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glowing-fish posted:This was a short series of four books that I read in the 1980s: the US had undergone a military coup and was now the "United Secure States of America" and the teenage protagonist who was caught in the middle of it. It was this: 
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Sep 6, 2016 02:56
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mucocele posted:Sign of the Beaver? Kid gets stung by bees, falls out of a tree, Indian boy saves him and they become friends, right? The greatest love story ever told. Nah screw that book, I was forced to read it in school.
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Sep 6, 2016 03:42
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Allen Wren posted:I do remember No Coins Please, where this kid on a coast-to-coast trip runs cons on people in every city they stop in, and I remember the first one was taking bets on slot car races he ran on the sidewalk with, I guess, a battery powered slot car track? The writer of that also did the pretty-awesome-to-young-me Bruno and Boots juvie fiction books. He could build up these crazy convoluted plots and then resolve them by having everything happen at once like some crazy Marx brothers film. For example here's the Wiki summary of "Beware the Fish": wikipedia posted:In the climax, the police form a barricade around the school to attempt to arrest Sturgeon, whom they believe to be The Fish, due to his surname and the nickname "the Fish" that the students have given him. All the students, from both schools, come out in wonder. Everything is exposed as Bruno reveals it was Elmer's device that had caused it, but he hadn't known it was that powerful. Due to all the exposure from the police, the explosion due to Elmer's equipment being buried with the chemicals reacting to the shotgun blasts from Ms. Scrimmage, and most of all the press that had arrived to capture The Fish being caught, the right message gets through and the school gets its publicity. A record enrollment comes up for next year, solving all the school's money problems. All that happened in a 160 page book! I was even more impressed when I learned much later he wrote those books while in high school himself.
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Sep 6, 2016 03:46
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Rutibex posted:I think you might have just been watching TV? this is the plot of the show The 100, season 3 is even about a killer AI that runs the planet: I found it: Remnants by KA Applegate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnants_(novel_series)
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Sep 6, 2016 03:56
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A book where a kid and his dad are trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a deadly plague. That's all I can remember about that one. Another book where a nerdy boy and a nerdy girl from opposite ends of a camp on a lake are left naked on an island in the middle as a cruel prank. They escape off the island, run away from the camp, and end up loving in some PUA's house when he's not around. A lady tries to call the police because at one point when she sees the girl trying to buy tampons. Another book where the title is not at all indicative of the contents, but I forget the title. I know it was a joke or something. Anyways, the book is about a murder mystery at a convention, and the victim is a fantasy writer who really loving hated writing books about his one successful character and just wanted to kill him off. I think he got killed by an angry cosplaying nerd who was too obsessed with that fantasy character. Another book about colony ships being sent from Earth, and one ends up on a lovely ice planet orbiting a dead star. There's some weird poo poo with mind-controlling stones and people wandering out of the colony ship to freeze to death. I forget the rest. Neurion fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 04:04
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I'm not sure if they were trendy in America at the time (early 90's), but Brian Jaque's Redwall series was the first childhood books that I remember making a lasting impression on me. They introduced me to the world of fantasy, a small niche of it that was the foot in the door to a world unlike our reality. When I started adulting, I bought them all for sentimental value and re-read them. I highly recommend the series.
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Sep 6, 2016 04:29
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Al Capone, please, wash my shirt! Hey Al, wash these undies! -from the book Al Capone Washed my Shorts
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Sep 6, 2016 06:21
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I remember some book about a kid who's like your average dopey kid who isn't very cool and one day there's a tiny alien in his cereal who helps him defeat the cool kid in his class who was secretly an evil alien or something like that. All I remember is the cool kid/alien had red leather running shoes, and at one point the dopey kid mentions his mom's Tab and I only barely had any concept of Tab as a soft drink. The evil alien's name was Dorf maybe? E: Aliens for Breakfast. Apparently followed by Aliens for Lunch and Aliens for Dinner but I never read those coronatae fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 06:57
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Some kids lived in a mountainous area and there was an invasion of these machine-things with 3 or 4 tentacles or legs, I barely remember. The cover or the pictures is kind of like what the Venture Bros compound is like; Swiss Alps or something, and one of these machines attacking. It wasn't War of The Worlds, as far as I know but the machines were kinda like those in the Tom Cruise version of the movie. That's really all I remember.
