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A Strange Aeon
Mar 26, 2010

You are now a slimy little toad
The Great Twist
Apparently Judy Blume also wrote for adults, I had no idea:

Wifey is set in a 1970's Jewish New Jersey community. The main character, Sandy, is a housewife who finds her life extremely boring while her kids are away at camp this particular summer. She comes to terms with the fact that she's not really in love with her husband and craves a more exciting sex-life. When a stranger makes regular visits to Sandy's yard to please himself, Sandy becomes oddly turned on and actually starts to look forward to his visits. It doesn't help that her husband is content with their infrequent love-making (if you can call it that), and refuses to believe anything is wrong in their relationship. Throughout the novel Sandy looks for ways to fill the void in her life, having freaky daydreams, contemplating a swinging lifestyle and even joining the local country club. The story takes a weird twist when Sandy beds a few guys, including her brother-in-law (who is also her gynecologist), to satisfy her sexual craving.

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Cornwind Evil
Dec 14, 2004


The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting
This thread is now the 'Talk about childhood books in general' thread.

Something else that's come to my mind, and like the Fudge thing, this isn't new to my adult brain. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Okay, Golden Ticket contest, saintly main character Charlie gets one, the other four are gotten by 'bad kids'. These bad kids?

Augustus Gloop, who's an avatar of sheer gluttony and found his ticket because he eats so much chocolate every day that his mother said it was inevitable he'd find one, and he literally found it the day after the contest was announced. Seeing how he's represented in the book and first film really shows how much the scale of is considered 'morbidly obese' has changed, especially in the Americas.

Veruca Salt, an incarnation of 'spoiled rich terror', who basically had her father buy her a golden ticket by having him buy truckloads of chocolate bars and turn his factories into bar opening centers until they found one. Definitely the worst of the 'bad kids', for various reasons.

Then we have Violet Beauregard, who is a 'bad kid' because...she chews gum. What? Even as a kid I was 'That's not a bad thing'. Is this some cultural change where chewing gum was once seen as a sign of delinquency and moral failing, like leather jackets? And finally we have Mike Teevee, who is probably more of an avatar of what the writer Roald Dahl disliked in entertainment (television), as he's so obsessed with television it's honestly amazing he managed to obtain one of the bars that had the golden ticket: all the other kids at least put forth some kind of effort to find them, Charlie included. I'll note that Dahl wasn't the only kids book author who was severely down on television: this thread brought up My Teacher Is An Alien series, and a plot device in that series is that aliens didn't like how fast humanity was advancing, so they introduced television to humanity to cause a societal 'brain-numbing' and slow them down, or something like that, it was revealed in the third book.

So all the kids are 'hoisted' by their sins. Gloop is so greedy he drinks chocolate right out of a chocolate river like a four legged animal, falls in, gets stuck in a pipe, and shot off into Wonka's pipe works. Violet insists on chewing an experimental piece of gum that tastes like a full course meal, but somehow the last part causes the human body to literally balloon into a berry transformation. Veruca wants a squirrel that Wonka has a bunch of, and tries to force the issue, and the squirrels toss her in the rubbish chute (her parents swiftly follow because they are stupid), with Wonka hoping the incinerator is turned off that day. And Mike Teevee, having not learned anything from what happened to Violet, forces himself into Wonka's experimental 'sent chocolate by television' system and gets shrunk down to only a few inches tall. Then at the end of the book we briefly see all the kids again, confirming none of them died, but there's one glaring aspect of each of their fates.

Gloop arguably comes out of it better, as he's now thinner/thin, because 'he got squeezed in the pipe', which isn't how biology works but whatever, and that probably hasn't fixed his overeating. But Violet and Mike get incredibly raw deals: Teevee was sent to be 'stretched back to size', but when next seen he's 'nearly ten feet tall and as thin as a wire', with Wonka saying 'They overstretched him, those foolish Oompa Loompas' (he also says that they can feed him special vitamins to 'fatten him up', but still), he's now seemingly permanently deformed because, man Roald Dahl sure thought television was horrible. And Violet has been successfully 'de-juiced'...but her skin turned purple during the process, and it's still purple, which Wonka outright says "That's what she gets for chewing that awful gum all day". But the worst one, the one who really could use a lesson in life to keep her from growing up into something just as bad, Veruca Salt?

