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List the fiction books you enjoyed as boy and still enjoy today.

Here are some my favorites off the top of my head.

Johnny Tremain
Robinson Crusoe
Rob Roy
Ivanhoe
The Black Arrow
Treasue Island
Kidnapped
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings Trillogy
The Collected Works of Sherlock Holmes
Robert A Heilein's Juvenile series
Rabble in Arms
North West Passage
Anything by Louis Lamour
Dune
Dorsai!
Anything by Jules Verne
The Man in the Iron mask
The Count of Monte Cristo
Anything by Robert E. Howard
Anything by Jack London

The Allan Quartermain and She books by H. Rider Haggard
Anything by Zane Grey
Guadicanal Diary

The follwing series by Barry Sadler (Vietnam SF vet, author of "The ballad of the Green berets") is not even close to a book series for boys, but I read them anyhow. I learned a lot of neat things from these books that every red blooded American boy should know before thry go out into the world; How to kill with a garrote and knife, negotiate with hookers, how to set up a proper L shaped ambush, how to prepare for a military patrol, basic sniping skills, communists were evil scum bags etc etc. The series is total pulp crap, but a very guilty pleasure to read.

The Casca Series

In addition to many of the books Bats mentions:
Anything by Jack London
Kipling's kids books, lots of his poetry too
Leatherstocking Novels
Odyssey
Beowulf
Kidnapped
Shane
Red Badge of Courage
Anything by Mark Twain

Able Team and Phoenix Force.

T200 wrote:Able Team and Phoenix Force.

And their Daddy, Mack Bolan.
Don't forget the Deathlands books and the Remo Williams Executioner books. (Fuck that stupid movie.)

I read shit like that as a kid, my favorite book at 10 was Beckwith's Delta Force and I had a real good book about Brit Commandos in WW2, the author's name escapes me.

Then there was Star Wars and G.I. Joe comics, my Mom's Rolling Stone and Time, and my step dad's Soldier of Fortune, Easyrider's and the occassional Hustler.

All great childhood reading.

SNAKE EYES wrote:

T200 wrote:Able Team and Phoenix Force.

And their Daddy, Mack Bolan.
Don't forget the Deathlands books and the Remo Williams Executioner books. (Fuck that stupid movie.)

I read shit like that as a kid, my favorite book at 10 was Beckwith's Delta Force and I had a real good book about Brit Commandos in WW2, the author's name escapes me.

Then there was Star Wars and G.I. Joe comics, my Mom's Rolling Stone and Time, and my step dad's Soldier of Fortune, Easyrider's and the occassional Hustler.

All great childhood reading.

THat's damn near my exact list.

Also: MAD, Cracked, American Survival, Conan and a billion other comics.

All of Tarzan and the Mars series by Burroughs
The 3 Musketeers - Dumas
Enders Game - O.S. Card
Soldier of Fortune magazine along with the old Gung-ho mag.
Popular Mechanics magazine

Enders Game was the last good book in that whole series. Damn it got pretentious.

I liked the Alvin Maker series too, but only red through like the third one.

Let's keep it to books and maybe Graphic Novels guys. If you want to list magazines and movies, let's start another thread. I'll be happy to join the discussion. I started this thread to get ideas for books to buy for my son. I'm very sure there are lots of good books for boys I've missed.

As an aside,I read a bunch of comics also as a kid, but none of them stood out as ground breaking. However, IMO the best graphic novels ever published are "The Dark Knight returns" and "Watchmen". Hands down, these two are the most influencial graphic novels ever published and what other graphic novels aspire to be.

Bats, I have the entire Tarzan series in a box in the closet (where I read them) Want them? if so PM me.

D

tough old man wrote:Bats, I have the entire Tarzan series in a box in the closet (where I read them) Want them? if so PM me.

D

I'll Pm you tonight.

ER Burroughs

Lloyd Alexander's "Prydain" series

The Mad Scientist's Club (2 story collections, and two novels)

Homer Price and the sequel

Childcraft, the '68 edition, which needs parental guidance to update the old technology, but the historical and howto stuff is still good.

The timing of this thread is perfect. I was going to try to find the thread of this same subject that was posted on the FSF long ago. There was some really good stuff in that thread actually. If anyone can find it that would be great.

There are some really good books here. I'll be purchasing a lot of these for The Chosen One.

Thanks!

Others:
Uncle Remus Stories
Little Black Sambo
Where the Red Fern Grows

Hustler. I really liked that as a kid.