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Sep 6, 2016 07:08
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Haier posted:Some kids lived in a mountainous area and there was an invasion of these machine-things with 3 or 4 tentacles or legs, I barely remember. The cover or the pictures is kind of like what the Venture Bros compound is like; Swiss Alps or something, and one of these machines attacking. It wasn't War of The Worlds, as far as I know but the machines were kinda like those in the Tom Cruise version of the movie. That's really all I remember. Tripods series I think.
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Sep 6, 2016 07:58
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Haier posted:Some kids lived in a mountainous area and there was an invasion of these machine-things with 3 or 4 tentacles or legs, I barely remember. The cover or the pictures is kind of like what the Venture Bros compound is like; Swiss Alps or something, and one of these machines attacking. It wasn't War of The Worlds, as far as I know but the machines were kinda like those in the Tom Cruise version of the movie. That's really all I remember. Pretty sure this guy got it Neurion posted:Tripods series I think. I liked those books, they just got weird toward the 3rd one. The tripods weren't really invading, they had destroyed humanity and bred them in captivity for like 1,000 years and then they would stick a brain controller on your skull at like age 14 or 15 or something. So every now and then one would come by and cap some people before leaving and everyone lived like it was the dark ages not knowing much about technology or even understanding the ruins around them.
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Sep 6, 2016 08:04
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fattypuffs and thinifers if you haven't read this then you a plain rear end bitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattypuffs_and_Thinifers
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Sep 6, 2016 10:18
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I remember a book that had a bit where some kid was actually an android with a holographic projector that disguised his gross robot body and at one point he turned it into a bubble surrounding him and the protagonists during gym class so everyone else would see a bunch of kids having a conversation about a movie or something but they were actually talking about how to beat the evil aliens or whatever and all I could think was "why don't you just have a normal conversation and shut up and change the subject if anyone comes over" I think maybe it was an Animorphs.
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Sep 6, 2016 12:05
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Neurion posted:Another book where a nerdy boy and a nerdy girl from opposite ends of a camp on a lake are left naked on an island in the middle as a cruel prank. They escape off the island, run away from the camp, and end up loving in some PUA's house when he's not around. A lady tries to call the police because at one point when she sees the girl trying to buy tampons. The Goats by Brock Cole. There was a movie version a few years ago called Standing Up.
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Sep 6, 2016 16:19
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sinking belle posted:I remember a book that had a bit where some kid was actually an android with a holographic projector that disguised his gross robot body and at one point he turned it into a bubble surrounding him and the protagonists during gym class so everyone else would see a bunch of kids having a conversation about a movie or something but they were actually talking about how to beat the evil aliens or whatever and all I could think was "why don't you just have a normal conversation and shut up and change the subject if anyone comes over" There is very definitely a robot with hologram powers in Animorphs, for those times when turning into an animal just doesn't work, I guess. He looked kind of like Anubis or Lucario and was the last remnant of some dog-people who lived on Earth before humans.  Edit: Okay, I just thought of a book whose title I can't remember. It was about a girl who was the one "normal" person in a family of strange people. Like they had silly hair and wore weird clothes and maybe they were all circus people or hippies or something; it was a very benign kind of strange since this was definitely for kids. At one point the girl hikes up the hills to get away from her family for a while and encounters a skunk. She decides to smile at the skunk in order to not get sprayed. There's also a scene where the whole family is driving around together and pick up a hitchhiking runaway who decides to go back home after meeting such strange people. Rahonavis fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 23:58
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Rahonavis posted:Edit: Okay, I just thought of a book whose title I can't remember. It was about a girl who was the one "normal" person in a family of strange people. Like they had silly hair and wore weird clothes and maybe they were all circus people or hippies or something; it was a very benign kind of strange since this was definitely for kids. At one point the girl hikes up the hills to get away from her family for a while and encounters a skunk. She decides to smile at the skunk in order to not get sprayed. There's also a scene where the whole family is driving around together and pick up a hitchhiking runaway who decides to go back home after meeting such strange people. I think that's Me and the Weirdos by Jane Sutton.
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Sep 7, 2016 02:27
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Action Jacktion posted:I think that's Me and the Weirdos by Jane Sutton. And based on the cover art, that's the one! (With that "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down" style title, no wonder I couldn't find it.)
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Sep 7, 2016 03:57
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I vaguely half remember all the Fear Street books because I read every....single....one. Even all of the miniseries.