Her punishment is she and her parents are utterly covered in garbage. Okay yeah that's drat unpleasant. But that's a lot more addressable than 'is now permanently purple' and 'might now be freakishly tall for the rest of his life'. I do wonder what Dahl was thinking, and if he had more British 'upper crust is superior' in his subconscious than he realized.

The Wiggly Wizard
Aug 21, 2008


Bonjour, stupid!

free hubcaps
Oct 12, 2009

A Strange Aeon posted:

Apparently Judy Blume also wrote for adults, I had no idea:

Wifey is set in a 1970's Jewish New Jersey community. The main character, Sandy, is a housewife who finds her life extremely boring while her kids are away at camp this particular summer. She comes to terms with the fact that she's not really in love with her husband and craves a more exciting sex-life. When a stranger makes regular visits to Sandy's yard to please himself, Sandy becomes oddly turned on and actually starts to look forward to his visits. It doesn't help that her husband is content with their infrequent love-making (if you can call it that), and refuses to believe anything is wrong in their relationship. Throughout the novel Sandy looks for ways to fill the void in her life, having freaky daydreams, contemplating a swinging lifestyle and even joining the local country club. The story takes a weird twist when Sandy beds a few guys, including her brother-in-law (who is also her gynecologist), to satisfy her sexual craving.

Judy Blume also wrote Forever... which is a pretty graphic book about teenage sexual awakening. It's really good and still pretty widely challenged in libraries.

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012
I must
I must
I must increase my bust

My mom got into Judy Blume (because I couldn’t give a poo poo about Johnny Tremaine), and I had the version with the menstrual belts. Needless to say I was dreading getting my period because those belts sounded horrific. Judy Blume wrote Blubber and that book was loving ROUGH. It’s great but it’s so hard to get through.

I also watched the Ramona tv show as a kid as well as read the books. It’s how I learned you can eat tongue and name a cat Chevrolet. Beverly Cleary died a few years ago at 104, goddamn!
https://youtu.be/mPtGFnIIkBw

I have read more Baby Sitters Club books than any human should and I am shocked I remember as much as I do from them.

However my all time favorite was Harriet The Spy. “Lady Hitler” is a favorite insult, and god I should get my copy from my mom’s. The Nick movie was also pretty good.

Dixville
Nov 4, 2008

I don't think!
Ham Wrangler
I remember reading most of the Ramona books. They were pretty boring in retrospect, I don't remember reading one more than once. I guess they went on for a pretty long time but I think I kind of outgrew them. I also remember some random book where a girl went to camp and she was afraid of developing pubic hair because it would show with a swimsuit. No idea what book that was but it made me nervous too. I also remember some book where the girl was gaining weight and she was afraid of being seen by her crush getting the low fat milk since I guess only fat people drank it? I have so many random memories of books I read but I don't remember what any of them were.

Rain Brain
Dec 15, 2006

in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

root beer posted:

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.

I had to read Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die in school, which was deeply upsetting (not Red Fern upsetting but real real close). My unhappiness was further compounded by the fact I confused him with Richard Peck and couldn't understand how one person could write a book I hated so much but also could produce the wonderful Blossom Culp series.

SatansOnion
Dec 12, 2011

another unironic Great Brain fan checking in. I wonder if I still have my copy of the one wherein he's sent to boarding school and basically becomes a preteen kingpin. when I was just a lil spring Onion I wished I could be that clever, and that kind of clever too, not like that pedantic dweeb Encyclopedia Brown

never really got into Cleary, though; just never really grabbed me, is all. (Probably because those books are supposed to be about reasonably normal girls, and not nascent goons like yours truly :v: .) I preferred to get books with titles like I Spent My Summer Vacation Kidnapped Into Space, go figure

credburn
Jun 22, 2016
A tangled skein of bad opinions, the hottest takes, and the the world's most misinformed nonsense. Do not engage with me, it's useless, and better yet, put me on ignore.
Anyone ever read Interstellar Pig?

