My childhood friends !. Review on Favourite Books Of Childhood

Ever since I can remember I’ve loved to read. When I was six and lived in Muscat, Oman, there was this bookshop called “The Family bookshop”, and every weekend, my daddy (poor man) just HAD to take us there and wait patiently, while my sis n I happily ran about picking out a book (we were allowed one book each every week!). It was my favourite place in those days.

Before I begin this review, I must express my biggest deepest appreciation for one person whose name is synonymous with childrens literature. Enid Blyton. I for one , simply cannot imagine what kind of a person I would have been if I hadn’t spent all those years reading her books. Because her books fuelled my imagination….and where would any of us be without imagination.

Here goes then….in no particular order, five books I loved to read as a child ( which for the purpose of this review is taken as below the age of twelve)

The first book that I actually read  was “Oscar the cat”(I still have it). It was (obviously) about a cat that couldn’t smile. All the toys in the nursery try their best to make Oscar smile, but he gets sadder and sadder. Until one fine day he meets a mouse who teaches him to smile and then he cant stop smiling !!

It sounds like a silly ‘lil story but I was four and I loved it, simply because I could read it all by myself. It had just one line on each page, under a huge coloured picture of Oscar…lines like..”This is Oscar”. “ He is sad” and so on.

(you can’t see the pictures on some of the pages because a certain four year old has crayoned and felt-tipped all over.)  But its still one of  my all time favourite books.

The Famous Five series: I firmly believe that no child is complete unless he or she has read at least one book in this series. Okay, now if you analyse it for a minute, this book is about five kids who go to boarding school and come home after first term, foil a daring robbery, then return after the second term, catch a smuggler or two, and so on. When they’re not creeping out at night in pursuit of dangerous crooks, they’re feasting on “hot buttered scones, chocolate éclairs and jammy buns” (reading about all that food always did two things to me a) Made me feel terribly hungry  and b)Would drive me to accuse my mom of not knowing how to cook anything nice ( which is not exactly the right thing to say when you’re hoping for something out of the ordinary to eat).

But when I was eight, the Famous Five were an awesome five! Brave and fearless and I cant count the number of times I wished I could be one of them!!!  (just as I cant count the number of summer holidays spent playing “Famous Five” with my cousins in Bombay. There were five of us too, and poor fella, the youngest one was always Timmy (the dog). So he had nothing much to do except bark every now and then( heh heh)

The Oriental Doll : I got this one on my eleventh birthday and fell in love with it right away cos the central character in the book was Rose who was celebrating her eleventh birthday !!! She is having a really boring summer break, until her little sister Lucy buys a new doll. Its one of those talking dolls, except as it turns out this one talks a lot more than its supposed to. That’s cos the doll is possessed by a Greek oracle (fortune teller)  and I found the book terribly fascinating .

Considering I was already into Agatha Christies by then and thought even Nancy Drews for the babies, so its surprising I loved this one. But sometimes there’s a hidden charm in books (and movies) and you fall in love with them for some inexplicable reason! The Oriental doll is one such book.

The Secret Seven: This series is strikingly similar to The Famous Five as far as the basic storyline goes but is nowhere as good in terms of content. Even then it was one of my favourite reads…..and it inspired a bunch of us , neighborhood  kids to form our own gang ( we were the “Notorious Nine”).

You remember how they had secret meeting places and passwords and badges in the book? Well, needless to say we had them all. (Come to think of it we should have called ourselves the “Notorious copycats” or something!)

The gang (the Notorious Nine) died a natural death, after about a month of sitting (rather uncomfortably) in big round pipe-like thing( I don’t quite remember what it was) with nothing to do once the new password had been voted on !!!! And gradually the excitement of reading the Secret Seven wore out ..but it was great while it still lasted !

The Malory Towers series:( it was a difficult choice between this one and “the Secret Garden won when I realized how much they influenced me!) Okay, now I doubt if many guys would have read this series.

Its all about life at a residential school in England, a girls school- the kind where the girls are always playing pranks on the poor ‘ol French mistress, having pillow fights in the dorm and of course the inevitable midnight feast !!

Ever since I read my first Malory Tower book, I’ve wanted to live in a boarding school, I’d plead with my folks to send me away and decided I’d never forgive them for doing so ! (it wasn’t until years later, that hostel life exposed the bare truth to me…that dorms always look better from the outside and that midnight feasts are the culmination of a day filled with unpalatable-unidentifiable elements referred to as “food” by the cook!!)

These then were books I absolutely adored. There are loads more, because as I have told you earlier, I love reading. I think the man who said “wear an old coat and buy a new book” sure had his priorities right. (well, at least , he makes me feel better when I end up borrowing cash from dad until the next pay check  cos I’ve spent my last few dirhams on books!! )