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Sep 7, 2016 04:29
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I read a bunch of Goosebumps and Ghosts of Fear Street (apparently ghostwritten). There was some book that about a haunted house with a bunch of haunted rooms;one of them had vines on the wall that made people sick and there was a dumbwaiter that was somehow relevant to the plot. Then something about a haunted castle and there was some kid who had long arms that dragged. This...might have been the same book. There was also one with aliens and cubes that 'shinked' people. There was also this picture book where a bunch of kids were like pirates on an island and they were just playing and having fun on their boat, but it was somehow kinda dark in a weird way, and I don't remember exactly why it felt like that.
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Sep 7, 2016 04:59
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Wicker Man posted:
That's Much Mojo by Joe Lansdale. Its the second book in the Hap and Leonard series, the basis of a recent good cable TV series. Not a young adult book, but any thing by Lansdale is worth reading.
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Sep 7, 2016 06:13
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1969 baby posted:That's Much Mojo by Joe Lansdale. Its the second book in the Hap and Leonard series, the basis of a recent good cable TV series. Thank you! Yeah definitely not a young adult book, but I really appreciate your clearing that up for me.
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Sep 7, 2016 07:37
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Fat Shat Sings posted:Pretty sure this guy got it I remember Tripods. It is the first thing to come to mind when remembering YA books. I also remember reading what turned out to be the last book in the series with Black Cauldron. I had no knowledge of the series and there were all these callbacks I didn't get. I didn't realize it was part of series until I randomly caught the Disney Black Cauldron. Never did read the others.
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Sep 7, 2016 08:54
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Serious Frolicking posted:there was this fantasy novel where an evil d&d party had to bring back evil because good was too successful and the world was so unbalanced that it was going to be destroyed. also the head good wizard was a rapist? Nobody's given a real answer to this yet; it's "Villains by Necessity" by Eve Forward. (I was already an adult when it came out and thought it was pretty funny.)
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Sep 7, 2016 09:23
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The Eclipse Phase trilogy by John Shirley. There's this rocker in the cyberpunk future and stuff happens and it was supposed to be intrigue but it sucked poo poo and I can't remember any of it. Tek War by Shatner and ghost writers. There's this uh detective in the cyberpunk future and stuff happens and it sucked poo poo and I can't remember anything about it. The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling. There's this little punk kid who fights for sport all the time, and he sucked poo poo and I don't remember any of it. Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite. There was this horror novel I bought at 14 because I liked Books of Blood by Clive Barker and this got recommended to me by some girl. It turned out to be gay snuff porn. I remember it wasn't poorly written, except that it turned out to be gay snuff porn and I ain't fuckin gay bra. On The Road - It sucked poo poo and I don't remember any of it except that the Burroughs character was cool, and he had a bunch of mustard gas and a rocket launcher under his bed. They smoked tea and swell jazz parties. Xanth - Suck my Diiiiiick. Sucked poo poo harder than anything sucked poo poo, and turned out to be gay porn. Lord Valentine's Castle - I really have no idea other than the name sounds like gay porn. Jack The Giant Killer - Again, just the title and memory that I read it. No idea. Gay porn? Probably. Sword of Shannarah - Terry Brooks, right? No idea.
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Sep 7, 2016 09:58
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Santheb posted:I remember reading some cool fantasy novels in the 5th or 6th grade. They were a series, all by the same author. I have no idea who or what they were about but I remember that the artwork on the front of the books was pretty cool (all hardcover) and they were fairly lengthy for being in an elementary school library. A shot in the dark but "The Dark is Rising" series? Those were a long series of fantasy books, targeted at that age range, all by the same author and were a mainstay in two of my schools reading comprehension tests.
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Sep 7, 2016 10:05
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God Of Paradise posted:Sword of Shannarah - Terry Brooks, right? No idea. These books are hilarious. I read the first one and even as a kid I was like "wow this is a gigantic Lord of the Rings ripoff, eh I guess I'll read a few more". Well at the time there were already like ten books (probably thirty by now) and they get quite batshit, at one point they travel to a volcanic island called Morrowindl and fight grasshopper the size of a tank. Meanwhile the literal horsemen of the apocalypse show up riding like...giant blue cats or something? But the misanthrope wizard beats them up and they run away
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Sep 7, 2016 11:24
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skasion posted:These books are hilarious. I read the first one and even as a kid I was like "wow this is a gigantic Lord of the Rings ripoff, eh I guess I'll read a few more". Never read any of them myself but at least Brooks was one of the, um, original Tolkien imitators. Might even have been the first one.