I don't remember anything about it except I really loved it and it taught me what keelhauling was :|

Erin M. Fiasco
Mar 21, 2013

Nothing's better than postin' in the morning!



credburn posted:

Anyone ever read Interstellar Pig?

I don't remember anything about it except I really loved it and it taught me what keelhauling was :|

I LOVED that book! It was on a Summer Reading List and I read it on the title alone, along with The Outsiders which I also loved. I remember it was about some kind of interdimensional board game between humans and aliens I think? I have forgotten most of the details but it had such cool vibes and a really intense nighttime hide-and-seek scene or something.

RepeatingMeme
Dec 27, 2012


this place is not a place of honor

no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here

nothing valued is here

what is here was dangerous and repulsive to us

this place is best shunned and left uninhabited


Guts! Guts! Guts!

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
As mentioned, the Quimbys always seemed to be on the verge of bankruptcy and Ramona was sad when her mom slapped her dad in the hand with a spatula after someone forgot to turn on the fuckin crockpot in the morning.

I have to admit though, that one kid really pissed me off. Who is that "one kid"? I don't remember that little fucker's name. It was in the book where they got a new addition on the Quimby house and at show and tell or some poo poo, Ramona was all like "some guys came and chopped a hole in the side of our house" and when people asked her about it, the kid accused her of lying. Despite having seen the hole.

When she confronted him about it later, he was all like "you lied, they didn't CHOP a hole in the side of your house, they used saws and CUT a hole, so you're WRONG".

The kid was technically right but man did I ever want to stomp on that fuckin kids throat and jaw.

teen witch
Oct 9, 2012

Rain Brain posted:

I had to read Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die in school, which was deeply upsetting (not Red Fern upsetting but real real close). My unhappiness was further compounded by the fact I confused him with Richard Peck and couldn't understand how one person could write a book I hated so much but also could produce the wonderful Blossom Culp series.

Mentioning Where the Red Fern Grows unlocked a memory of my fifth grade class listening to my teacher read it out loud. When we got to the ending, it became a classroom of weeping kids. I’m certain doesthedogdie.com came from a kid who read that book.

The Wiggly Wizard
Aug 21, 2008


teen witch posted:

Mentioning Where the Red Fern Grows unlocked a memory of my fifth grade class listening to my teacher read it out loud. When we got to the ending, it became a classroom of weeping kids. I’m certain doesthedogdie.com came from a kid who read that book.

Someone in our class fainted when the death scene was read aloud lol

Maudib Arakkis
Dec 24, 2023

LEST I GET MORE "OWNED" FOR BEING "STUPID" I WILL SAY THIS IS CATEGORICALLY UNTRUE. IT IS OFTEN PART OF DIAGNOSIS AND STAGING BUT IS ALMOST USELESS FOR TREATMENT.
Cam Jansen and the babe Ruth baseball much? Click

Supreme Allah
Oct 6, 2004

everybody relax, i'm here
Nap Ghost
Encyclopedia Brown was my jam. Ohh that dastardly Bugs Meany :arghfist:

TITTIEKISSER69
Mar 19, 2005

SAVE THE BEES
PLANT MORE TREES
CLEAN THE SEAS
KISS TITTIESS




Supreme Allah posted:

Encyclopedia Brown was my jam. Ohh that dastardly Bugs Meany :arghfist:

And his gang, The Tigers. They should have called themselves The Teabags, they were always getting themselves into hot water.

credburn
Jun 22, 2016
A tangled skein of bad opinions, the hottest takes, and the the world's most misinformed nonsense. Do not engage with me, it's useless, and better yet, put me on ignore.

