Let’s Talk Bookish: Childhood Favourites

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022.

Let’s Talk Bookish February 23th:
Do You Ever Reread Childhood Favourites?
(Jillian @ Jillian the Bookish Butterfly)

Prompts: What were some of your favorite books when you were younger? What books got you into reading? Do you ever go back and reread those books? What do you remember loving most about your childhood favorite books?

Some of the earliest non-picture books I remember picking up were The Chronicles of Narnia. We didn’t have many kid-friendly books at home, so most of my reading was either books I’d been gifted that I’d reread over and over, or books from the library. I had a boxset of the Narnia books, and read through the series multiple times. I also really enjoyed Horrible Histories, which I borrowed from my brother, along with his Goosebumps books, when I was feeling a bit brave, though I got more into Point Horror as I got a bit older. The series that did grip me the absolute most as a kid was Harry Potter – I did reread them when younger, but they are unfortunately hugely tainted for me now (which is why I very rarely mention them on the blog, too).

The other books I really enjoyed were those by Jacqueline Wilson and Meg Cabot. Although I liked Princess Diaries, it was Cabot’s more paranormal series’ I was drawn to. With Wilson, anything she put out I was keen to read.

The books that really got me into reading initially were Horrible Histories, Jacqueline Wilson, Harry Potter and books by Roald Dahl – again, a boxset I borrowed from my brother, though I eventually had my own set of Dahl’s works for slightly older readers. And, of course, I loved the Magic Key series we read through school.

Usually, I loved escaping to somewhere fantastical. Especially if the characters involved were ‘just like me’ – ordinary kids living ordinary lives until something extraordinary happened to them. As a kid, too, I particularly liked stories that involved evacuees – my gran told us stories of her own experience being evacuated, but I loved reading about the kids in Narnia, escaping war only to find themselves in a different kind of battle. Carrie’s War was another favourite, which had the bonus – for me – of being set in Wales. I liked Goodnight, Mr. Tom and Back Home by the same author, about a young girl who is sent to the USA during the war, and returns in 1945, struggling to fit in with a completely different way of life.

Books also appealed if they involved animals in some way, but as I got older I definitely leaned more towards fantasy (His Dark Materials) and paranormal (a couple of Meg Cabot’s series), along with books with characters who were maybe similar to me but with different experiences – often in Jacqueline Wilson’s books, she wrote for kids who came from divorced families, or lived in hotels because they had no family home, or came from care homes.

I was always a curious kid, so books that gave me an idea of how other people lived or exposed me to experiences and situations outside my own always grabbed me. Whether it was evacuees travelling to a distant, fantastical land (whether Narnia or the States) or teenage girls who could see ghosts, or kids who lived in a Bed and Breakfast, or the Horrible History series that dived into parts of history teachers didn’t tell us about, the things I loved most about these books were the way they absolutely transported me somewhere else, and I suppose not much has really changed since!

Occasionally, I do go back and reread some books from my childhood, however I try and experience them in a different format and I’m more likely to reread a book from when I was a teenager, as I tend to still have those ones! Certain books I do think I wouldn’t get anything from reading them now, and I almost don’t want to taint the memory of them! That’s not to say I wouldn’t in the future, but who knows. The last book I reread was His Dark Materials, but it was more that I wanted to refresh my memory of the books themselves after watching the BBC series. I did listen to a full cast audio for that, but with the amount cut out of those it’s still on my list to reread at some point.