I loved this book when I was a kid. Its about a young Indian who finds himself at the battle of Ticonderoga in 1758. You can pick it up on amazon for a penny.



Ticonderoga is one of the best forts to visit in North America IMO. (Skip William Henry though, its a bit of a tourist trap.)

Oh, and throw in Lord of the Flies too Bats since you don't want to be coddlin' the lad!

"Some call it courage"

Now this is the book for boys!

I remeber finding this book when I was 10 yrs old at a Honolulu Library book sale.

Batboy2/75 wrote:"Some call it courage"

Now this is the book for boys!

I remeber finding this book when I was 10 yrs old at a Honolulu Library book sale.

That's just plain "Call It Courage" if it's the book I think you mean.

Another series of books that aren't ment for boys and yet I read them; The Gor series.

Total Pulp Crap, but filled with epic sword killing and sex slave wenches.

Total unknown author: Eugene Izzi. He wrote crime books back in the 1980's ad early 1990's. Fucking bad ass crime books. More like books for teenagers than boys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Izzi

His novels were bad ass.

He either committed suicide or was killed by the Chicago Outfit back in the early 1990's.

A lot of great picks here. How about "The Old Man and The Sea"?

Fat Cat wrote:Hustler. I really liked that as a kid.

"Chester the Molester" is a great comic.

GoDogGo! wrote:

Fat Cat wrote:Hustler. I really liked that as a kid.

"Chester the Molester" is a great comic.

But then they decided a molester wasn't that funny after all and Chester became "Chester the Protector" and protected kids from molesters, which wasn't that funny either and finally Chester just went away.

edit: I just looked this up. Tinsely, the cartoonist died in 2000. But, shit fire, you can't make this shit up:

In 1984, Tinsley was accused of molesting his 13-year-old daughter, Allison, over a period of five years. She claimed that her father had raped her over 100,000 times during this period (more than 50 times per day). Tinsley was convicted and served 23 months of a six-year prison sentence[2] before his conviction was overturned on the grounds that his conviction violated the First Amendment because it was based, in part, on his comic strip. During his incarceration, he continued "Chester the Molester", dispatching new strips to Hustler from his cell to be edited by Edward Kuhnel. The conviction was later overturned.[3]

I will confess to enjoying, as a youth, the works of S.E. Hinton - The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, like that. The movies were pretty good, too.

As I got a little older, I somehow discovered the books of gun-mag writer Jerry Ahern - most notably, The Survivalist. Some of the pulpiest stuff I've ever read, and perhaps not exactly for kids (though I read them when I was young, and I'm perfectly well-adjusted), but in the words of Clarence Boddicker in RoboCop, "Guns, guns, guns."

And Casca: The Eternal Mercenary was the man; I still have the whole series around here somewhere. FWIW, I've seen it suggested that Sadler didn't write all of them, and this seems especially evident in many of the later books. Actually, I liked most of Sadler's work, especially the hard-to-find Morituri (about Lucanus, the gladiator), which I recall enjoying tremendously, and the four-book series he did featuring Rossen, the sniper. Sadler wrote some manly-as-hell books, in my opinion, and every growing boy should eventually experience them. Plus, for those who may not know, Sadler put out a self-defense video (or series of videos) way back in the early 80s, that I used to see advertised in the backs of SOF and Gung-Ho magazines and such; I recently tried to find this video - to no avail ...

Oh, and what I meant to recommend:

Richard Halliburton, the Complete Book of Marvels.

A couple of reviews from Amazon:

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars First and best!, June 2, 2005
By Kathie Wasserman (Pelican, Alaska) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
My father bought this book for me when I was 6, back in the middle 50s. While my other friends were boringly reading "run, spot, run," I was being introduced to places I could only wonder about. I was entranced by his chapter on Chichen Itza and that chapter alone was THE push that allowed me to become an archaeologist many years later. Richard Halliburton will always be a hero of mine, as he gave me a love of travel, other cultures, reading, and learning. I think there is a small pocket of people across the world who have been touched by this author in the same way I have.
katwas (Juneau, Alaska)


19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels, June 10, 2000
By "catombro" (Ocean Isle Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews
I'm now 58 years old, but still remember first reading this book when I was 10. I can't remember how many times I would pick up this book and be transported as a child to so many different cultures. If I could find it, I would read it over and over and then give it to my grandchild when I felt he was old enough to even look at the pictures. I credit Mr. Halliburton with not only showing me the world, but starting me on my life long love of books. I too wish this book could be brought back into print. It belongs in every school and every home, for young and old alike.
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