Weekly Geeks: Childhood Treasures

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This week’s theme challenges us Weekly Geeks (more like Daily for me, but whatever; I’m not going to argue semantics haha) to write about our memories of childhood books. Incidentally, I must mention that last week’s theme – which requires participants to link other bloggers’ reviews – is something I want to participate in, but I just didn’t want to write an entire blog entry about it. Having said that, I’m going to follow what Lightheaded did and put the review policy on the sidebar. So, have at it!

Anyway, on to my childhood favorites. I read a lot as a child, although it wasn’t always easy to procure books where I lived at the time. Still, I only chose two titles (or series, to be more accurate) here, as they fall under my two categories of reading: the guilty pleasures that I’ve left behind and the childhood reads that I continue to love well into adulthood. The first title I will mention falls under the guilty pleasure category:

Sweet Valley High by Francine Pascal

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Old School vs. New School
I prefer the vaguely 1970s-porn look of the old school covers myself.

My shame is now laid bare: I loved the Sweet Valley High series. It’s an unnatural, shameful love, akin to a hipster secretly watching Gossip Girl instead of an obscure film on the Sundance Channel, but I refuse to keep it secret any longer. The series is like crack, but in book form. Why else would anyone read about the impossibly exciting lives of people who are impossibly good-looking?

Even at a young age, I was aware that the stories were, at best, preposterous. Everything about it was over-the-top, which (if you’re a preteen experiencing the throes of love and/or rejection) is what it’s all about. But as soon as you learn to start asking questions – Is Jessica, in fact, a sociopath? Why doesn’t Liz smack her around a bit? Who allowed Bruce Patman to register his outrageous license plate, 1bruce1? Where are all the minorities? – the books lose their luster. Still, Sweet Valley High will always be special to me; I think obsessing over all the little details in its incestuous universe is what led me to be the fan girl / geek / whatever-term-you-want-to-use that I am. (Read: my obsession with Buffy, Angel, Degrassi, and other shows with sincere but ridiculous premises.) These days, though, I no longer read the books at all; I’ve found that reading the snarky recaps over at Elizabeth and Jessica Are Better Than You is far more enjoyable.

And for the read that has stood the test of both fickleness and time:

The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper

A bit of background: Growing up in a provincial area of the Philippines, books (new or otherwise) were extremely hard to come by. Public libraries in my hometown had (and probably still do have) only a paltry selection, and I wasn’t even allowed to actually take them out of the building; I had to stay in the library and read the book in the presence of a librarian or teacher and put it back on the shelf when I was done for the day.

Anyway, my mother (who moved to the US a full decade before I moved here) used to scour library book sales to send books for me to read. That’s how I came to read the first two books in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone and The Dark is Rising. Unfortunately, that’s all my mom sent, and though I repeatedly asked her to send the rest of the books in the series, she never did. But I read and reread those two books that I did have until the pages were creased and worn.

When I finally moved to the US in 1995, one of the first things I did was apply for a library card and borrow Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree from the city library. I waited nearly ten years to finish the series, but, damn it, I did it, and I felt like I had lost a friend when I did.

I wrote about my love for these fantastic books in a previous entry, but I will repeat it here. These books should be right up there with The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter. Yeah, I said it, what?

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Tags: childhood reads, guilty pleasures, sweet valley high, the dark is rising