My Favorite Children's Stories Today

When I was a kid, I loved to read. I devoured books in a matter of hours and searched for more. When I hit my horse phase, my reading habits developed an obvious preference for books that involved horses. Some of my favorites included The Boxcar Children series (I read the first one more times than I can count), the Pony Pals series, the Thoroughbreds series, Black Beauty, and the Black Stallion series (though, for some reason, I was a bigger fan of Flame's books than the Black's.)

Now, many years later, I've started hunting out those books I used to love to relive the magic. Unfortunately, in some cases, the magic is now gone.

Harry Potter
I'm going to do a complete review of the series once I reread the whole thing again. The later books I'm still fully in love with, but I'm starting to see the flaws in the earlier ones.


Tamora Pierce
She got me through middle school, then high school, and now she's getting me through college. I'm still just in love with her books as I was when I picked them up for the first time. I reread Realms of the Gods over exam week to give me a relaxing escape and, even though I was reading it for about the twentieth time, I still enjoyed every minute of it.

The Boxcar Children
The simplicity of these threw me off at first, but as I got farther into the story, I began to enjoy it more. They're just such sweet and simple stories. I'm thinking that, unlike Tammy, I may have outgrown these long ago and maybe I should pass them on to my niece for when she's old enough to read them.  

Heartland
I'm really enjoying re-reading these after all those years. Books were my biggest connection to horses when I was a kid and these were some of my favorites. I never actually read the whole series as a kid and I only own a few of them, so I'm thinking about buying the entire series so that I can read the whole thing in order.

Thoroughbreds
This series was written created by one author and then continued by several others. It really shows in the later books. The horse racing -- for the most part -- is really well-done, but I have trouble believing in some of the plot leaps.

Have you reread any of your childhood favorites recently? How did you feel about them? 


Comments

Unknown said…
Harry Potter FTW! That is all. :) Looking forward to your review of the series. I've talked to many that feel like you do about the early ones. For me, I think it's an issue of a couple of things:

1) I've just read them so many stinking times there's very little "magic" left in them. So I nitpick instead of read. 2) The first two movies killed the first two books for me. I've seen the movies probably 12 times each (maybe more ... don't judge!), and they do an incredible job of capturing the books in my opinion. Beginning with the 3rd movie, there's a LOT left out from the translation from book to film. So I can still read those and "feel" something new each time.

In fact, if I run across someone who hasn't read them (yes, they do exist) I always have them start with the 3rd, as opposed to the first, if they've seen the movies.

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