Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Childhood books that changed your life

Not a book,but I waited for each issue of Boys Life to be delivered.Comic Books were my main staple until about 9 or 10 years old.I read all the Hardy Boys books,Treasure Island,Moby Dick.I was pretty sure I was going to be a Pirate when I grew up.

Outdoor life and Field & Stream..... not most people's idea of kids books , but think about it.....

Because of this thread I ordered Canoeing with the Cree.

Maybe if I'd read the book as a boy I'd be enthralled. Not so much in my dotage.

Peter Capstick, and Jack O' Connor. Love their work

These were my father's books and i thoroughly enjoyed reading them at a ripe young age. They should be required reading in public schools everywhere

Hustler and Swank.

Well, OK. Chester the Molester was a classic.

The Little Red Hen.

Huntsman 22, No, you're not alone. Will James was my great uncle by marriage, he married my great aunt Alice Conradt. I was force fed "Smoky" from knee high to a grasshopper....didn't do any good, I still went to sea as soon as I could. grin.

Moby Dick gotcha, huh?

Winter Danger and Lone Hunt by William Osteel. Great kids books about hunting, trapping and Indian fighting in the pioneer days.

Another strong vote for The Young Trailers series by Joseph Altsheler. I must admit, I still pick it up as a great escapist tool.

"Mister Rifleman"

"Gunsmith's Apprentice"

Pretty close for me.

Still my favorite book of all time is "To Tame a Land" by Louis L'Amour but everything that he wrote was good. I read it 42 times at last count. The Kilkenny books were good. Zane Grey's "Rogue River Feud" 'cause I grew up on the banks of the Rogue fishing some of the same waters he wrote about. My grandfather worked on the pack train that carried him into his cabin at Winkle Bar. The part at the start about black speckled trout .. got me hooked you might say.

Heinlein was good ... for me it was Tunnel in the Sky ... "beware the stobor!!" Much of it was over my head the first 4-5 times I read it.

I like sci fi a lot. In older days my favorite was Poul Anderson. Lot of his stuff was somewhere between James Bond and western .. just set in space. Andre Norton. Later CJ Cherryh, especially her Chanur books. Pournelle/Niven "The Mote in God's Eye". The Sword of Truth series is pretty good but is a few months' project. David Brin's stuff is good ... he wrote The Postman which the Costner movie was based loosely on. The movie script played fast and loose, the book is pretty darn accurate so far as geography ... roads and rivers I grew up on, the Oregon State University campus and computing center where I did a lot of my undergrad work played a big part. And Tom Petty's character, if present, was so minor I missed him in the book. Brin's stuff is like Cherryh's stuff .. very intricate plots and characters, hard to track sometimes.