#21: Favourite book from your childhood

Wow, childhood is really very broad.

I'll start with early childhood. My favourite book when I was three would have been Dr Seuss' Hop on Pop. I have not seen this book for more than 25 years and I still remember the pictures and some of the content ("We like to hop on top of pop / STOP", "Pup up, Brown down" > this has to be a cricket-related headline one day).

When I was able to read novels I was heavily into Enid Blyton. My word that woman was prolific. I read quite a lot of Wishing Chair and Faraway Tree books as well as most of the Famous Five series, but my favourite was the Adventure series. I had a three-book omnibus of The Island of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure, and The Valley of Adventure. I can count an omnibus as my favourite book, can't I?

(Oh my! They have all eight books in the series for the Kindle. My omnibus was so careworn I think my mum made me throw it away. I'm so tempted to buy them... UPDATE: Blytons bought)

In my early adolescence I read Babysitters Club books, Nancy Drew novels and those schlocky horror stories by people like RL Stine, DE Athkins and Christopher Pike. The one I re-read several times, because it had such a beautiful ending, was Carolyn Keene's The Clue in the Crumbling Wall, #22 in the Nancy Drew series. And you know what? I only just discovered via Wikipedia that Carolyn Keene was a collective pseudonym.

Sorry to disappoint you, I was not some kind of freak wunderkind who read classics at the age of 10. For some reason people still see me like that.

Day 22 – Favourite book you own
Day 23 – A book you've wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favourite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favourite book of all time

I'd like to thank Sarah Jansen for her tweet about this, as well as The Literary Gothamite and Confessions of a Book Lush for the good idea.