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Sep 7, 2016 11:38
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When i was in primary school I read a book about these thorn creatures attacking really small people? (might of been faeries or something) at the very start a bunch of the thorn creatures surround and murder a fox.
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Sep 7, 2016 11:45
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I remember a book about a group of foster (?) kids who traveled from city to city together, seemingly on the run. The eldest, a teenage boy (?) had a newspaper column similar to Ann Landers or some such, if I recall the column was published under the auspices that some wise grandma was answering the letters, not a kid. I think the kids as a group were reading Catcher in the Rye - I recall them going from library to library in different towns to read.
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Sep 7, 2016 18:58
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God Of Paradise posted:The Eclipse Phase trilogy by John Shirley. There's this rocker in the cyberpunk future and stuff happens and it was supposed to be intrigue but it sucked poo poo and I can't remember any of it. Eclipse was such a massive letdown - in my teen years, I was gifted a huge cardboard box of stripped paperbacks from my aunt who worked for a publishing company, and one of the books in there was a (mostly) cyberpunk short story collection called "Mirrorshades" which is really loving good, and in it there's a cut-down version of all the Rickenharp stuff from the first Eclipse book (up until they get off the island), so I was fooled into thinking that the whole thing was going to be about this great washed-up druggie rocker guy and this freedom fighter chick he's trying to hook up with but NOPE.
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Sep 7, 2016 20:35
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I remember reading a sci Fi book as a child where the world was overrun by mutants and poo poo, but some of the surviving rich people had hair stylists that styled their pubes. It was clearly not a children's book, but I would love to read it as an adult because man that book was a real "wtf" as a child
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Sep 7, 2016 21:28
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Since we're talking about sci-fi involving people's groins, I now also remember this weird one I read when I was like eleven where I think it was part of a series about these time-traveling cops who are supposed to keep the past happening as it did and the villain's henchman in this episode was supposed to go back and gently caress poo poo up during the plot of The Three Musketeers and does so by being sex-changed and cosmetically surgicalized into being the lady DeWinter, and eventually goes insane believing they are her, up to the point of getting executed at the end because obviously the heroes save the day. The cover of the book had a weird drawing of a Musketeer with a laser sword and no visible face, just a weird glowing star on the forehead of the shape, just south of the hat.
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Sep 7, 2016 21:48
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hemale in pain posted:When i was in primary school I read a book about these thorn creatures attacking really small people? (might of been faeries or something) at the very start a bunch of the thorn creatures surround and murder a fox. Thorn Ogres of Hagwood maybe? The Thorn Ogres were sent out by a heartless queen to attack these cute friendly woodland Pixies who can turn into animals. Along the way the Ogres pretty much destroy every living thing who has the bad luck to look at them. I remember reading it as an adult and thinking, "poo poo, this is dark!" 
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Sep 7, 2016 22:00
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I remember a sci-fi series (I only read the first book but I know there was more) where a planet of Good Religious Magic People get invaded by space aliens who take over easily and subjugate the locals. Then at some point an alien general takes a local to be his concubine and has a child with her who's going to be the Messiah for the slaves. At some point Jesus has to go on the run and hides in some distant witch's cabin. The army is after him, so they put his spirit into the body of a girl who just died of some disease so they'll think he's dead. What I remember most was that everything had really stupid names with like 3 of the same consonant in a row and crap like that.
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Sep 7, 2016 22:02
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Allen Wren posted:Eclipse was such a massive letdown - in my teen years, I was gifted a huge cardboard box of stripped paperbacks from my aunt who worked for a publishing company, and one of the books in there was a (mostly) cyberpunk short story collection called "Mirrorshades" which is really loving good, and in it there's a cut-down version of all the Rickenharp stuff from the first Eclipse book (up until they get off the island), so I was fooled into thinking that the whole thing was going to be about this great washed-up druggie rocker guy and this freedom fighter chick he's trying to hook up with but NOPE. Yeah. Mirrorshades is great, and Shirley's not all bad. City Come A' Walkin and Wetbones were good. And New Noir contained what I considered to be the funniest story ever as a surly teenager, "Just Like Suzy," which is about the corpse of a prostitute that is stuck on a guy's dick. Which sounds terrible, but it's played for slapstick the entire story.
