Welcome to Gaia! ::

hmm i was an odd child =/ I was hardly ever read to or read myself, but I do remember a few.
Green eggs and ham (used to have it memorized when I was around 5...)
sweet valley kids (a serious of twins)
and i forget to title but there were many of there small horror books (not goosebumps, but i remember one story this woman wouldn't take off her scarf in the end she does and her head rolls off xD (read that to my 2nd grade class...) probably thought i was crazy
that's about it for me

Stine is still a favorite author of mine, and I still love Goosebumps. I admit that there are better authors, but I like his cheesy horror and sense of humor...plus he helped me learn what works (Name one of the more popular titles, like Night of the Living Dummy, The Haunted Mask, or Monster Blood. There is a reason why they are popular) and what does not (I still loathe My Best Friend is Invisible. Boring book, bad set-up, lousy characters, cruddy ending. To be fair, that was toward the end of the original series when Scholastic was forcing him to churn them out faster...but this still holds the title of the first book I ever wanted to chuck at the wall and was so boring I was literally trying not to fall asleep through it. I mean, there is bad, and there is bad).

I do love that Stine is willing to play around with and break tried-and-true formulas in his books, as evidenced by the new HorrorLand revival. I love how he set me up expecting a pattern, then broke it halfway through the books (like, he went in-depth with the Haunted Mask in Scream of the Haunted Mask in terms of where it came from and its history, and in Revenge of the Living Dummy, he sets you up to think Slappy is up to his usual tricks...then throws a curveball so fast it actually made me go "What the <********>?!" out loud). There was still predictability and traces of the usual patterns, and of course, mockable material, but I love how his stories change and evolve so that new fans are intrigued and old fans can come and see what new things he does with his plots and characters.

I loved and still love just about anything by Bruce Coville. Coville always had awesome concepts, good characters, and he writes in a variety of genres, so I got my fixes on fantasy, horror, and sci-fi just by reading his books. I never was a big sci-fi fan, but I will sit down and read Space Brat and I was a Sixth Grade Alien any day. I really love his fantasy series, though. I always adored the Magic Shop series because of its themes and how he goes in-depth with the Aesop, but in a way that you do not feel it was hammered into your head. The Skull of Truth has got to be one of the biggest inspirations for my own writing to this day.

Roald Dahl always had a lot of quirkiness in his stories, and I love his sense of humor. He makes me get all nostalgic and whimsical whenever I read one of his books. I need to get around to reading the stuff he has for adult audiences, though.

Lois Lowry recently made my list with Gathering Blue. I read her Anastasia Krupnik series as a kid. Okay books, but not nearly as memorable as other authors. I do want to read The Giver, though. It is on my list of "books I must read before I die."

I have only read Louis Sachar's Wayside School series, but even as an adult, it still makes me laugh.

I did read some Christopher Pike (Spooksville, which I guess is a variation of Stine's Fear Street). Liked him, but he is not as memorable to me as Stine or Coville.

Harry Potter, of course, was big for me and still is. I remember I was mocked for it in junior high...until it turned out Harry Potter was required reading for a challenge at the end of the year. I got every Harry Potter question before the teacher finished asking it. No one mocked me after that. >D

I always loved books of fairy tales and folklore. I am very partial to Hans Christian Anderson, though I like the Brothers Grimm. I want to get more collections of these. There are plenty of good old stories that are rich with inspiration.

I am amazed no one has mentioned Lemony Snicket yet, though. A Series of Unfortunate Events has got to be one of the best children's series written in a while. I love the backhanded narrations, and I do love that in one of the books, he tries to derail you from the misfortunes by describing the water system in painful, boring detail so you will fall asleep and not read the rest of the book. And I am amused that this actually worked on me. XD

But still, in general, I like Snicket's personal touches on the series, and his easily discernible voice. You can read a passage and immediately know it is him. I also like his cleverly hidden references to things that would go over children's heads (such as Sunny's use of "Merd").

[/gush, because this is already ridiculously long]

There were sixty-two in the original series, forty-two in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, twenty-five in the Goosebumps 2000 series, various numbers of collections of books, and the new HorrorLand series is currently...fifteen books and counting (though, right now I kind of count the first twelve as its own series, seeing as the story ended with twelve. I do not know if thirteen+ will have a combined story line like the first twelve books, or if they are all separate stories).

I think some of the later Goosebumps (original series) books might have been ghostwritten, but I have no evidence. I do think that certain titles are always going to be 100% Stine, though. *cough*Night of the Living Dummy and its sequels/spin-offs, because Stine has said Slappy is fun to write*coughhackcough*

I think my only real complaint with the original series were continuity errors (read Haunted Mask, then Haunted Mask II and note how Carly Beth's little brother---who was important in the first book---just randomly disappears in the second...) and how bad some of them got (the aforementioned My Best Friend is Invisible. Chicken Chicken also qualifies, and is in fact Blogger Beware's most hated book, for good reason). I find Stine's later works are much better, probably because he learned from the stinkers in the original series.

I think I read Snicket when I was eleven or twelve, so barely within the "childhood" age. That was like, ten years ago; I feel so old. >>

I like looking in the children's section in bookstores, personally. Pretty pictures and stories I can actually get through in the half-hour-or-so that I usually need to kill. XD

I do remember I read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in third grade (and I chose to read it; my teacher was not a sadistic b***h, and I have always been higher than others in terms of my reading level). I hated it, and remember struggling through it, though I plan to try reading it again since I am older and wiser.

I also remember reading some Babysitter's Club: Little Sister books. I barely remember them. I think I was very "meh" with them and used them as a placeholder until I could find something else to read.

My other big reads were any--and I mean any---books on the supernatural. Vampires, witches, ghosts, haunted houses, poltergeists, UFO's, urban legends, Big Foot, the Bermuda Triangle, other unsolved mysteries---you name it, chances are I have read about it (and may or may not still remember a ton of miscellaneous facts about it). I remember leaving the local library with a large stack of books on those varying subjects (which, oddly enough, my mom was okay with, yet Goosebumps were banned for ugly covers---that I read anyway and simply hid them under my pillow because I knew my mother never looked there. >3 Sense, my mother made none).

When I was really little, though, I had a ton of those Little Golden Books, things by Dr. Suess (and varying authors/Disney books that were roughly the same size), a lot of Sesame Street books, and a few collections of bedtime stories.

I'm rereading one of my childhood reads right now. I think I first read this book and its sequel in late elementary school. I remember getting it from the library several times--then they eventually weeded the books from the collection. And they went out of print!

But I bought used copies online years later, and now I'm reliving the past.

The books are called Winter of Magic's Return and Tomorrow's Magic by Pamela F. Service.

For some reason, they just stuck with me and I had to have them.

They're set 500 years after the nuclear holocaust has devastated most of the earth. A boy and a girl live in a boarding school in Wales and meet an older boy with no memory of his past. They all eventually discover that he's the wizard Merlin, who has survived for centuries by enchanting himself to age forward and backward while trapped in a mountain. When someone blows up the side of the mountain, he's released as a young child and taken to the boarding school. They begin a quest to find Avalon and bring back Arthur to unite the warring dukedoms of Britain.

I always liked King Arthur stories. Post-apocalyptic Arthur stories work, too. xd

The books are from the 1980s, but I just found out there was a 3rd one published in 2008. I'll definitely be picking it up now.