Supreme Allah posted:

Encyclopedia Brown was my jam. Ohh that dastardly Bugs Meany :arghfist:

I used to read an Encyclopedia Brown knockoff that had this weird conceit that, this kid was like a reporter or something, but his boss "liked puzzles," and so the kid would create jigsaw puzzles out of pictures he drew/took. And it was the reader's job, to, I GUESS cut out the jigsaw shapes from the pages of the book and then put them together?? I can't remember what these books were called but I enjoyed them (I never once cut out the jigsaw shapes gently caress that)

free hubcaps
Oct 12, 2009

The funny thing about red fern is you are sad as gently caress when the dogs die, but when the rear end in a top hat neighbor kid falls on an axe and gets disemboweled it's just like "eh he was an rear end in a top hat anyways"

The Bible
May 8, 2010

free hubcaps posted:

The funny thing about red fern is you are sad as gently caress when the dogs die, but when the rear end in a top hat neighbor kid falls on an axe and gets disemboweled it's just like "eh he was an rear end in a top hat anyways"

NGL, I kinda feel that in real life sometimes.

500excf type r
Mar 7, 2013

I'm as annoying as the high-pitched whine of my motorcycle, desperately compensating for the lack of substance in my life.

teen witch posted:

I must
I must
I must increase my bust

My mom got into Judy Blume (because I couldn’t give a poo poo about Johnny Tremaine), and I had the version with the menstrual belts. Needless to say I was dreading getting my period because those belts sounded horrific. Judy Blume wrote Blubber and that book was loving ROUGH. It’s great but it’s so hard to get through.

I also watched the Ramona tv show as a kid as well as read the books. It’s how I learned you can eat tongue and name a cat Chevrolet. Beverly Cleary died a few years ago at 104, goddamn!
https://youtu.be/mPtGFnIIkBw

I have read more Baby Sitters Club books than any human should and I am shocked I remember as much as I do from them.

However my all time favorite was Harriet The Spy. “Lady Hitler” is a favorite insult, and god I should get my copy from my mom’s. The Nick movie was also pretty good.

I forget when I read it, like 12 years old? 14? Either way those belts confused the hell out of me like what the gently caress is going on with girls

Rat Patrol
Feb 15, 2008

kill kill kill kill
kill me now
Did anybody else read Walk Two Moons? We read it in middle school and I didn't really "get" it then and when I looked up another book by the author, "Chasing Redbird" which takes place in the same universe, I got it even less. Looking back on the themes/imagery as an adult, I'm still not convinced I know wtf was going on and I don't think I'm interested in rereading to find out.

Both books were full of snake imagery and death by/because of snakes. Both main characters' grandmothers died and they both became weird wife surrogates to their grandfathers (in WTM the main character even mentions "our marriage bed" to her grandfather, while sleeping next to him, to comfort him, in CR she shares a weird call and response lyric thing with her gpa that her gma used to).

Both involve sad family secrets that are dealt with in the unhealthiest way possible. Also I seen to remember finding the names of the characters fuckin stupid even as a kid (tho the only one I remember is, one woman literally has the last name cadaver and the twist is main character's dad is dating cadaver because his wife is secretly dead)

Wtf were those books

Erin M. Fiasco
Mar 21, 2013

Nothing's better than postin' in the morning!



I loved Sharon Creech's books growing up, including Walk Two Moons. I actually got into trouble at school because of how much I read, and I very specifically remember my fifth grade teacher getting mad at me because I read that book before she assigned it in class. After Walk Two Moons I checked out Absolutely Normal Chaos, which until five minutes ago I thought was written after Walk Two Moons (because it was marketed as the diary of a girl who appears in Walk Two Moons, which it technically is, but it isn't exactly the "hey remember that scene where she had a stack of journals? Now you can read them too!" book it claimed to be), and I remember really enjoying that one. I also read Grandma Torelli Makes Soup, but the book I remember the most was Bloomability because I read it as I was moving to Italy for my high school years and it was all about ski trips and European excursions and such, and it was fun to first read about those and then do them myself.

