IT REALLY WAS REAL! The "I saw this so long ago I thought I hallucinated it" thread

I vaguely remember reading a fairy tale years back, although it's not an ancient tale but more 1800-1900 fare, but I can't for the life of me remember the name -- it's about a girl locked in a poisonous garden by her father, and I think her touch was poisonous as well?

 

Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne?

 

!! That was the name, thank you!!

 

I had two... not quite games as a kid. Fairy tales- I had Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin- on cd. Really pretty artwork for having been (I think) DOS games, with an image on one side and text on the other made to look like two pages, like you were reading a book. Sometimes words would come up in blue and have definitions or historical details. It also sometimes gave choices, but I don't remember failure states or any major departures from the tales. Mid-90's, was running them on Win 95, I think they were on separate disks. Red artwork on the cases? And I remember the in-game illustrations being more red-tinted than sepia but that may have been a hardware thing.

 

Do you remember if they were Disney or non-Disney adaptations?

 

Non-Disney.

 

One of the drawbacks to reading pretty much everything the "fantasy" section of my local library had when I was little is that after a while all the stories start to melt together and there is no way in hell to remember the names of them (or if they were even originally in English - i know that's not the language I read them in...)

there was one in which wings were alive. Like, people had disembodied wings, kind of like pets, and then you could make the wings dig their claws into your back and then you could fly. there were flying competitions/races (maybe just a race) and i think the main character swapped places with a rich girl who didn't want to fly and pretended to be her or something? I can't recall and I can't find it no matter where I search, I've been looking for years :(

the way i'm describing it makes it sound very young adult-y and it may well be, but from what I recall I actually found it to be very serious/dry compared to the other stuff i was reading, so it may not have been directed much at kids at all (or maybe i just read it when i was too young, like with half the other stuff i got m y hands on.)

Help?

 

I was on my way to this thread to ask if anyone, particularly those in the UK, remember analysing an honestly haunting poem in middle school english classes about a boy who deliberately and graphically kills a cat and... something, something, learns the permanence of death, etc. Then I googled "poem about guilt over killing a cat" and found it on the first page (probably a case of Dead Cat, Do Not Eat for a lot of people, while the language is simple and child-appropriate, that kind of makes it more upsetting, imo. use caution), as well as a newspaper article from 2009 featuring parents upset about their 11 yr olds being taught the poem, so I gather it might have been a part of the UK curriculum in the 00s? Whatever the reason my school had for teaching it, it unnerves me enough to make me google it in the middle of the night 15 years later. Good job, poet guy.

 

I don't remember seeing that poem in my early secondary school english classes but I do sure as hell remember the great poems in the GCSE textbook. The one about necrophilia. The one about poisoning your husband. The one about stabbing your wife. The one about beating a hitchhiker to death. The only one that got removed that was the one about a narcissist with a knife and my personal favourite.

 

"Education for Leisure"? Yeah, I remember that one.

 

Yeah, that one. Honestly, the one about the hitchhiker was more worrying because the narrator showed no sign of being as obviously disturbed as the narrator in EfL but I guess beating a hitchhiker to death with a krooklock isn't Knife Crime

 

I remembered a book I read in either middle or elementary school, but can't come up with the title for the life of me, and what I do remember is so strange I'm not sure where to start googling.

It was like a sci-fi Narnia, a small group of siblings (?) gets transported to another dimension, or something like that. There was an alien that I imagined as an Animorphs Andalite, and one that looked like a purple cookie monster. Unknown if that's was they were actually described as or just what I imagined. I remember nothing from the first half of the book, but towards the end they are transported to a... dimension? planet? where the big bad rules. When they arrive there are hundreds of children in front of identical houses, who are all bouncing a ball/jumping rope in perfect unison. At the same time they all stop and go inside. There was one kid who stayed outside and played in an individual way, but I think he was kidnapped and mentally tortured? Anyway the main character kids go the capital, which I imagined as the emerald city from OZ, and confront the big bad who is a giant brain, or eyeball, or something like that. He explains how this world works, and the "kill you if you have the flu" thing. I think they somehow kill him?

Reading this over it sounds like a fever dream, but I swear it was a real book! It was one of the few assigned reading books I remember liking, and now I'm really curious to read it again. (assuming I can find the thing)

 

@Azurite That is A Wrinkle in Time! Very good book!

 

You're thinking of A Wrinkle In Time, I think.

 

If you like the first one, you may also enjoy some of the others in the series! A Wind in the Door is next, followed by A Swiftly Tilting Planet (maybe also Many Waters? Can't remember if that fits in or not, and there may be another I'm forgetting.) The author is Madeleine L'engle, if that helps.

 

THANK YOU!!

I just looked it up and they are making a movie, with that exact scene I remembered in the trailer. I'm definitely going to reread it, and will check out the rest of the series!

 

Speaking of books of a more sci-fi bent....

There was a book I listened to a lot as a kid because my library had a copy and I had a Walkman tape player and I liked the book and I liked the narrator. Anyway, a teenage (I think) girl is traveling through space to rejoin her parents who are working on a distant planet. She got into some trouble at her school, or something? Anyway, she can't stay there and she's in space. I think there's a cat? That's not super important, but I think there is one. She meets an alien who is transporting a relic back to his homeland/homeworld/people and it gets stolen, there's mystery, there's action, the last bit of the book they go into hyperspace and she's very talented at navigating there (a rare trait for people in the book's universe). I cannot remember the author but I think the title had "Alien" in it somewhere.

The cat might have been named Podkayne.

 

@Saro yeah, many waters is part of it! i had the box set as a kid, there were five! let's seee uhh, wrinkle in time, wind in the door, a swiftly tilting planet, many waters....OK i googled but the last one is "an acceptable time" !

 

A couple years ago some anime went around on tumblr, it was after klk and there was yelling about it being sexist and the only thing i can remember is that it was about girls knocking other girls over with their boobs, and it had a variety of body types. Also something something pedophilia because some of the girls had smaller cup sizes than F. Anyone remember that one?

 

It's Keijo!!!!!!!!, and yes, there are that many exclamation points.