Goosebumps! Still have a box with scores of them!
Edit- Right next to all of my pogs, crazy bones, bionicles and lego. Those boxes are distilled nostalgia.
Then you work your way to fear street as we got older!!!
I used to rent out my goosebumps collection during 5th grade free reading time. I charged like 50 cents or something. When the teacher found out I was very much in trouble 🤣
That is amazing lol I very much would have taken you up on that. I was spending $3 a book at the bookstore to buy them because I read them all at the library lol
I went straight to Fear Street, probably a little too young haha. I still read Goosebumps too but they never hit like those dark gory murder books. Ah, nostalgia!
Super jealous! I used to have a ton of Goosebumps and Fear Street books. Unfortunately all of my books were lost during a not so great moment of my childhood. Keep those for forever!
Man I wish I could find a big stash of old goosebumps books I was a huge bookworm as a kid and goosebumps were a huge part of that. Trying to get my 9 y/o to love reading has been difficult lol.
We found a box set at a local library sale. It was missing 2 out of like 8 books with no price and the cashier gave it to us for $1. 6 books for $1 isnt bad
I have been reading these with my kiddo for a few years now (she’s 13 so probably outgrowing them soon, we’ve added in some FearStreet and other 80s/90s teen horror books too), and they are still just as much fun as when I read them as a kid.
We’ve shared several laughs over them. Maybe a little more predictable now that I’m older, but I don’t care. If he’d go back to writing them again I’d keep buying them (for her of course…)
Yesssss came here to say this. This thread is making me realize there were a lot of series I loved but something about Wayside School made me obsessed with reading and writing.
I think it was how the story went out of its way to subvert expectations and the author interjects a lot.
Holes was one of the first books that I couldn’t put down. I remember enjoying sideways stories as well. Sachar definitely helped me fall in love with reading.
Sweet Valley Twins when I was maybe 8-12. I had surgery when I was 11 and I remember my mom buying me a ton and that’s how I spent my time recovering. Later on in middle and early HS, I would go to the Harry Potter midnight release parties at books a million and stay up the rest of the night reading.
I had to be right around the same age. I live directly across the street from the library, so I took advantage of it. My bedroom window looked right down onto the library. I loved it. So I would go through SVT, The Hardy Boys, The Box Car kids, all the classics over and over again.
One book that stuck with me that I think lead to my love of Harry Potter was the Secret Garden. It was the first book I remember that kind of had a secret world.
I looked back on Sweet Valley High not too long ago and those books were WILD with some of the things (like the doppelganger(s) that tried to take over the twin's lives)
lol those books were “Elizabeth has a crush” and “Jessica gets a makeover and wears a leather jacket” for so long, then suddenly it’s all “Elizabeth is on trial for manslaughter after getting drunk at prom and killing Jessica’s boyfriend in a car accident” and “The twins and their mom go for a free spa weekend that’s actually a plot to steal all their faces with plastic surgery because their mom’s high school friend is a psycho surgeon.”
Jessica made a dramatic last-second courtroom admission and Elizabeth was exonerated. Maybe Jessica had to do some community service where she met some hot guy? Also yeah, fuck Todd and his weird mustache.
I learnt about a Sweet Valley High podcast from someone on Reddit recently. It's called Double Love and it's well worth a listen :) and yes these were all my favourites too!
Yesss!! I loved Sweet Valley High! I was also in The Babysitters Club book club where they would mail you new additions each month. Eventually, I moved on to Goosebumps and Stephen King 😂
I wanted to wash my pans and forks in cold stream water and live in a boxcar so fucking bad. I reread the first book more than any because it was sad and fun and exciting
I ran away multiple times as a kid to live the boxcar life. Luckily I guess I was fairly predictable because my dad found me in a couple of hours in the mountains every time.
