I asked my parents about it and they had to explain to me that it was part of the fiction. Also! Moomin books! Moomintroll and everyone are v important. Moominland Midwinter is probably my favorite, for the lovely unsettlingness of having your own house and place suddenly be unfamiliar and strange and need learning about all over again because it's different, and also for practical Too-Ticky and the poor sad Groke.
Tove Jansson is a treasure. Watership Down is also a kid book for me because my parents gave me the audiobook (on tapes!!!) when I was 8 and I listened to it many times. Bruce Coville was a childhood favorite, as was Robin McKinley, Patricia C. Wrede, Diane Duane, Diana Wynne Jones, Sherwood Smith, Sharon Creech, Alison Croggon, and Patrick F. McManus. (One of those things is not like the others, on of those things just doesn't belong~) I'm sure there are more, but these are authors with multiple books that I read more than once that I can remember at the moment.
I got to meet Bruce Coville this year and just. he was so good. so nice. his books were probably the biggest influences on me as a young writer, and they still hold up exactly like i remembered them. he sent me a pdf of one of his books because it's out of print and he just wants people to be able to read it. i still havent read it because i opened the file and started crying. i still can't believe i got to meet him.
@Saro Oh man I can't believe I forgot about Watership Down Roald Dahl was super important to me too, even though my mom read... hm, maybe one of the stories in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and couldn't believe they let me, a smol, read it. The titular story in that collection inspired me to learn to pick up stacks of coins and know how many were in it just by feel, and I still have a knack for it.
that book fucked me up. i don't even remember what half the stories were, i just know there was one in there that i wish i hadn't read.
More I just thought of - I loved the Wayside School books as a kid! Also Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series. Also I read Emma Bull's Bone Dance at 15 or so and I swear it changed my life.
The sad part is, there's two that I can think of that you might be describing. (The autobiographical one and the one that's super explicitly about bullying.)
Re: Roald Dahl: I liked The BFG a lot when I was a smol. Re: Bruce Coville: I think he was the one that wrote one that involved, like, a kid's dog being possessed because it dug up a dragon bone, or something? And it freaked little me the hell out. (Little me was easily freaked out.)
That would be the second, and I'm pretty sure that's the one that had my mom going "wtf you gave this to an eight year old?"
My life was Tolkien, CS Lewis, and Crichton. I loved the choose your own scare booka a lot too. Especiallu themore gamey later ones with maps and invetories and stuff.
Oh man, there was this one collection of ghost stories that I liked so much and I can't remember the title or anything. But it started out with really mild and even cute ghost stories (maybe a ghost pet?) and then got scarier and scarier. Maybe they were all set in the same house? And I have, vaguely, a recollection of a model train track being involved in one of the later stories. eta: Found it! It had the extremely generic title of The Haunted House.
Speaking of scary stories, did anyone else insist on their scary stories to tell in the dark book always being put down face down so they didn't have to look at the creepy illustrations on the cover?
who even did the art for those books, what else have they done, and why were they allowed to illustrate a kids' book?
I also really liked The Folk Keeper (Franny Billingsley); it had bb!me's favourite tropes of girls disguised as boys, magic creatures, and folklore. (tbh given the number of books about girls disguised as boys that I happily devoured I wonder why I was surprised when I turned out to be a dude.)
His name is Stephen Gammell, and apparently both before and after Scary Stories he has done quite a bit of non-traumatizing children's book illustrations. His art is really neat! It's also freaking terrifying in black and white.
For creepy stories, I remember enjoying a collection of Saki stories: The Open Window, Gabriel the Werewolf, Sredni Vashtar, and the like. Also, John Bellairs did some really good creepy YA: The Face in the Frost, The House with the Clock in its Walls, another with the same characters as House whose name I can't recall. Astrid Lindgren was another one I remember as I'm thinking back on things: Ronia the Robber's Daughter, Seacrow Island, Mio My Son, The Brothers Lionheart. And oh yes, Pat McManus. My dad and both my grandfathers liked his books, so we had several of them, and I didn't really get all the jokes and references as a kid, but I still enjoyed the stories.