We actually wrote a letter to Sharon Creech after reading the book for class, and she responded, even answering my question about the connections between Walk Two Moons and Absolutely Normal Chaos, and she talked about how she found it fun to set all her books around the connecting town of Bybanks, KY, and that it was a fun challenge to ground her books in the shared world.

William Henry Hairytaint
Oct 29, 2011



teen witch posted:

Mentioning Where the Red Fern Grows unlocked a memory of my fifth grade class listening to my teacher read it out loud. When we got to the ending, it became a classroom of weeping kids. I’m certain doesthedogdie.com came from a kid who read that book.

One of my favorite childhood books, and made me want to get a dog. I ended up with a 6 month old German Shepherd/something else mutt from a local animal shelter who I named Amy. She lived for fourteen years and was an extremely lazy but thoroughly loving and well behaved animal. So yeah, sad book, but definitely the catalyst of some good in my life.

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL
Feb 21, 2006

Holy Moly! DARKSEID IS!

free hubcaps posted:

Judy Blume also wrote Forever... which is a pretty graphic book about teenage sexual awakening. It's really good and still pretty widely challenged in libraries.

I never knew about this book and summary sounds…really normal? Like amazing how a book by one of the top children’s authors in the late 20th century is challenged for frank, realistic discussions about navigating sex as a young adult even including sexual vs romantic attraction and how it’s okay if your first “serious” relationship doesn’t last and it doesn’t make you a bad person. But you know, Biblical violence is a-okay!

The book that stuck with me most was “Nothing’s Fair in the Fifth Grade” and the sequel “Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You” because I related to the protagonist, a tomboy and budding delinquent. I wasn’t cool enough for the delinquency or the softball, but I was a tomboy with a learning disability, not that I understood that at that age. It’s the first books I recall where adults were as unreasonable as the ones in my real life.

William Henry Hairytaint
Oct 29, 2011



SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

I never knew about this book and summary sounds…really normal? Like amazing how a book by one of the top children’s authors in the late 20th century is challenged for frank, realistic discussions about navigating sex as a young adult even including sexual vs romantic attraction and how it’s okay if your first “serious” relationship doesn’t last and it doesn’t make you a bad person. But you know, Biblical violence is a-okay!

Well I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free

A Strange Aeon
Mar 26, 2010

You are now a slimy little toad
The Great Twist
Does anyone remember The Ear, the Eye and the Arm?

I vaguely recall them being mutant detectives in a sort of future city setting that had a walled nature preserve where I think a kidnapped kid was taken to.

BeastOfTheEdelwood
Feb 27, 2023

Led through the mist, by the milk-light of moon, all that was lost is revealed.
My jam in elementary school was Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, which was like a Celtic inspired high fantasy story. For those unfamiliar, the Disney movie "The Black Cauldron" is an adaptation of the first two books. Actually, The Black Cauldron was the second book in the series, but for the movie they combined the villain of the first book (The Book of Three) with the main villain of the overall series.

Rat Patrol posted:

Did anybody else read Walk Two Moons? We read it in middle school and I didn't really "get" it then and when I looked up another book by the author, "Chasing Redbird" which takes place in the same universe, I got it even less. Looking back on the themes/imagery as an adult, I'm still not convinced I know wtf was going on and I don't think I'm interested in rereading to find out.

Both books were full of snake imagery and death by/because of snakes. Both main characters' grandmothers died and they both became weird wife surrogates to their grandfathers (in WTM the main character even mentions "our marriage bed" to her grandfather, while sleeping next to him, to comfort him, in CR she shares a weird call and response lyric thing with her gpa that her gma used to).

Both involve sad family secrets that are dealt with in the unhealthiest way possible. Also I seen to remember finding the names of the characters fuckin stupid even as a kid (tho the only one I remember is, one woman literally has the last name cadaver and the twist is main character's dad is dating cadaver because his wife is secretly dead)

Wtf were those books

I think I read Walk Two Moons in sixth grade. That was the one where the main character says she is afraid of pregnant women, and then you find out later that she blames herself for her mother's miscarriage, right?

