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Grey Cat posted:I was probably reading something more like: The "there is no 13th floor" joke makes a lot of sense in hindsight, since a lot of buildings skip that number. I didn't pick up on that until I was older.
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Feb 22, 2024 21:55
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I remember the Peter and Fudge stories, especially how Fudge's parents gave him the talk, then he saw a pregnant lady on the bus and said "I know what's inside you and I know how it got there" so she moved to another seat. My go-to children's books were the Bruno & Boots series, I just looked and it's up to 7 books. I read the first five, although the fifth one only once - it was never in the library. Did any fellow Canucks watch the TV movies based on the books? Any good?
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Feb 22, 2024 22:29
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I liked tales of a fourth grade nothing because it was about a little boy with untreated clinical depression. Fudge was a little poo poo. Maybe he'd be more bearable if they put him on ritalin, but I doubt it, he'd probably just use his newfound clarity and concentration to torment his brother in more complex ways he couldn't conceive of before. He'd probably slip his own meds into Peter's food so he can laugh when he has a panic attack and develops tachycardia. Nigmaetcetera fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 22:38
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ChickenHeart posted:My Teacher Is an Alien was always the superior choice in that specific niche of grade school book bus fiction: This book is amazing, the cover is some Roger Corman poo poo but the book is a dead serious contemplation on the nature of humanity. It includes poo poo like a scene where a soldier slowly, tensely and selflessly works to rescue a child from a battlefield before they both get vaporized by a bomb. The ending is pretty great too and has exactly a really kickass message presented in a really cool way. Bruce Colville covers would look like Goosebumps ripoff, but the stories were actually Dark and legit good from what I remember.
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Feb 22, 2024 22:38
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Bifner McDoogle posted:This book is amazing, the cover is some Roger Corman poo poo but the book is a dead serious contemplation on the nature of humanity. It includes poo poo like a scene where a soldier slowly, tensely and selflessly works to rescue a child from a battlefield before they both get vaporized by a bomb. The ending is pretty great too and has exactly a really kickass message presented in a really cool way. Oh poo poo! This is the guy who wrote those books about that magic shop (The Skull of Truth; Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher). I remember liking those when I was in elementary school.
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Feb 22, 2024 22:54
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Have a copy of Bruce Coville's The Search for Snout here in my hands, and the illustrations are credited to his wife, Katherine Coville. Oh to be a husband-and-wife team making the weirdest kids media of the 90s
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Feb 22, 2024 23:13
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Wilkins Micawber posted:Then again I was more of a Problem Child 1-3 watching kinda kid. Now there's a smart Alec you can hang your hat on. I am literally the stocky, striped-shirted, spin-kicking bully from Problem Child 2
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Feb 22, 2024 23:17
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So anyway if you wanna https://youtu.be/aDTwO0TlwOU Looks like you can still buy some direct from Bruce himself here https://www.brucecoville.com/library/
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Feb 22, 2024 23:23
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Grey Cat posted:I was probably reading something more like: I adored this series. Even to this day, the chapter where a new kid shows up in a foul-smelling raincoat sticks with me. He's a total dick and smells so bad that someone takes his raincoat and throws it out the window only to find that he's wearing dozens of them. They keep pulling them off as his maniacal laughter continues to rise in pitch and eventually discover he was a dead rat trying to sneak into the classroom blew my grade-school mind. I'm also still just a little nervous about buildings that lack a 13th floor. BeastOfTheEdelwood posted:The "there is no 13th floor" joke makes a lot of sense in hindsight, since a lot of buildings skip that number. I didn't pick up on that until I was older. There was one. The builder forgot to put it there but there was one that students occasionally slipped into and couldn't escape. Wayside School did Backrooms decades before Reddit. The Bible fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 23:37
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Wilkins Micawber posted:There was one where they all went on vacation or something and they were playing softball (?) and there was some lady everyone called "when-in-rome" and like huh, is that the joke? I remember getting dinged on a book report for writing something like "then Peter played softball with When In Rome and . . ." and the teacher marked me down for a gibberish sentence. The injustice!
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Feb 22, 2024 23:54
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BeastOfTheEdelwood posted:The "there is no 13th floor" joke makes a lot of sense in hindsight, since a lot of buildings skip that number. I didn't pick up on that until I was older. It was the 19th floor that was missing
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Feb 22, 2024 23:57
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The Bible posted:I adored this series. Sammy! I think about Sammy a weirdly large amount. Something about him specifically being a "dead rat" in a whole bunch of smelly rain coats both intrigued me and freaked me out. I loved all of Louis Sachar's books growing up, and Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger was a favorite. That one had a substitute teacher who had an ear on top of her head that could read minds and she was mean because every partner she ever had broke up with her once they realized she had an ear on her head. It had a happy ending 
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Feb 23, 2024 00:08
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The Bible posted:I adored this series. Yes! I think about this way more often then objectively makes sense because even after a 30 odd years of reading other stuff it's still such a wild dénouement.
