Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
Yes, I remember my favorite book from childhood.
End of post, right? It was a yes or no question today…
In all seriousness, it’s really hard to pick my favorite book. I seem to recall I loved every book I read. There were three though that stick out in my mind.
First, was Danny and the Dinosaur by Sid Hoff
I don’t know why this one was so beloved. Even when I could read chapter books, I still liked to go back and read this. In fact, when my oldest nephew was born, I bought a new copy of this book to give him as a present on his 1st birthday. I wrote a sweet message on the inside cover. I don’t know if that punk 26 year old still has it, but maybe.
Another favorite was this particular Berenstain Bears book. Yes, Berenstain. I heard about the Mandela effect with these particular bears. I’ve always known they were Berenstain and not Berenstein.
I still have most of my collection of these books. This one was my favorite though because I really enjoyed the end when Mama Bear helped them clean their room and it was all nice and neat and organized. I myself was a very obsessively neat and organized little kid. My sisters would go in my room and change things to see if I would notice. They’d pull my desk drawer out half an inch, or turn something around on my bookshelf. I always noticed. The organization nerd in me loved this one.
Finally, there’s this book:
It was one of those books that my grandparents had made with my name and the names of my family and pets in it. I loved reading it simply because it was a story about me.
On my shelf now, I have other books from my childhood. The whole Little House on the Prairie series that my grandparents gave me. Though I only read one of them because of that project in my child literacy class in college I mentioned yesterday. There are other chapter books. Lots of my original Goosebumps books. I hate that I gave away all of my other R. L. Stine. Rows and rows of his Fear Street books. I had to buy one on Amazon so I could re-read one and remember what they were about.
I’m thinking all deep and nostalgic right now. It makes me think of one of my favorite movies, “You’ve Got Mail”. Meg Ryan’s character owns a children’s book store and gets carried away telling Tom Hank’s character about how “when you read a book as a child it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does”. It’s a made-up movie, but I absolutely agree with her. I don’t know exactly how these books became a part of my identity. Yesterday’s question kind of refers to this. Those books became a part of my identity sort of, in that I think about them often. These childhood books though, I also just remember them fondly and have very vivid memories of reading them over and over as a kid. Maybe that’s a part of my identity as a reader. That’s a good possibility too.
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