Weekly Geeks and a Blogging Meme

Meme first!  Kim L has asked for us to give our top blogging tips, and if you leave a link to your post in a Mr. Linky on her blog, she’ll enter you in a giveaway for a $15 Amazon gift certificate!  So I’m not going to tag anyone, but if you want a shot at the prize, go ahead and share your tips. :)  I’m impressed with all of the tips so far, and the one recommending the use of photos made me realise that while I used to have lots of visual stuff, lately I’ve been slacking. I’ll be working on that from now on! I have a couple tips myself…for newbie bloggers, it’s sad to write a post and not get any comments (I know that from experience).  I found that the best way to get comments was to really get out into the community and leave lots of comments on other peoples’ blogs: I know that when a blogger I don’t know leaves a comment on one of my posts, I always follow the link back and check out his/her blog, and many bloggers are the same way.  The other is for anyone who wants to increase their blog’s traffic.  Other than more frequent posting, in my experience the best thing you can do is start a meme.  It helps if you bribe bloggers to link back to your site (I said I’d link to their answers if they linked to my site, and I did a book giveaway), but that continues to be the single post with the most views, and it helped really spike my viewing numbers.  Plus, it’s a bunch of fun!  I happen to have to have made up a new meme a few days ago, but I’m waiting for a lull, since memes are everywhere right now. :)

Now on to Weekly Geeks!  This week, we’re invited to talk about our favourite childhood books.  I was a huge reader from a very early age, and I’ve talked a bit about my favourites before.  But it’s always fun to revisit them! All of the cover images below are the ones whose books I actually had, though sometimes it took a bit of searching. :D

My favourite picture book was Koala Lou by Mem Fox. It’s a wonderful story about a baby koala whose mom becomes busier as more koalas are born. Koala Lou is determined to get her mother to love her again, so she enters in the Bush Olympics and trains really hard, thinking that if she wins the Gumtree Climbing event, everything will go back to the way it was. I still have my copy (although it’s on loan to my neice right now), and in my head I hear my mom and I saying “Koala Lou, I DO love you!” (that’s what the mom says several times) whenever I think about it. My mom tells me that my other favourite read-a-loud was Rapunzel. She read it to me so much that when I was two-and-a-half, I almost tricked my parents into thinking I could already read, because I’d have the book in front of me, “read” all of the sentences, and turn the pages at the right time. In actuality, of course, I’d just memorised it. :)

I learned to read when I was 4, and I progressed quickly. I don’t remember the title of the first chapter book I ever read, but I do remember the plot: a little girl who lives in the country finds a duck egg and brings it home. When the duckling hatches, she raises it; as a four-year-old, I loved that, and I still remember looking very carefully at stones when we went on walks, in case one of them was a duck egg. My other favourite book at this age was Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. You can read about how I got my copy here.

In elementary school, I had a wide range of tastes. My mom and I read classics together, including Little Women-I always wanted to be Amy, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess, Phantom of the Opera, Jane Eyre, a little bit of Robinson Crusoe, which we both thought was horribly boring, A Tale of Two Cities, and more.

Meanwhile, on my own I got really into The Babysitter’s Club and Animorphs (for those who haven’t heard of it, these fivekids get the ability to morph into any animal that they touch for two hours from an alien who crashlands on earth. They must use this ability to fight a different race of aliens, who are like slugs that creep into people’s brains and take control, who are trying to conquer earth). I liked animals, what can I say? I also loved three books from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Green Knowe series (you can read about both of those in the post I already mentioned), and the Anne of Green Gables series (I read them all, up through Rilla of Ingleside, so often that I can tell you all of the plots to this day).

Oh-and I absolutely adored ghost and horror books! (written for children) I never read Goosebumps (I did read two Fear Street books, by the same author though), because I thought they were stupid instead of scary. I still remember the plots of some of the books I read: one girl had gotten amnesia in a car accident, and her somewhat odd older sister was taking care of her. But it turns out the “older sister” was actually a stalker who had caused the accident and kidnapped her, and there was a great scene involving a huge butcher’s knife and the girl running for her life. In another one, a girl at boarding school discovers this doll that ends up being evil and possessed. I’ll never forget the scene where the girl has buried the doll out in the forest, and she’s in bed when she hears something clunking up the stairs. Slowly, it gets all the way to her door. Then it pounds on the door, which flies open, and the doll is standing there, smeared with dirt and with leaves in its hair. Oh! And here’s another one that I found on Amazon called The Dollhouse Murders: it’s a ghost story. I loved being frightened. :D

And of course I can’t forget the horse books: The Black Stallion (my favourite: the race scene at the end is so incredibly thrilling; somehow, I didn’t know that there was a whole series), the Misty of Chincoteague series, Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka (although that one was really sad)-I ate them all up. Did anyone else read Where the Red Fern Grows? It was about this boy and his two hunting dogs, which he raises from puppies, and it was the first book I distinctly remember exactly where I was when I read the ending, because I just bawled uncontrollably.

By sixth grade, and during middle school, I read a bunch of Nancy Drews (my mom had collected them as a child and gave them to me in sixth grade: after that, I always got a few more for Christmas), and I was really into Lurlene McDaniel books. There were a bunch of mini-series and stand alones, but each book involved teens with big medical problems: cancer, weak hearts, comas, etc. They all found love, and sometimes they died and sometimes they didn’t. I remember my dad picked up a few for me on a business trip back to the States (we were living in England), and when he came back he was concerned that I was growing a bit too morbid, lol. This is also when I discovered Jane Austen, with Pride and Prejudice first (I still have my copy-it only cost me a pound in a British book store). For my thirteenth birthday, one of my best friends gave me her other five completed novels, which was awesome!

I also read quite a bit of fantasy at this stage: my mom really liked it, as did one of my other best friends. My favourite authors were David Eddings, Piers Anthony (but only his Incarnations of Immortality series), and Tad Williams. I also really loved this book that the same friend leant me, which of course I can’t remember the title of, that involved a high school girl who realised that she was a reincarnated Egyptian Bast priestess, and that she and a popular clique in her school could all turn into panthers at will. Now that I think of it, it kind of had a Twilight vibe, and I read it over and over again! I just spent ten minutes doing an internet search, and it turns out it’s a trilogy called The Year of the Cat by Zoe Daniels; my friend had an omnibus edition. I’m so tempted to see if my library has it and do a walk down memory lane…

Well, that’s probably more than enough. :D High school’s still close enough for me that I don’t really consider it childhood, and I’m sure half of y’all are bored to tears. But it is fun to reminisce!