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Cthulu Carl posted:- A novel about some kinda cross-country road trip for fried chicken. This one is called "Chicken Trek," and it was my favorite book as a kid, probably because it was totally goddamn nuts. The plot is that a kid breaks an extremely expensive invention prototype made by his mad scientist uncle and has to pay him back, so he and his uncle team up to have the kid win a contest to be the first person to eat fried chicken at every location of a huge multinational chicken chain, whose stores are all shaped like giant chickens. The uncle has a pickle-shaped teleporting van, which helps with the travel time, but eventually it's more of a struggle against the kid's growing aversion to eating more fried chicken. I forget whether the kid actually won or just barely lost, but whatever prize level he won included a giant paper bag styled like the chicken chain's take-out bags, and he set it up in his room and would climb into the bag to sit when he needed solitude for thinking. Children's literature is insane.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:56
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Daniel Pinkwaters stuff is also really insane.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:17
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Acne Rain posted:Journey to Terezor, I think. Maybe? The cover seems familiar but I swear it had a more futuristic setting. I also remember pyramids, but I could be imagining that. I may have to find a copy and attempt to read it to verify.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:17
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Antivehicular posted:Children's literature is insane. There have to be a couple fakeposts in this thread but damned if I can tell them apart from the real deal.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:18
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the pyramids might be from a part where main character visits dome for another alien with a more primitive living situation
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Aug 17, 2016 19:18
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Acne Rain posted:the pyramids might be from a part where main character visits dome for another alien with a more primitive living situation Could be. It was over 20 years ago when I read this, so there's no telling what plot details I've added over the years. Here's another one. A kid (or kids?) use a clock or a watch or something and are time traveling. Something happens and he starts hopping backwards in time into his younger self but he still has his memories from when he was older and can't figure out how to get back to the present.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:29
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Antivehicular posted:This one is called "Chicken Trek," and it was my favorite book as a kid, probably because it was totally goddamn nuts. The plot is that a kid breaks an extremely expensive invention prototype made by his mad scientist uncle and has to pay him back, so he and his uncle team up to have the kid win a contest to be the first person to eat fried chicken at every location of a huge multinational chicken chain, whose stores are all shaped like giant chickens. The uncle has a pickle-shaped teleporting van, which helps with the travel time, but eventually it's more of a struggle against the kid's growing aversion to eating more fried chicken. I forget whether the kid actually won or just barely lost, but whatever prize level he won included a giant paper bag styled like the chicken chain's take-out bags, and he set it up in his room and would climb into the bag to sit when he needed solitude for thinking. I can't imagine there being multiple "Fried Chicken Road trip" children's novels, and the cover art seems familiar to me, so I think this is the one.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:42
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I remember some dope af books about two brothers who travel to exotic and unexplored jungles to collect rare animals for their dad's zoo. There's usually some evil trappers or some other bad guys who get eaten by giant crocodiles or black mambas at the end. I forget what they were called. Also one about a kid who gets given a hatchet for his birthday and then a plane he's flying on crashes on some remote island and he's the only survivor and has to learn to survive using his new axe until he's rescued. The only thing i really remember was that at one point he swims down to the sunken plane wreckage and finds the pilot's body all eaten away by fishes and it's pretty gnarly. iirc there was a sequel where the exact same thing happens to the same kid like a year later.
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Aug 17, 2016 19:56
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The second one it Hatchet by Jack London
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Aug 17, 2016 20:14
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Hatchet is by Gary Paulson and the sequel Brian's Winter wasn't the same thing happening again, it was Paulson saying "this book that I sold a bajillion copies of needs a sequel, so uh yeah what would have happened if he never found the plane's black box?" There's another sequel called The River that's about the character returning to the site of the crash as an adult as a kind of pilgrimage. If you want weird Gary Paulson books though check out his sci-fi novel The Transall Saga. Bruce Coville (My Teacher Is An Alien, Aliens Ate my Homework, Space Brat) is awesome because his book series always start with basic kid-level hijinks like "oh I saw our new teacher talking to his watch in a weird language and I'm pretty sure he's wearing a mask" to completely insane conclusions. In the My Teacher series, the main character who has been telling the story in the first person fuses mentally with his school bully and the girl that he liked, creating a single entity with three bodies - and it's implied they want to connect EVERYONE in that way. The Rod Albright (Aliens Ate My Homework) series ends with the main character stuck in the body of some blue dog thing. They always end up with weird body horror/weird science stuff and it's great. I read this one lovely YA book once, it was called Tangerine I think and was all about how the main character was basically blind from staring at the sun and it ruined his whole life but it turns out he was actually blind because his shithole murderer older brother held him down and sprayed spray paint in his eyes. I also recall one called The Wrecker, I think, about this guy who is sick of being bullied and teams up with this weird genius inventor kid to build "the wrecker", which will take care of the bully forever. They build and use the mysterious device and the bully's whole personality gets erased, like he turns into a placid animal. The kid that teamed up with the inventor ends up weirdly pissed that the bully didn't actually die IIRC. There's also some books that I can remember the title but absolutely nothing else about them, like The Egypt Club and The View from Saturday.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:34
