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

Jim Kjelgaard’s Big Red series and Robin Lee Graham’s “Dove”.

Any of the books by:
James Corbett
J.A. Hunter
Jim Kjellgaard
Jack London
The Black Stallion series
The Big Sky
Zane Gray
Louis L'Amour
Jack O'Connor
Elmer Keith
James Fenimore Cooper
The series of children's books about American patriots and heroes, especially frontier heroes (good luck finding books like this today)
Ed Zern (magazine)
So many others, too many to recall.

I was a prodigious reader and I am thankful for that.

Our three sets of Encyclopedias were probably the most important to me.

The Young Trailers series by Joseph Altsheler---a series of books about the adventures of a boy/young man growing up on the Kentucky Frontier, fighting Indians, living off the land, etc.

read all those also.

Where the Red Fern Grows.

28 minutes too late!
Knew I would be.
Too easy.



A reading fool, I read the cereal boxes, or the air fresheners in the crapped.
But can't really think of A book.

I also read Crazy Horse a million times as well.

A boy's mind could get lost in the freedom that they had before "we" came.

Peyton Place

Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel

World Book. My parents bought the set when I was in grade school, the 1955 version. I would grab one at random and just start reading. That was during the period of a massive increase in technology and 10 years later much of it was obsolete. There was almost nothing there about the space race, for example.

Then I took what would be the most valuable class I ever took. In Jr. high, I took a semester of speed reading. I learned to rip through a novel with very high retention. Most of us don't have that naturally. The class teaches you how to do it. After that, I read almost every book listed in the previous posts. I got to where I liked longer books. I even took on War and Peace and enjoyed most of it, until I got to his philosophy in the last chapters. I got lucky with that one, though. There are a number of translations and by luck I got a good one, especially how it dealt with Russian names.

Read a lot growing up, my mom the school teacher encouraged us every step of the way. She believed most kids would never enjoy reading if forced to read stuff that would not hold them through the minds eye. Some of the old classics are hard reads for a lot of young folks so she said read what holds your interest so that learning wasn't a chore that had to be done. Later with more maturity the more complicated reads were much more doable.

For me it was outdoor stories or science fiction growing up.

Computers and internet have made huge changes, can't imagine trying to get a child started with printed books today.

+1
And every Outdoor Life Sports Afield and Field and Stream that came every month in the early 70’s

Today (or at least when our kids were in school) they had AR (assigned reading)

They had to read so many books in order to achieve a passing grade and get a "prize." The more difficult the book, the bigger the POS prize was.

Out of four intelligent, hard working kids, not ONE will pick up a book to read today.


They absolutely hate reading because of that schidt.

Yep!

My favorite was the "This happened to me" stories.

Where The Red Fern Grows and My Side Of The Mountain were favorites for sure. Also, The Lonesone Traveler by Weldon Hill. The one that really stayed with me was Lost in The Barrens by Farley Mowat. I was able to find copies of each of them and read them again as an adult. I enjoyed them just as much 50 years later.

Old Yeller
Born Free
AVALANCHE!
Where the Wild Things Are
Watership Down
Stranger in a Strange Land
Where the Red Fern Grows
Peach Boy
Webster's Dictionary and Encyclopedia Brittannica

As others have said. My Side of the Mountain and Where the Red Fern grows

Guinness Book of World Records had all sorts of weird and interesting stuff. It was THE authority to settle petty arguments amongst ourselves.

The Encyclopedia Britannica.