The Influential

My homeboy Surya recently got me thinking about a lot of the things I read as a kid and there were a few books that stood out to me in the conversation, or rather they were the ones that bubbled up to the surface from so long ago.  So here's a list of some of the books or series of books that influenced me as I was growing up.

Some I found in the library at school, others were bought from the old Scholastic Fairs that would come to school for a week or two, and others were found at the library we'd go to every weekend. I remember a reading program called "Book It" that was involved with all of the local libraries, Pizza Hut, Dairy Queen, and some bank in Oklahoma City at the time. If you read "x" number of books you got a prize, if you read "x" number of books higher, you got a better prize, so on and so forth. Needless to say, our mother got us hooked on that program pretty early on. We'd spend hours in our rooms reading. One could make the argument that she was a good mother by enrolling us in this program and fostering the good habit of reading at an early age; I think she just wanted a quiet house for longer than half an hour (we were noisy, argumentative kids...pains in the ass for sure).

Ul de Rico - "The Rainbow Goblins"

Probably one of the craziest books I've ever read in my entire life. Also one of the most spectacularly visual. De Rico not only wrote the book, but he painted every page within. That's his art that you're reading AND seeing. Imagine that there are 7 goblins in the world, each a different color of the rainbow. Now imagine that these goblins survive by drinking up the pigment of rainbows that appear after storms. They catch the color in nets and drink it up like alcoholics. Now imagine that the undergrowth and root system of the natural world hears about your plan to steal the next rainbow and hatches a plot to save the rainbow so you can't have it. This is that book. Here's just one of the many, many gorgeous pictures from inside:

Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators

This was a fun series of books. Three friends, who kept their "Headquarters" in a junkyard, investigate mysteries. The books were pretty longish for kids books of the time, but I'm almost positive I read every one of them. Every time we went to the library, I'd try to find more that I hadn't read before. Now I'm on the hunt to find them online and buy them all up again, but it looks like they're quite the collector's items and haven't been reissued. Not only did I read these, but I read almost all the old Hardy Boys books, Nancy Drew, and had nearly all the Choose Your Own Adventure books too. Now I wish I had held onto them all when we moved to Kansas City.

  Howard Pyle - "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood"

I couldn't recall one of the stories out of this book when asked, but I vividly remember staying up late at night reading it by moonlight on the top bunk of the bunk bed my brother and I used to share. I'm sure this idiotic practice was a good part of why I wear glasses today.

Norton Juster - "The Phantom Tollbooth"

God, this book was so good. A bored kid one day finds a box in his bedroom. In it, he finds a car and a tollbooth. He drives the car through the tollbooth and finds himself in a nonsensical world based on grammar, syntax, and proper use of English. In a strange way, this book is a very teachable one in that it actually helps to solidify a lot of the rules of English in the reader's brain while remaining an entertaining story. This will be required reading when I finally (if ever) have kids.

Shel Silverstein - "Where the Sidewalk Ends"

This book was forever checked out of the school library. If it was ever on the shelf, it wasn't there long. It wouldn't surprise me if this book had been checked out by every reading-aged kid in the school at least twice, if not three times. Some of the greatest pieces of poetry, limericks, and hilarious pictures to show up in kid lit. Shel Silverstein was a scary looking dude but wrote some really great stuff.

Donald J. Sobol - "Encyclopedia Brown" 

Apparently I had a thing for detective novels as a kid. Encyclopedia Brown was a super attentive boy who helps people around his neighborhood by solving minor crimes. The books were broken up into three separate (and sometimes interrelated) stories. Each story ended before the case was solved, leaving the reader to attempt to solve the puzzle (though the solutions were in the back of the book). I think I read all of these as well.




Feel free to leave a comment about any of the books you remember being influential to you as a kid. I'm actually reading more kid lit these days for no real apparent reason and I would love to check out some more.

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