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Ryoshi posted:The Egypt Club Oh gently caress, I think I read this one! Like a bunch of kids made up a backyard Egypt cult and they accidentally stumble across some criminals or something and can't do their Egypt stuff for a while because they have to lay low, but Egypt stuff is too important so they sneak out to do it anyhow and get caught by the criminals but somehow things work out ok
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Aug 17, 2016 20:44
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DrowningInDreams posted:
A Wind In The Door, by Madeline l'Engle. It was the sequel to A Wrinkle In Time. Then there was a third book,"A Swiftly Tilting Planet." Cerebral Mayhem fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 20:44
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Wicker Man posted:I could have sworn that Interstellar Pig went under a different name, because I strongly remember some kind of Z word being associated with it (only in the book itself?). I mostly remember the back cover showing a kind of unfinished tabletop game with the little glowing pig piece sitting there. They made a movie called Zathura that completely bit off of Interstellar Pig, I'm pretty sure that's what you're remembering. Cthulu Carl posted:
Lol, I had a few of those when I was a kid. I got them from one of those subscription YA dealies where they send you a few books every month. They also sent some other pretty drat good ones...I remember some updated Tom Swift books where he makes a flying surfboard but then an old enemy of his dad completely takes over his science compound, and one where he punches a hole in the space time continuum and his evil twin from another universe comes through and fucks his life up. There was also another book I vaguely remember getting one month called Turbo Cowboys about this post apocalyptic world where the government is completely fascist and keeps orphans locked in some sort of concentration camp out in the desert. Some total dude bro best friends 4 lyfe escape after stealing some apples and meet up with this old desert hermit that gives them beans and cactus beer. They find these old rear end dirt bikes and siphon some gas out of an old wrecked tanker and just kind of blast around in the desert until the fascist dudes start looking for them. I don't really remember what happens but I know they trick the fascists guys into wrecking this Mad Max style modified half-track by stunting all around it on their bikes and setting it on fire or something. Then they steal the gas out of the half-track. gently caress I don't know.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:47
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I think there were at least two stories in this book but the two I remember made it obvious that the author masturbated to the ideal of Texas. The first story was about some kind of settlers? Or something in space and they used their space ships to drive around in space submarines and harpoon giant worm dragons and store their fat in warehouses. A lot of emphasis on these space settlers being hardy badasses harvesting these worms. I'm pretty sure also in the book was a story about a texas space ambassador that saved the day with his quick draw ability. There may have been a space barbecue and space dog people but the main point of the story was that the guy used a fake future holster to get the edge on everyone else trying to outdraw him. He also won favor? with the delegates for being able to draw his guns so fast? I'm pretty sure they were in the same book because I was always confused if the space whalers were related to space texas.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:59
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garfield hentai posted:Couple horror books I remember reading when I was little, not Goosebumps or anything Okay this was bugging me a lot so I just looked it up and found the eyes one was The Eyes of the Killer Robot by John Bellairs What I remembered: The eyeless guy going around moaning "THEY TOOK MY EYES" What I did not remember: The reason his eyes were gone was they were used to power a magic robot that played baseball
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Aug 17, 2016 21:01
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Cerebral Mayhem posted:A Wind In The Door, by Madeline l'Engle. It was the sequel to A Wrinkle In Time. Then there was a third book,"A Swiftly Tilting Planet." There's more than that, there's Many Waters when the twins go back to hang out with Enoch and Noah in the Old Testament and get hella sunburnt, and I think one about the daughter of the protagonist of A Wrinkle In Time that gets born during A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Gabriel Pope posted:Oh gently caress, I think I read this one! Like a bunch of kids made up a backyard Egypt cult and they accidentally stumble across some criminals or something and can't do their Egypt stuff for a while because they have to lay low, but Egypt stuff is too important so they sneak out to do it anyhow and get caught by the criminals but somehow things work out ok Something like this, yeah. I want to say that there was a spooky old man in the apartments above the club that they thought was some kind of a creeper or something and he ends up being the one who saves everyone.