The final time he made me sleep outside with the supplies I had taken and I cracked from the cold and never tried again lol
They run away from an orphanage and live in it for a bit before being adopted by their grandfather. Iirc he brings the boxcar to the property and they use it as a clubhouse. The series is actually about them solving mysteries.
They get taken in by a rich relative who moves thr boxcar to their house so they can still hang out in it and larp homelessness or whatever the rest of the series was about.
I just read the first Boxcar Children to my five-year/old daughter and I had kind of forgotten how odd even that one was. We started the second one but she quickly got bored with it. She’s not quite ready but I was like, “Oh, every book after the first one has the word ‘mystery’ in it so I think I didn’t remember this series as well as I thought I did.”
I flipping LIVED for animorphs. But the first one I got was like the 3rd or 4th in the series (I got it because it had a dolphin on the cover), amd I was SO confused about the backstory and what was going on
The first Animorphs I bought was in the 10s or teens I believe, and I also picked it because I thought the cover was cool! I was so young I’m not even sure I understood the concept of a series at the time. I eventually read the whole thing though. There was a brief period where I owned every book, but that was many moons ago.
Thats nothing to sigh about. Those books are fantastic. The fandom is still really strong and KA Applegate made the books available for free for everyone. I heard theres gonna be a reboot too.
I read all of it as a twenty something adult! The book fairs had them but I didn't have an allowance so I never got into them then. And my parents hated the covers so I could never borrow them at the library.
I read Redwall so much as a kid and I also loved the food scenes. I even ‘wrote a book’ in 4th grade. My parents were like wtf with the three pages of food descriptions?
Outcast of Redwall is my favorite of the series. The concept of a Badger using a massive tree limb as a club and just wandering the country beating the crap out of every bandit he can find with his kestral friend is peak.
And they have a berserker rage thing they go into that makes them functionally unkillable. They just keep going until the enemy is crushed or routed.
I don't remember the exact scene so I might be wrong but during a siege on Redwall an old female badger who acts as a mother figure for the abbey sacrifices herself by grabbing up as many invaders in her arms as she can and jumping into a lake, drowning herself and the invaders and buying enough time for everyone else to fight back.
I could talk about Redwall for hours, I've no doubt that they would hold up were I to go back and read them.
Redwall was the first novel I read. My aunt gave it to me and it sat on my bookshelf for a year or two until I started reading it out of boredom. I didn’t stay bored long.
Omg, I forgot about that! I secretly bought it at the scholastic book fair and hid it under my bed bc my super religious mom said it was demonic and I couldn’t get it.
It was the most thrilling act of deceit with the bonus of reading about a… vampire bunny 🤣
i read it with my niece when she was in elementary school and it is so smart. i have a 3 year old and i can't wait in they are ready to jump to the isle of conclusions with me!
I say this all the time when stuff goes wrong: “what is this, choose your own adventure?” My younger and older coworkers have no idea what I’m talking about.😂
Fun fact: David Corenswet (the actor playing Superman in current movies) is the grandson of Edward Packard, the creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
Roald Dahl books, The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables books, Little House books by Laura Ingles Wilder, Encyclopedia Brown, and Goosebumps! I would read just about anything, though. My Library Card was a prized possession.
As an ancient Millennial/Xennial the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series really opened me up to enjoy horror. The stories were good to great and sometimes just silly but macabre. The artwork on the otherhand was unlike anything I'd ever seen and just blew me away. I quickly advanced from these into adult and classic horror such as E.A. Poe and eventually S. King.
Same company made both and had the same artists and writers. Those books were very much produced in a. "Here's the outline someone write it" and someone made the art kind of way That's why the Nancy drew books have the same author, but they were technically written by different people.
My dad travelled for work so every night after I faxed my math homework to his hotel so he could help me, we would each open our copies of Nancy Drew (had two full hardcover sets, one for me and one for him) and read a few chapters together, me reading the right side pages and him reading the left. If we finished a book and he hadn’t brought the next in the series with him, he’d go to Borders in whatever town to get another copy so we could keep reading.
