Where are the Snowy Owls of Yesteryear?

[steepholm]

In my first Children's Fiction class of the year I always ask the students to talk about a book that was important to them in childhood. This time, for the first time in a dozen years, not one of the 18 mentioned Harry Potter. The HP generation appears to have passed. No one sat a-tremble on the eve of their 11th birthday to see if an owl would bring them the anticipated letter to Hogwarts. (They ought of course have been waiting to discover whether they were an Old One, which is much cooler.)

There was only one mention each of Dahl (The BFG) and Blyton, specifically Malory Towers. Jacqueline Wilson held up well, though, breasting the tape with Percy the Park Keeper.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What books did they mention? Were there any consensus favorites?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Never heard of Percy the Park Keeper, but very glad to see that Darrel and co are still read.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Where is the owl gone? Where the letter? Where the hat of sorting?
Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?

How that time has passed away,
grown dark under cover of night, as if it had never been.

Which reminds me of The Wanderer's Lament for a Cooked Breakfast

Where is the egg gone? Where is the bacon?
Where is the sausage that was sizzling?
Where are the beans and the fried potatoes?
Where is the slice of fried bread?
Alas for the greasy frying pan!
Alas for the cooker of sausages!
Alas for the well-laden breakfast table!
Now that time has passed away,
Dark under the cover of night
As if it had never been!

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Blyton with my hero the girl George and the writer of the early http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew (who could do anything; ride elephants at the circus and drive fast vehicles plus she treated her fav. suitor in a condescending way) influenced my young life, I've only noticed exactly how much in later years. My father had gotten a whole box full of Barbie novels (yes, they existed and I read them all and am still suffering the collateral damage to be expected...), Blyton and what was then called Kitty (=Nancy) from a female colleague and I so revelled in them after all the heavy Goethe, Hugo and Dostoyevsky stuff of the house and suddenly, for a short moment, was capable of communicating on face level with the other girls *phew* only they didn't get my fascination with George but nevermind the bollocks!

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I did once have a conversation (with someone who is younger than me but is now an adult) where I said, "I was really disappointed when I turned eleven and nothing happened." She said, "Hogwarts?" I said, "I'm ten years older than you. No."

My students are past the Harry Potter generation too. It's all Hunger Games right now, I think.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

When I was last in a session where people were volunteering favorite books from their childhood, I noticed that most of the offerings were YA, so I went to the other end and picked picture books. I particularly fondly remembered those by P.D. Eastman, a colleague and contemporary of Dr. Seuss, who wrote Are You My Mother? and Go, Dog, Go.

If asked when I was 18, though, I'd probably have named The Hobbit, as the most influential book on my life.

[sovay]

a book that was important to them in childhood.

I have trouble answering that question in the singular. I posted at inordinate length about it in 2006. And still forgot to include Eleanor Cameron's Mr. Bass's Planetoid (1958)!

(They ought of course have been waiting to discover whether they were an Old One, which is much cooler.)

My parents gave me The Dark Is Rising for my eleventh birthday.

[forochel.livejournal.com]

Being an Old One would be so terrifying, though! All that responsibility!

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Teaching, as I do, a younger set of students, I have encountered this already. It's quite dismaying as it was so helpful to be able to compare Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape when discussing flat versus round characters (I don't know what Forster would think, but it worked for me!), and suddenly last year it wasn't quite working anymore. As mentioned by rymenhild there is The Hunger Games (but, whatever else one might think of the relative merits of the two texts, THG is significantly more focused and less, well, baggy in a way that makes it less likely that it will be useful to teach any given literary concept one wants to deal with). I'm afraid that coming up it could be Divergent, which put me off enough that, unlike either THG or HP, I was unable to read past the first book.

Man, I still vividly remember when one of my best friends, exactly half a year older than I, turned 11 and I was just so jealous. That having been said, I have to agree with forochel that, as an adult, I'm not convinced I would wish having been an Old One on myself as a kid over and above being a HP-verse witch. It's actually a really difficult choice - going to Hogwarts would have been cool and not ultimately all that scary or threatening, but it wouldn't have added much metaphysical depth to life, and I might have just ended up being disappointed. Being an Old One would have given me Meaning, but it would have made everything so much more difficult and painful. . . .

I realized I didn't really believe in magic when I read High Wizardry at 11 (Dairine, of course, was also 11 when she became a wizard) and got to the part about "beating her fists against the walls of life, knowing that there's more, more," and I realized I'd felt that way my entire life and that there wasn't actually more. Possibly given the choice I'd rather wish my 11-year-old-self to have been a Diane Duane wizard above either of the other options; it seems like the best compromise.