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Aug 17, 2016 21:12
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I remember there being actually a large number of Doctor Doolittle books, including ones where he's abducted by a giant moths and goes to the moon and becomes slightly mutated
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Aug 17, 2016 21:13
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blk96gt posted:Could be. It was over 20 years ago when I read this, so there's no telling what plot details I've added over the years. I'm pretty sure the second one is a goosebumps one called Clock of Doom, there's an antiue clock and if the cuckoo head is turned backwards what you said starts happening. If I remember right, he quickly realises that despite his knowledge of the future he can't actually change events like breaking his arm and so on, and he eventually turns into a baby as he realises he's not got long left until he just ceases to exist. He eventually fixes the problem, but knocks the year 1988 off the clock when he does so, when he returns to the present, his bratty younger sister was never born, and he just leaves her to her oblivion. I didn't read very many YA books overall, I skipped straight from dumb kids books to dumb fantasy novels for adults. Aside from the ones I've mentioned and Goosebumps, the only series I remember reading religiously at the time was a YA series called Broken Sky that was some dude writing an anime/Final Fantasy inspired book. The main male character had a sword and magic stones in his spine that let him do kamehamehas, the plot was a good rebellion verses a white haired androgynous evil emperor. It was, thinking back on it, very cliche. The main guy falls in love with the daughter of the emperor, there is a "wise beyond her years" little girl, the main girl gets amnesia when working as a slave in some evil badguy mine. But the books were filled with poo poo like wyvern-rider cavalry, interdimensional travel, assassins that can warp through mirrors. evil hive mind spider-people and the last book had a device that summoned kaiju. It probably wouldn't hold up, but I have very fond memories of those books.
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Aug 17, 2016 21:52
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I think I read most of the sci-fi and fantasy books in my tiny school library. I remember there being a lot of weird sex stuff in all the fantasy books. Anyway, there was one space book where a family was cryogenically frozen and going to settle a new planet. Some sort of malfunction caused the youngest boy to wake up early and he was dicking around on the spaceship alone for 70 years and is now an old man. I want to say he befriended a robot and road around on a tricycle? The family wakes up a and I guess they reach their destination at some point. There may or may not be bug aliens involved.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:22
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Hopefully someone can identify this book for me I read as a kid. A collection of European(?) folk tales, I only remember two stories: - An old hag catches a bear in a bear trap but he gnaws off his arm and escapes. The hag makes stew out of the arm but the bear comes back and kills her. -Two princes fight a super strong lizard knight to save a maiden. The lizard man bashes one guys head in and throws him into a pit. I remember it was beautifully illustrated as well..
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Aug 17, 2016 22:34
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Bananaquiter posted:I think I read most of the sci-fi and fantasy books in my tiny school library. I remember there being a lot of weird sex stuff in all the fantasy books. That is a short story titled The Days Between that became part of Allen Steele's Coyote series if you ever want to revisit it. It's actually a great set of short stories/novellas.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:00
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There was this book about some park ranger who was trying to investigate a fire. He met a 14 year old kid with a weird tent that ended up being fireproof and able to survive a blaze. That book taught me the words cocksucker and prick when I was in like 4th grade.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:11
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Ryoshi posted:The Egypt Club I remember this one. I won some writing contest in fourth or fifth grade and got to meet the author. Nice lady. Another one I can't remember the name of was kind of like Cube, but instead of a series of cubes it was a series of Escher style staircases that would go on for ages. At one point they met some obscenely fat girl that got stuck in there with them, but all she did was hang out next to this glowing sphere and repeatedly stick her tongue out at it. Every time she stuck her tongue out it would give her some kind of salty pork-like product. They kept trying to convince her to help them escape, but she just wanted to sit on her rear end eating slim-jims. If anyone know what the holy hell this book is please let me know. EDIT: Nevermind. I found it. It's called, fittingly enough, House of Stairs. girth brooks part 2 fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 00:00
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The Stainless Steel Rat series. I really liked them as a kid, it's like a comedy spaceship version of James Bond. He went on fun adventures and made me laugh 
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Aug 18, 2016 00:09
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My mom and I used to read The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks books together. I don't remember much about the books themselves, but I do feel like they were pretty fun and nonsensical. 
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Aug 18, 2016 00:40
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Cheese Pain posted:My mom and I used to read The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks books together. I don't remember much about the books themselves, but I do feel like they were pretty fun and nonsensical. Is that the one where two bros have two plants and one feeds it good poo poo and the other gives it junk food so good poo poo plant is normal but fatplant evolves into like a venus fly trap that eats horrible poo poo?
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Aug 18, 2016 01:10
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I've got two series I kind of remember. I think they were popular for their time? The first was some sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy thing that I think actually took place in Australia, or maybe just the author was Australian? Anyway, everyone lived in a big castle and I think there was some weird sort of colour (not skin colour, mind) based caste system going around, and I think everyone had magic, talking shadows or something. Sooort of like The Golden Compass but it wasn't that. I think the main kid got banished into the wasteland and returned at the end of the series as part of some sort of revolt. One specific detail that I remember is that they played some sort of chess-like with magically animated or holographic pieces. The other one was by some relatively famous author. I only read one of the books, though. There was an evil lord of the kingdom and the main dude was part of some rebellion (again) group and the bad dude had these bigass flying monsters he used to keep the fear in them but one of said beasties got injured and he nursed it back to health. It may or may not have died tragically at the end of the story and the MC may or may not have been the original prince of the land. Any clues?
