Gather here to chat about your day & have fun with all your Imzy friends!
Did you read any books as a child that absolutely altered your world view?
Our book club activity is coming up, so I'm thinking about books :)
For me, it was The Bridge of Terabithia. I didn't know bad things could really happen, until that book drove it home. I cried for days.
And I got into a bad habit of flipping to the end of books...!




Oh god, you are TOTALLY the kid who can't help but flip to the end of the book! Can't wait for Christmas day, can you??
Ahahaha I'm the most impatient human being I know
Elly and The Impatients.
A band!
Totally obscure Canadian coming of age novel called Jasmin by Jan Truss. I actually hadn't been able to find it online until a couple weeks ago.
Oh, interesting!
Good Reads link if anyone is curious!
Definitely Bridge to Terabithia! Also Where the Red Fern Grows. 😢
Where the Red Fern Grows broke me.
:(
We read it in fourth grade. It was supposed to be read as a class. Me, being me, took the book home and read ahead. And broke down sobbing. Then we get to the end in class, and I broke down again. Because WHY would you make a class full of kids who have pets read that freakin book. Then I got teased for a week, and then we were supposed to watch the movie. And I refused.
And in sixth grade we were going to read Old Yeller. And I went up to the teacher and I flatly refused to read it. And he said I couldn't opt out of a class assigned book. And I said that it was against my religion to read it. He said there wasn't a religion that forbade Old Yeller. So I spoke to my mother and she wrote a note saying that it was against our beliefs to read it. I got assigned an alternative reading assignment.
You are my hero.
In this case, it's my mother. If I hadn't pushed it, I don't think she would have said anything one way or the other. But she absolutely HATED Old Yeller, so when I said that they were going to make me read it and I didn't want to she said she was willing to step in.
The same author who wrote Where the Red Fern Grows wrote a book called Summer of the Monkeys which has just as much heart and doesn't have the ending from hell.
Luckily I got to read Where the Red Fern Grows at home, but I remember I couldn't get it out of my head. It was a very overwhelming read for a child.
Well, Poe's short stories were quite influential on me as a child. The Masque of the Red Death taught me that not all stories had a happy ending ("and Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" didn't make me cry for days, but it stuck in my mind for a long while), but The Pit and the Pendulum showed me that I could still hope for one anyway. And The Gold Bug sparked my interest in code-breaking :)
Other than that, the abridged version of Tom Sawyer made me distrust all abridged stuff, but that was more because I told my dad I'd read Tom Sawyer and he started going on about a funny bit that wasn't in the book I just finished. It was his favourite book as a kid, apparently.
And a short story by Chekhov broke me out of an existential depression I fell into when I was eleven. It made me realise that I still felt that there were things which mattered and that I'd been wasting my time wallowing. I don't remember the title though. I wish I could find it again, or have time to read his other works.
What was it about? I used to be way into Chekhov
Hmm... There was an older man talking to a young student who also thought everything was pointless. The older man talked about his relationship with a married woman, I think. The student said that it was still meaningless, and the older man said something about how he'd fixated on the idea that there was no meaning in anything and all his thoughts were just variations on that, like cooking dish after dish using nothing but potatoes.
That's all I can remember.
Could it be Lights?
http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1250/
Strangely, I don't think I've had that experience, which is strange since I was a very bookish kid.
Secret Garden.
Anne of Green Gables
I think I related to Anne more than any other person or character before or since. She's still one of my all time favorite characters.
Maybe Harry Potter because Hermione was described as having busy/frizzy hair and big teeth, and a bit of a weirdo who had trouble making friends. I related to that a lot because, at that age, that was pretty much a description of me.
Related: Before Bridge to Terabithia I had the habit of always reading the last chapter/flipping to the end of the book. My teacher told me not to, so I clearly ignored her. Read the ending, I threw the book across the bathroom. (The bathroom at age 11 was the only place I could read without interruption)
I have never read the ending of a book early since that day.
I have the opposite problem now!
Little Women, for showing me there was no such thing as a "right" way to be a girl.