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Feb 23, 2024 00:08
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PizzaProwler posted:It was the 19th floor that was missing Whoops.
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Feb 23, 2024 00:09
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PizzaProwler posted:It was the 19th floor that was missing And it was the “Nineteenth Story.” As in, the nineteenth story of the book consisted of simply, “There is no nineteenth story. Sorry.”
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Feb 23, 2024 00:11
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Erin M. Fiasco posted:Sammy! I think about Sammy a weirdly large amount. Something about him specifically being a "dead rat" in a whole bunch of smelly rain coats both intrigued me and freaked me out. I loved all of Louis Sachar's books growing up, and Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger was a favorite. That one had a substitute teacher who had an ear on top of her head that could read minds and she was mean because every partner she ever had broke up with her once they realized she had an ear on her head. It had a happy ending It wasn't even the first time dead rats were referenced. It was established before that the dead rats lived in the basement of the school and conspired constantly to get to the 30th floor because the teacher was afraid of dead rats. Great worldbuilding for such a brief series. Hazo posted:And it was the “Nineteenth Story.” The chapter "What?" had me very confused for an embarrassing amount of time.
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Feb 23, 2024 00:36
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Hazo posted:And it was the “Nineteenth Story.” Reminds me of the Choose Your Own Adventure Book, Inside UFO 54-40 which had no way of escaping from inside the UFO.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:04
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I remember one of those Judy Blume books where a teenage girl goes to Miami and thinks some old dude is Hitler. I remember literally nothing else about that book.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:17
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PizzaProwler posted:It was the 19th floor that was missing There was a chapter where one of the kids ends up on the 19th floor and enters a classroom full of adults who got trapped on the 19th floor when they were kids. They memorized the dictionary all day. The girl went nuts and somehow escaped. Edit: the author visited my school once and read us a cut chapter where the kids are on the playground playing a game called "Murder the Man With the Ball". The Bible fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 03:18
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The Bible posted:Edit: the author visited my school once and read us a cut chapter where the kids are on the playground playing a game called "Murder the Man With the Ball". Original name redacted hardcore.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:32
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:I remember the Peter and Fudge stories, especially how Fudge's parents gave him the talk, then he saw a pregnant lady on the bus and said "I know what's inside you and I know how it got there" so she moved to another seat. Imagine Fudge saying "daddy put the big cummies in you". I read Theres Something Happening At McDonald Hall, Beware the Fish, and The War With Mr Wizzle. They were dope, but by the time I knew there were others I was in highschool and by that time they were kinda young for me. Also my high school library didn't have them anyway. I think I read the first two Wayside School books. They were pretty dope. BeBe Gunn's brother Ray was annoying. Or possibly fake. I forget.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:32
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In the third Wayside book, there's a story about the kids writing poems about a color. The one for purple has stuck with me. Purple by Allison The baby won't stop crying. His face is turning purple. Will anything make him feel better? I bet a burp'll.
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Feb 23, 2024 03:49
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There were 4 Wayside School books? I only knew of three. Found a boxed set online, picking it up. You know, for my son...
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Feb 23, 2024 04:08
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It's hard to explain, but graduating from Beverly Cleary books to Judy Blume books was somehow an important coming-of-age threshold, even though no one ever really commented on it.
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Feb 23, 2024 04:24
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There was a year of elementary school that Maniac Magee fever struck and every kid was checking it out of the library. Looking up the summary on Wikipedia, there was a lot we missed in the context. We just thought it was cool because this kid legend skipped school and had a poem made up about him.
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Feb 23, 2024 04:27
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counterfeitsaint posted:I read those books and the only thing I can remember was later he got a dog and named the dog Turtle in memory of his turtle. Toddlers do do lots of stupid things. There's not even any real malice in them, because they don't understand that concept yet. But even so, everything Fudge does falls under 'This can be fixed' or 'This can be water under the bridge' or 'This can be taken back'. But committing to swallowing a small turtle, especially since the kid never gives any sort of reason, not even a "I wanted to try to do it"? That's not a 'can be taken back' thing. But you're right. While I can't expect the parents to have predicted their kid might do that (You can predict that kids want to play with matches, it's a lot harder to predict 'This kid will eat his brother's pet...just because'), they probably should have punished him, not rewarded him for being 'all better' once the turtle is extracted (IIRC, they give him castor oil, and milk of magnesia, and prune juice, so I'm guessing they had him poop the turtle out) and then giving the older brother a dog as a "Sorry" consolation. Then again, book's over fifty years old. Things were different back then.