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Aug 18, 2016 01:22
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Mordja posted:I've got two series I kind of remember. I think they were popular for their time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_TowerThe Seventh Tower by Garth Nix It had a lot of poo poo going on, there were shadow pokemon creatures and coloured towers and an infinite wasteland with barbarians and an alternate reality with monsters he also released six of them in two years.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:43
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poo poo, that was fast. The wiki says Lucasfilm was involved so I'm kinda surprised they weren't made into a film franchise.
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Aug 18, 2016 02:09
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Claven666 posted:Is that the one where two bros have two plants and one feeds it good poo poo and the other gives it junk food so good poo poo plant is normal but fatplant evolves into like a venus fly trap that eats horrible poo poo? I don't think that happened, I just recall the one plant only ate dirty socks and the other plant only ate clean socks because it was owned by a neat freak kid. I don't remember the dirty sock one mutating, but it's been years, so who knows?
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Aug 18, 2016 02:55
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What is the one about a group of siblings who are like , on a road trip or somethjng and their parents are maybe dead or something and the older sister takes care of them and one of them is like a toddler???????
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Aug 18, 2016 03:04
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Cheese Pain posted:I don't think that happened, I just recall the one plant only ate dirty socks and the other plant only ate clean socks because it was owned by a neat freak kid. I don't remember the dirty sock one mutating, but it's been years, so who knows? Yeah, my memories of this story are lost to time but I vividly remember the slob brother shoving junk food into the plant soil and poo poo. I just looked on amazon and I definitely remember that cover.
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Aug 18, 2016 04:40
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I remember reading this boring thing when I was in Jr High: Post apocalyptic story, some anti-war chick hears about someone finding a still working submarine (I think it had nukes), and raising a small army. Chick gets a bunch of people together to go protest the submarine. EDIT: never mind my stupid brain suddenly remembers it was "Doomsday Plus Twelve," a title that obviously took the author an entire smoke break to come up with. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2335052.Doomsday_Plus_Twelve defaultluser fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 05:15
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canpakes posted:What is the one about a group of siblings who are like , on a road trip or somethjng and their parents are maybe dead or something and the older sister takes care of them and one of them is like a toddler??????? Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt.
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Aug 18, 2016 12:22
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:Around 4th grade I read some book set in the US in like the early or mid 1800's or something. I think the premise involved some teenage kid being sent to a new homestead or property or something in order to fix or build a cabin, ahead of the rest of the family arriving like a year later or something. Since I guess that's a thing that makes perfect sense in the 1800's or whatever. I think the kid was alone, maybe had a dog. I distinctly remember the character got really excited over the idea of installing greased paper windows in the cabin. Did he befriend an Indian boy? Sounds like Sign of the Beaver.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:11
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The harrowing tale of a trailer park supervisor trying to overcome his alcohol addiction, with the help of a bisexual sidekick.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:16
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I had some book which was less of a novel and more of a (fictional) journal/diary complete with doodles and poo poo, of some bratty kid in a comically awful school, complete with sadistic teachers and rear end in a top hat classmates. Never have been able to remember any names and the "bratty kid at terrible school" trope is so common I've never been able to find it again. I also once borrowed a poo poo book called Bananagram about someone writing a message on a banana.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:56
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DrowningInDreams posted:I remember a book with a guy who received radio transmissions on his tooth, and an evil alien that died from eating too many red pepper flakes. I think this one is Fat Men from Space by Daniel Pinkwater?
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Aug 18, 2016 14:57
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Cowboy Pope posted:There was this book called The Eyes of Kid Midas that was about some dumbass kid that kept getting relentlessly pranked on by some much stronger boy. On a camping trip or something he was apparently taking with his aggressor, he comes upon a pair of sunglasses sitting in a beam of light on a plateau like a burning bush. He throws them shits on like any desperately uncool teen, and soon realized his new hater blockers have properties. He makes wishes, and they are granted, and everything goes real great until it gets to the point where everything he thinks immediately comes true and he glasses fuse themselves to his face. He tries to cut them off with hedge clippers to no avail, they are a part of him. The book climaxes with him laying in a bathtub full of freezing water in an attempt to deprive the glasses of the energy they need to tear the world apart based on the whims of his adolescent brain while they're just ruining everything. I do not remember what happened after that. Kind of a weird book for kids.
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Aug 18, 2016 20:36
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liquorlanche posted:The harrowing tale of a trailer park supervisor trying to overcome his alcohol addiction, with the help of a bisexual sidekick. Was it Mojo? That sounds an awful lot like what I described. Were they martial arts enthusiasts?
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Aug 18, 2016 20:40
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