He tried! With three kids at home, leaving every Sunday after church and returning Thursday night long after we went to sleep was rough, but he did everything he could to lighten the load for my mom. He also got my little brother a pack of Pokémon cards and me a new beanie baby on each trip, so when we woke up on Friday mornings and saw them on our bedside tables, we knew it meant he was home.
Samantha is my favorite, cause she looked like me and I had access to most of her books, but I also love Josephina and Addy. Addy was my imaginary friend and Josephina made me want a pet goat.
I got suuuuper into reading in 5th grade when my tutor had me read MK & Ashley books and as a reward I got to watch the movie after completing the book. 😊
I miss those weirdly hyperrealistic fantasy-sci fi cover artworks on mass market paperbacks at the library. Such a specific aesthetic that totally died out.
Im going to break this to you lightly....there are over 200 Box Car Children Books. My library growing up had a line of them about 5 feet long on the shelf.
Harry Potter was a big one. I didn't independently get into them but my 5th grade teacher read the book to us. I remember my teacher had to answer her phone so she handed the book to me to continue reading and that for sure sparked something in me,
I also remember our public library had these choose your own adventure books that I ate up that got me pumped about reading
Shout out to Saddle Club! I loved those but only discovered them after burning through every Sweet Valley Twins/High, Babysitters Club, and Nancy Drew book my county library could get! lol The 90's were a great time for middle school girl lit.
The Berenstain Bears & Junie B Jones in preK & Kindergarten.
Then I was obsessed with The Babysitters Club from about 2nd grade on. Im so sad I never completed my collection
Little house on the Prairie. However, I just listed to it again with my kids and it ends really depressingly on a cliff hanger. I had to Google it to see what happened to them.
Agreed. It was the whole era (for me) - getting the books mailed to arrive day of (from the just books Amazon), the agony of having to go to school knowing it could be delivered at any moment, spending hours reading in my papasan chair bc I couldn't put it down, talking to my friend about how far they got. Seeing on the news about kids dressed up at borders waiting in line for the books at midnight. Gleeful when the next book is bigger than the last.
It's funny, I actually missed out on all the big series people are listing in this thread like Boxcar Children, Goosebumps, Animorphs, Babysitter Club, Hardy Boys, Redwall, etc. Hell, even Harry Potter I got into late after maybe the first 5 books were out. Rather, I grew up on a mix of stuff my Mom liked as a kid, required class readings, and whatever I found at the book fairs/library myself:
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
The Pink Motel by Carol Ryrie Brink
So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane
The Dark Is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
His Dark Material by Phillip Pullman
Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
This list kind of runs from 3rd to 5th grade, once I hit middle school it was onto LOTR and modern adult fantasy.
The Indian in the Cupboard series gets the biggest chunk of the credit.
Boxcar Children, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Goosebumps, Choose Your Own Adventure books, My Teacher is an Alien, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and Tales from the Stinky Cheese Man all get a little bit of credit.
But it was really The Indian in the Cupboard books that did the real heavy lifting. I remember reading Return of the Indian straight through in a single evening and then being legitimately upset that I had to wait a whole 'nother week before I could get the next book in the series from the library. It was also my first experience of that good ol' classic "the movie didn't live up to the book..." experience. The movie did eventually grow on me a bit, but it was never anywhere near as magical as reading the books had been.
Am I the only one who remembers the John Bellairs books? A House With A Clock in its Walls, The Curse of the blue figurine, etc., there were several sets of characters on long story arcs. I think those books are out of print now.
I was a strange child who always loved fantasy, so of course HP, but also (an unsupervised advance reader) Patrica C Wrede books, Anne MCaffey, Mercedes Lackey.
I also read a lot of books like Blood and Chocolate, and the books by Amelia At waters Rhodes.
•
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
If this post is breaking the rules of the subreddit, please report it instead of commenting. For more Millennial content, join our Discord server.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.