Damnit! Tamora Pierce!
Man, I love her books.
I’m actually rereading the The Circle Opens series at the moment.

I had Judy Blume in a longer first post, but I changed my mind because listing everything was really, really long.  And frankly I only read her stuff because it was popular, not because I particularly enjoyed it.

Don’t forget the Boxcar Children, or Choose Your Own Adventure, or Henry Reed, or From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, or zillions of others.

Boo - 09 April 2008 10:56 AM

Damnit! Tamora Pierce!
Man, I love her books.
I’m actually rereading the The Circle Opens series at the moment.

I re-read all of mine a little while ago.

Rosemary Sutcliffe is one of my all-time favourite authors. She wrote historical novels, most of them about the Romans.

Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

The Dragon and I just got back from the library, and we were able to find old hard cover copies of The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot and The Mystery of the Death Trap Mine. I didn’t realize that there are like 50 books in that series! (All by many different authors no less.) It took me a bit of time to come up with a search string that would ferret them out. (As well as going by an older book in the series that listed the titles of some of the others, but not the authors...)

Another series I ran across that I haven’t seen mentioned is the Tom Swift series of sci-fi adventures! Set in the middle of a space race between two mythical super-powers, they have titles like Tom Swift and his Flying Lab and Tom Swift In the Race to the Moon..and about a dozen or so others. I always enjoyed those books because they had a jules Verne kinda feel to them. It’s amazing to note how many of the things that they have discussed have actually come to pass. (Deep see submersibles, high speed boats. space shuttles, satellites, etc...) Not bad considering they were written in the 50’s!

Oh! The other series I have been looking for is the Sime/Gen series by Jean Lorrah. It describes a land where there has been selective mutation of human stock to produce two sub-species. Gen’s are pretty much normal, but simes are a sub-species that have tentacles that come out of their wrists at puberty which they use to feed off of the life energy of the gens. It’s really great. (In my opinion anyhow.)

I was always into anything interesting, be it history, philosophy, fantasy, sci-fi, or mystery. I too read the Encyclopedia Brown Series as well as Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew and such. (I was able to find a book of one minute mysteries by the author of the EB series this last winter. It brought back great memories of lying on my bed, reading the EB mysteries and trying to find the clue that I had missed in the story! )

Charybdis - 07 April 2008 06:20 AM

Carlotta is the only other person I’ve known who read the Three Investigators.  They were mostly good, though certain authors seem to have been better than others.

I seem to recall that there was one story in that series about a dragon terrorising a seaside town. . . 

MadCarlotta - 07 April 2008 08:07 AM

Want me to photoshop a sun in there somewhere Chary?

Ah, but it already has a son in it! 

DavePrime - 12 April 2008 03:33 PM

Another series I ran across that I haven’t seen mentioned is the Tom Swift series of sci-fi adventures! . . .Not bad considering they were written in the 50’s!

Some of them were written a lot earlier than that, too.  I have a copy that was printed in 1910.  So they’ve been around for a considerable while!

DavePrime - 12 April 2008 03:33 PM

It brought back great memories of lying on my bed, reading the EB mysteries and trying to find the clue that I had missed in the story!

The stories I read in that series sort of annoyed me and left me unsatisfied, as I was too easily able to see so many ways in which the “proof” could be so easily explained away by the evildoer.  But then, I suppose that the stories were written for kids.

Accipiter - 13 April 2008 09:45 PM

The stories I read in that series sort of annoyed me and left me unsatisfied, as I was too easily able to see so many ways in which the “proof” could be so easily explained away by the evildoer.  But then, I suppose that the stories were written for kids.

That and you are much too experienced an evil-doer to get caught in any of those ways…

Nettie - 07 April 2008 06:30 AM

There are a couple of books that I just can’t remember the names of and it’s driving me mental. One of them I was sure was called The key, the secret, the garden but it’s not The Secret garden. A young girl is sent to live with her Aunt during the war and she discovers a gorgeous garden out the back. She also meets a young boy who she plays with, thinking it’s the next door neighbour. It actually turns out the boy is a ghost and no one but herself can see him.

Actually, it sounds closer to Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. Incidentally, I’m reading The Secret Garden to my daughter as her bedtime book, she saw the book in a shop and asked to buy it, having seen and enjoyed the film a couple of days earlier.

The Secret Garden is a fabulous book—another of my favorites.

Well, acting on the glowing reviews of The Three investigators Series, I just finished reading my first book of that series, The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot Not bad.  Being the second book in the series, it introduces one to the characters at an early point in their adventures.

I was able to locate this and several other titles at the public library, but my search was hampered by the fact that the books have various and sundry authors!  (I think the next book I have is something like #24 or some such.) I will see if I can find any of the other titles as they become known to me.

I enjoyed it!  It was laid out well, and I can see how a young gentleman or lady would find the pacing and action in them riveting.  The book read quickly and without any of the major plot holes one finds in some other series that are all solved at the last minute in a slip-shod fashion.  All of the clues in the story were made evident early on and were worked into the story in an entertaining and reasonable fashion.  All in all a good read!

I also enjoyed the forward and after-word written by Alfred Hitchcock. 

I am seriously thinking of introducing it to my own 9 year old daughter.

(And yes, Jupiter Jones is an interesting character....)