Powered Descent
Jul 13, 2008

We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

The book that stuck with me most was “Nothing’s Fair in the Fifth Grade” and the sequel “Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You” because I related to the protagonist, a tomboy and budding delinquent. I wasn’t cool enough for the delinquency or the softball, but I was a tomboy with a learning disability, not that I understood that at that age. It’s the first books I recall where adults were as unreasonable as the ones in my real life.

Was that the one where the protagonist finds out she's dyslexic? At one point she spraypaints graffiti on the school and almost gets caught because it's misspelled in a very dyslexic way. (Or am I thinking of completely the wrong book?)

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
Where the Red Fern Grows made me want to get some hound dogs and go out at night coon hunting.

Extra Large Marge
Jan 21, 2004

Fun Shoe
I read a lot of Gary Paulsen books, mostly having to do with survival in the woods (The Hatchet, The River, Brian's Winter) or at sea (Voyage of the Frog).

There was one that stood out though "The Car". It's about a 14-year-old kid with loser parents who end up leaving each other "Dear John" letters on the same night, thus accidentally abandoning the kid.

So he does what any other 14 year old boy would do: assemble a kit car in his garage that his dad owned but never got around to and hit the open road. Later he befriends some Army Ranger Vietnam veterans, I remember the book ending abruptly during a huge fight at a roadhouse.
 

A Strange Aeon posted:

Does anyone remember The Ear, the Eye and the Arm?

I vaguely recall them being mutant detectives in a sort of future city setting that had a walled nature preserve where I think a kidnapped kid was taken to.

I read that one too, pretty interesting. It took place in Zimbabwe in the 2100s which I thought was neat.

root beer
Nov 13, 2005

Extra Large Marge posted:

I read a lot of Gary Paulsen books, mostly having to do with survival in the woods (The Hatchet, The River, Brian's Winter) or at sea (Voyage of the Frog).

In the small reading group I was in (four of us, we were ~gifted~), we did a unit where we’d read books like that with kids who’d been lost in the wilderness in some way, like Hatchet or Island of the Blue Dolphins.

There was one called The Cay, about a white kid, Philip, from England—can’t remember whether he was privileged or just a regular white kid—whose ship wrecked on the coast of an island in the Caribbean in the inter-war period of the 20th century. In the wreck he was struck by a load-bearing wooden plank and left blinded. He was taken in and cared for by an old guy, Timothy, who’d been, can’t totally remember, a slave or the son of a slave. It ended with Philip being rescued after a hurricane hit the island, and Timothy died protecting him, basically being sandblasted by debris carried in the storm winds.*

I don’t know if it’d be well-received these days because Timothy was written with a heavy Afro-Caribbean accent, but I liked his character anyway and was super bummed by the ending. I don’t remember whether I’d read the sequel, in which Philip revisits the island—or even if there was a sequel and I’m just thinking of Hatchet, where in the sequels the kid definitely returns to the wilderness where he’d been stranded.

There was another book, called Homecoming, about a few kids whose single mother left them, and they eventually catch up to her to learn she is schizophrenic and in a catatonic state. Looking back, I wonder if our teacher was going through something because, drat, what a weird theme we were dealing with in that class.

*I might not have all the details right because I’m pulling everything off the top of the dome here

root beer fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Feb 25, 2024

root beer
Nov 13, 2005

BeastOfTheEdelwood posted:

My jam in elementary school was Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, which was like a Celtic inspired high fantasy story. For those unfamiliar, the Disney movie "The Black Cauldron" is an adaptation of the first two books. Actually, The Black Cauldron was the second book in the series, but for the movie they combined the villain of the first book (The Book of Three) with the main villain of the overall series.

Hell yeah Chronicles of Prydain. I burned through that series in a week. Great steppingstone for me to other fantasy stuff like Shannara, Book of Swords, Wheel of Time, leading eventually to Tolkien. Now that I think about it, I’ve never even seen The Black Cauldron.

500excf type r
Mar 7, 2013

I'm as annoying as the high-pitched whine of my motorcycle, desperately compensating for the lack of substance in my life.

wesleywillis posted:

Where the Red Fern Grows made me want to get some hound dogs and go out at night coon hunting.