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Feb 23, 2024 09:13
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Judy Blume, more like Judy...Blume..
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Feb 23, 2024 10:12
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:
Never saw the movies but I loved those dumb books. Cathy & Diane  Also, cutesy newbar was a decent dude.
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Feb 23, 2024 10:14
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StrangersInTheNight posted:Have a copy of Bruce Coville's The Search for Snout here in my hands, and the illustrations are credited to his wife, Katherine Coville. Katherine Coville’s illustrations were p drat sweet iirc RC and Moon Pie posted:There was a year of elementary school that Maniac Magee fever struck and every kid was checking it out of the library. That was my favorite book in all of elementary school and I want to give my copy of it to my daughter but I doubt she’d read it. It’s okay though, I think she knows well enough the lessons it was trying to teach without reading it. I read a lot of books in these two series, The Great Brain (JD Fitzgerald) and Soup (Robert Newton Peck). Just a bunch of stories about tweens doing dumb poo poo at the turn of the century and the ‘30s, respectively. They were contemporary with Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume but I assume they were considerably lesser known. I read pretty much all of whatever they’d written that was published up to the late ‘80s. root beer fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Feb 23, 2024 |
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Feb 23, 2024 20:44
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Cornwind Evil posted:Fudge, for essentially no reason at all (or a dumb kid reason that basically translates to 'No Reason at all'), decides to eat Dribble. Yes, he just swallows the turtle (again, very small). And of course, all the attention and care goes to the brat who did this, first to get the turtle out, and then to celebrate him being 'all better', never mind he killed his older brother's pet. And then they give him a fuckin mynah bird in the second book I hated the TV show, somehow Fudge was even worse, that fuckin kid
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Feb 23, 2024 20:59
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Also of note are the unusual amount of children's books featuring cool rodents:  I remember grabbing this one in like, 3rd grade and being surprised at how incredibly-gory it was for something on the same bookshelf as Captain Underpants:  iirc, the first chapter opens with a sanitation worker having his eyes eaten-out in graphic detail
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Feb 23, 2024 21:27
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The Bible posted:i remember this. There was a series that followed a girl as well, Ramona I think. The first books in the series were from the perspective of Henry Higgins. His friend and neighbor was Beatrice "Beezus." Beezus's bratty annoying tag-along little sister was Ramona, similar Fudge. Later books switched to focus on Beezus, and then to Ramona. At that age I really liked, and I still appreciate, the perspective shifts and how Ramona matured into a likeable narrator.
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Feb 23, 2024 21:29
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Wayside was fun to reread to my daughter recently. There's some interesting and weird stuff in there, like when one of the kids brings an unhoused person in for show and tell and he answers their questions. And another kid goes down to the basement and meets some weird men in suits who show up sometimes. But they end up giving him freedom so from then on he doesn't have to follow the teacher's rules. And the hell of the 19th floor is really existentially scary for a kid book
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Feb 23, 2024 22:09
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ChickenHeart posted:
God i loved Paul Zindel books, but maybe because so many of his book titles were absolute bangers.
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Feb 23, 2024 22:13
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They were basically just YA melodrama but I enjoyed his Pigman books
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Feb 23, 2024 22:38
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ChickenHeart posted:Also of note are the unusual amount of children's books featuring cool rodents: Can't forget Redwall, for kids who are racist against stoats
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Feb 23, 2024 22:54
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ChickenHeart posted:Also of note are the unusual amount of children's books featuring cool rodents: you forgot the best one! 
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Feb 23, 2024 23:40
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I very vaguely remember a book where a brother and sister run away from home and secretly live in a museum at night.
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Feb 23, 2024 23:47
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The Bible posted:I very vaguely remember a book where a brother and sister run away from home and secretly live in a museum at night. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Mixed-Up_Files_of_Mrs._Basil_E._Frankweiler it's a good'n
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Feb 23, 2024 23:51
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Szyznyk posted:I remember one of those Judy Blume books where a teenage girl goes to Miami and thinks some old dude is Hitler. I remember literally nothing else about that book. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself! I loved that book, thanks for the reminder. I need to read that again.
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Feb 24, 2024 00:43
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