Childhood reading

[ladyofastolat]

I've just finished reading Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading by Lucy Mangan, which does pretty much what it says on the tin. Like her, I was a voracious reader who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, although she's a few years younger than me. However, the main thing that struck me was how little our childhood reading overlapped. I've had plenty of

Comments

[conuly]

Time and place - Blyton and Swallows and Amazons and Just William are unlikely to appear on American booklists unless the kid had a seriously Angophile parent/librarian.

[kalimac]

My reading more closely matches yours. The Hobbit is the book that changed my life, literally. Almost everything I am today is because I read The Hobbit at age 11 and then The Lord of the Rings. Watership Down wasn't published until I was 15, but I read it soon afterwards and ... man, that was good.

[leesa_perrie]

It's interesting to see how avid readers differ in what they read as a child! I read as much sci-fi as I could, which probably seemed odd to people back then. It's more accepted now that sci-fi isn't just a boy thing.

[themis1]

My reading list would be closer to yours, I suspect, although I also read every book in the house at the time, which included a matched set of Dickens (hated it, except Christmas Carol), Rudyard Kipling, a selection of cheap murder mysteries including some Perry Masons and Ellery Queens, my mother's copy of Gone with the Wind, and my brother's collection of classic SF. And yes, the Hobbit, which I found in the school library and which probably changed my life, as it did Kalimac's.