Question for a rainy evening: forgotten children’s books?
It's a dark and stormy night in New England, with rain dripping on the roof. The cat I've been cat-sitting is curled up, snoring, in her favorite warm spot by the baseboard heater. I feel disinclined to post about anything intellectual. Instead, I've been cooking (salt-cured salmon, spinach with sesame seeds), and wondering what's gone awry with my latest knitting project (I suspect an error in the pattern, because the math just doesn't add up at one point), and listening to vintage science fiction from Librivox, and thinking about random things; in particular, about books I read as a child but no longer remember the titles of.
Before Google and Amazon and Bookfinder came along, there were a lot more of these books I almost remembered. I now know that the wondrous, wordless split-picture book I used to check out from the library over and over, almost a First Book of Surrealism, was Graham Oakley's Magical Changes, and that the series of eerie YA-ish novels set in the UK were written by Ruth M. Arthur (A Candle in Her Room was my favorite), and that the splendidly weird book with the family visiting a labyrinthine alternate dimension was The Light Maze by Joan North, whose other books I also devoured. But I'm still hunting for a couple of ghost story anthologies, a book about an orphaned brother and sister who run away to live in a hollow tree in a forest, and another book the plot of which I've forgotten except for a handful of details: a (possibly fake) document with old spellings and sealing wax, someone climbing out of a window in pajamas, and underground mine explosions that shattered a glass pitcher of lemonade. I may be conflating several books, of course. Why is it always these odd details that survive?
It occurred to me that this would be a good thread topic. Reader, what do you remember of your childhood reading? And what childhood books do you sort of remember but not quite? Post them in the comments, and maybe we can figure some of them out.
I just found this when I did a search for “Ruth M. Arthur”! Do I remember that book you mentioned about the mine explosions–did it have ghosts of dead miners sort of wisping up from the ground, and the family’s house collapsed completely at the end? Must-rack-brains!