It was my favorite book growing up because I lived on the frontier and explored it with my dogs, hunting critters. Similar to My Side of the Mountain, very empowering to a boy. When I ran away from home at 10 I knew exactly what to do until it got dark out and I got scared of ghosts

wesleywillis
Dec 30, 2016

SUCK A MALE CAMEL'S DICK WITH MIRACLE WHIP!!
Anyone ever read the book "call it courage" it was about this son or grandson of the chief of some south pacific islanders who is a sissy boy because he saw his mom get killed at sea when he was a kid. All the other native kids make fun of him. At some point he somehow gets stranded on an island with his dog and has to live on his own. He fights the "feke' monster ( an octopus that I called the feeky monster when talking about it with friends) eventually builds a boat and gets chased off the island by cannibals and makes it back to his island where he finally has courage and everyone thinks he's dope and a real man

500excf type r posted:

It was my favorite book growing up because I lived on the frontier and explored it with my dogs, hunting critters. Similar to My Side of the Mountain, very empowering to a boy. When I ran away from home at 10 I knew exactly what to do until it got dark out and I got scared of ghosts

Yeah I had a bunch of woods behind my house as a kid and more down the street at the dead end, I loved going out in that poo poo and prowling around


edited for spelling. i was typing too quick on my phone

wesleywillis fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Feb 25, 2024

naem
May 29, 2011

there does seem to be an ecosystem of children’s books and entertainment that transitions to young adult books/entertainment and for the offspring of the upper middle class and better that sheltered, comfortable reality where things are mostly safe, where everything exists to teach you a positive life lesson, might as well be the reality you live in until your parents privilege buys for you an affluent adulthood

I didn’t exactly grow up on the streets or anything but the transition to adult reality out of the metaphorical womb that is suggested to exist by educational entertainment I’d been exposed to hit a bit harder than it did for some I knew growing up

flubber nuts
Oct 5, 2005


ChickenHeart posted:

My Teacher Is an Alien was always the superior choice in that specific niche of grade school book bus fiction:



memory unlocked. i had the pc point and click game for the first book, my teacher is an alien, in like 1997. might have to get the books now for a nostalgia trip.

vegetables
Mar 10, 2012

naem posted:

there does seem to be an ecosystem of children’s books and entertainment that transitions to young adult books/entertainment and for the offspring of the upper middle class and better that sheltered, comfortable reality where things are mostly safe, where everything exists to teach you a positive life lesson, might as well be the reality you live in until your parents privilege buys for you an affluent adulthood

At least in 90s Britain there was also an ecosystem of harrowing children’s books which teach you the world is cruel and free of justice, which were the ones my parents would buy me.

And now I post on here, not coincidentally

Rain Brain
Dec 15, 2006

in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

teen witch posted:

Mentioning Where the Red Fern Grows unlocked a memory of my fifth grade class listening to my teacher read it out loud. When we got to the ending, it became a classroom of weeping kids. I’m certain doesthedogdie.com came from a kid who read that book.

I feel like I may have posted about this before but I moved around a lot as a kid and so was assigned Red Fern in 3rd grade and then had it read aloud to the class in 4th grade at a different school. I was the only kid who had read the book before and I remember sitting there eagerly anticipating the poo poo storm that was about to ensue as we got closer and closer to the end when, of course, every single kid in the class was going to lose it. I wasn't a complete psycho though, I was sobbing right along with everyone else when we got there.

The only book that made me as upset as a kid was Jacob Have I Loved, I remember lying on the couch weeping as I angrily read it because everyone was such an rear end in a top hat to the protagonist (and also because they threatened to drown a bunch of cats).

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redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

teen witch posted:

....(because I couldn’t give a poo poo about Johnny Tremaine)...

lol this thread had me thinking of old Johnny Tremaine. I gave a lot of shits about poor Johnny, with his injury and stuck working at a hot, dangerous forge all day. I remember thinking, well, school's not so bad compared to that....

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