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Sep 8, 2016 00:00
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A YA horror book where a girl has an imaginary friend that teaches her magic, including how to make some kind of ointment that makes you... fly? Invisible? Anyway, she and her imaginary friend get into harmless mischief at first, but that eventually leads to her sneaking into her school at night and her imaginary friend starts a fire and burns the whole building down. The girl realizes that her imaginary friend is a real force that's hosed up and evil, but it's grown too powerful to be stopped, though I think her real life friends eventually save her. Pretty sure it was part of some Goosebumps-alike series. Another not-Goosebumps book where a brother and sister are left home alone and the electronics come to life and try to kill them. There was one part where a cowboy in a lightgun video game starts firing at them through the TV. For most of the book, they think it's because the house is built on an indian burial ground, but really the dad was experimenting with some kind of smart house AI? Part of a series where a group of teens live parallel lives where everything's normal in the daytime, but when they go to sleep, they awake in some norse mythology-inspired fantasy world. The goddess Hel is the main villain, and a dragon steals their hearts and replaces them with rubies that will eventually break unless they do whatever, and I distinctly remember one part where the main character has a traumatic flashback to when he was molested at a summer camp. A book where a guy falls through a portal to an alien planet, and it's about how he manages to survive in the wilds. But it turns out it's not another planet, it's Earth in the post apocalyptic future, and he learns this by stumbling across some Coca Cola branded memorabilia. He meets another guy, who explains how civilization was wiped out by the Red Death, a disease that makes you bleed to death out of every pore, and in the end he finds a portal back to his own time, I think?
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Sep 8, 2016 04:32
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ShrewdOrganMerchant posted:Part of a series where a group of teens live parallel lives where everything's normal in the daytime, but when they go to sleep, they awake in some norse mythology-inspired fantasy world. this changes everything
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Sep 8, 2016 05:25
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Vaguely remember an alt history sci fi novel I read when I was 13 or 14 that opened in the 19th century with the premise of "one day, Europe and Africa and most of Asia straight up vanished and got replaced with a hosed up alien continent" and most of the novel was fascinating, lots of cool plotlines about people exploring the New New World and the weird poo poo they found there. Also a bunch of people found out by accident that they were immortal for some reason. It started to go off the deep end when it the immortals started turning into beetle people after like 50 years (???) and then in the last 30 pages or so there was the big reveal that, actually, the events of the whole novel had taken place within a simulation running on a galaxy-sized computer and the heat death of the universe had already happened and dude what the gently caress come on what is that
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Sep 8, 2016 09:31
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sinking belle posted:Vaguely remember an alt history sci fi novel I read when I was 13 or 14 that opened in the 19th century with the premise of "one day, Europe and Africa and most of Asia straight up vanished and got replaced with a hosed up alien continent" and most of the novel was fascinating, lots of cool plotlines about people exploring the New New World and the weird poo poo they found there. Also a bunch of people found out by accident that they were immortal for some reason. It started to go off the deep end when it the immortals started turning into beetle people after like 50 years (???) and then in the last 30 pages or so there was the big reveal that, actually, the events of the whole novel had taken place within a simulation running on a galaxy-sized computer and the heat death of the universe had already happened and dude what the gently caress come on what is that Darwinia! And that ending really is... something...  Query: I think this one might have been a picture book, or at least for very young readers. It takes place in a magical land where the people are humans by day and animals by night. There was one girl who stayed human at night and she had to find a wizard to help her "unlock" her animal form or something. (I have a feeling this one is going to have a completely unintuitive title.)
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Sep 9, 2016 04:51
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ShrewdOrganMerchant posted:A book where a guy falls through a portal to an alien planet, and it's about how he manages to survive in the wilds. But it turns out it's not another planet, it's Earth in the post apocalyptic future, and he learns this by stumbling across some Coca Cola branded memorabilia. He meets another guy, who explains how civilization was wiped out by the Red Death, a disease that makes you bleed to death out of every pore, and in the end he finds a portal back to his own time, I think? The Transall Saga, by Gary Paulsen, most famous for writing Hatchet. I remember thinking this book owned when I read it as a kid but I'm sure it was garbage.
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Sep 9, 2016 07:12
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