickly (I read the first three in a day, good lord I wish I had that attention span on my meds now...) and afterwards they make you feel slightly guilty. Cooper is much better but the morality troubles me in the same way! It does seem as if she wasn't willing to fully map out the consequences of this worldbuilding. On the other hand I do like that the light is something potentially scary and harsh rather than just being sweetly good. (I just mistyped that as 'god'. He's not a *tame* lion.)
It's weird how non political it is, now you come to think of it, even though she involves cameos from people in other countries. What were they doing in the 1940s, for example? It all seems very detached.
no subject
To my eternal shame and embarrassment I was absolutely in love with What Katy Did (the sequels less so but I still liked them) which is of course horribly ableist. In my defense I liked it because I was in love with Katy so at least I get baby queer points??
The Prince and the Pauper, some Sherlock Holmes, a gorgeous huge volume of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales which my aunt had drawn all over when she was a toddler and my mum still held a grudge about...and there were so many others I don't remember because they faded into one, plus we had a leak in our house over the cupboard that they were kept in and a lot of them got eaten by damp and silverfish. If you google 'Edwardian children's fiction' and look at the images there was just a huge pile of books with those sorts of covers, usually about girls having fun but very moral adventures. I was basically given a perfect children's library, albeit a child who was born in 1945. I was very lucky. (I also had volumes and volumes of myths, fairy tales etc and still have a lot of those. Mum would buy them from charity shops whenever she saw them - I even have Russian, Danish and Canadian First Nation ones, in translation!)
This was a long comment! But oh, I loved those books. There was always this gothic tinge because the original owner had died young and of course in Edwardian books people die or get very sick a lot so I'm afraid it sort of added to the whole experience.
I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the BBC about Children's Radio 4 being closed, and it was read out by a very posh, swotty sounding child actress on their Feedback programme. TO MY ETERNAL HORROR my teacher recorded the repeat and played it in class so everyone could see 'how clever Elizabeth is'. This sort of thing is why I had no friends until I was about 15. Of course now we have multiple radio stations and easy access to audio books online but at the time I was very annoyed.
I do love the Night Watch books but they're like candy - you can read them very quickly (I read the first three in a day, good lord I wish I had that attention span on my meds now...) and afterwards they make you feel slightly guilty. Cooper is much better but the morality troubles me in the same way! It does seem as if she wasn't willing to fully map out the consequences of this worldbuilding. On the other hand I do like that the light is something potentially scary and harsh rather than just being sweetly good. (I just mistyped that as 'god'. He's not a *tame* lion.)
It's weird how non political it is, now you come to think of it, even though she involves cameos from people in other countries. What were they doing in the 1940s, for example? It all seems very detached.