What Was Your Favourite Childhood Book?

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Today sees the start of my ‘bucket list’ challenge to re-read my favourite childhood book, ‘The Lord of The Rings.’ I purchased it on my Kindle last year with this intention in mind, but have always found an excuse not to start. Well, no more. I’m holding myself accountable to the good people of WordPress to ensure I don’t renege on my word this time. I’m diving into Tolkien’s world of elves, hobbits and talking trees.

Every week I’ll post an update on my progress, giving my own unique slant on where I’m at and how it compares with when I read it as a wide eyed, naive teenager. For now I am a wide eyed, naive middle aged man. Will it be as magical and captivating as when I first picked it up all those years ago. Or are my memories of Gandalf & Co. viewed through rose tinted spectacles? Has Peter Jackson gone and ruined it all?

Feel free to join me on this epic journey from The Shire to Mount Doom. I’ll tell you all my guilty secrets. Like, how I find hobbits slightly annoying and my irrational love of all things orcish. How elves are a bit dull, despite the best efforts of Evangeline Lily and Cate Blanchett to convince me otherwise. And how Styder is waaaaay cooler than Aragorn despite them being the same person, a concept I never quite got my head around.

I’m off to face what the day has in store for me now. But please leave your comments and thoughts below and I’ll get back to them as soon as I can. Are you a Tolkien fan? Can the film adaptation ever be as good as the book, no matter how many squillions of dollars they throw at it? Why does Hollywood insist on straying from the original text because they know best? The mic is all yours. Enjoy.

Published by Fractured Faith Blog

We are Stephen and Fionnuala and this is our story. We live in Northern Ireland, have been married for 17 years and have three kids - Adam, Hannah and Rebecca. We hope that our story will inspire and encourage others. We have walked a rocky road yet here we are today, together and stronger than ever. We are far from perfect and our faith has been battered and bruised. But an untested faith is a pointless faith. Just as a fractured faith is better than none at all. We hope you enjoy the blog.

77 thoughts on “What Was Your Favourite Childhood Book?”

  1. Ho!! Tom Bombadil, Tom bombadilo. I like both. But like all adaptations I expect them to have differences. Enjoy the read. Been about 15 years since I last reread them.
    Fave book as a kid? Too many.

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  2. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were 2 of the maybe 5 (max) books I read when I was younger. (I’ve only read about 25 now and most of them were biographies of some famous sportsperson). Maybe they put me off reading, I don’t know, or maybe it was the draw of sport and the outdoors, which was too strong to keep a (hyper?)active person like me inside reading. Good luck with the 2nd reading – but will the film sway your thinking?

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  4. Hi.
    Imo… You will enjoy. It
    in Deed. Indeed

    Be interesting to see
    Your Reactions. Now. Agree.

    Thanks for the Share. Sharing
    that. A Fav. Of a younger…
    i, Shiro…

    Papillon.

    Take Care too. To Alls.
    So there. Till then
    next… Shiro

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  6. I got into Tolkien as a teenager & at one time, I owned almost ALL of his books. Sadly, during my deep depressions of the late 1990’s & early 2000’s, when I gave away most of my books, my entire Tolkien collection went too. Sometime in the future, I plan to rebuy them. I buy most of my books on Thriftbooks.com. or in one of the used book stores here in Buffalo.

    But I got into Tolkien when I was like … fifteen? I wouldn’t have called myself a child at that age. I was a very grown-up person!

    My favorite childhood books were Lang’s Fairy Tale books … Red, Blue, Green & so on … Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (I spent a lot of time in Neverland) … The Bobbsey Twins & the All-Of-Kind-Family & The Boxcar Family & of course Little Women & all the other Alcott novels … & Anne of Green Gabels & all the sequels … I still have all those books. The Alcotts & the Anne of Green Gabels books. They were Christmas presents from my grandmother & I would NEVER get rid of those. I just got a new edition of Peter Pan & Wendy/Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens with illustrations by Arthur Rackham which is gorgeous.

    Another book I loved & which I still have is Harriet the Spy. I was thinking about this yesterday because I made myself a tomato sandwich & Harriet eats a tomato sandwich every single day. Harriet keeps a notebook & spies on her neighbors & friends & it’s hilarious. I did the same thing & got in all kinds of trouble … oh well. That’s being a kid. That’s how you learn.

    Great question. BTW, I don’t have a favorite, I could never restrict myself to ONE BOOK.

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  7. I have a confession to make… I have never read The Lord of the Rings series, despite having owned the books for over five years (I really did intend to read them!!)

    Also, my favorite childhood books will reveal my age: Holes, Ella Enchanted, Number the Stars, The Giver… As a teen I loved Francine Rivers, starting with her “The Mark of the Lion” series.

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  8. I will be honest, I never read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But now that I have seen the films, those titles have made it on my ‘books I need to read’ list. As I have read The Hobbit, I expect that the books will prove better than the films. Movies all too often cut out some of the most intriguing parts of the story.

    One of my childhood favorites, that I have picked up again is The Phantom of the Opera. Then, I have always been a sucker for old classics. For that is just one of many titles I have that border on the classics and it has never gotten old. In fact, when picking up some of these old reads to enjoy again I often find something new to appreciate that perhaps I did not see before.

    So, happy reading!

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  10. I let out a little ‘whoa’ when you said you’re gonna be reading LOTR series. I finished The Hobbit a while ago and LOTR is on the list!! Would love to hear your thoughts.😊

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  11. I have tried several times to read Tolkien and always ended up putting them down. My childhood favorites were many since I grew up with no TV until my teens. (I’m soooo old) Mary Poppins, Nancy Drew, all of the OZ books, lots of the classics.. I read voraciously. In college everything by C.S. Lewis.

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    1. Squeee! Another Ozite?! Personally I’d give a lot to have a Scalawagon… Or visit the Gnome King’s Gardens. So many fun ideas! I’m still peeved I “loaned” one of my Poppins books to a “friend”. My question now, that I’m older – is how much in the way of TBI do Nancy, George and Bess have from the number of times they’ve been knocked unconscious?

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  12. When I was a child of six, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, were read to me; they are perhaps singlehandedly responsible for my skill and interest in reading. Happy Reading

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  14. Oh dear I’m awfully sorry, but I didn’t like Tolkien. As a child I read every single Enid Blyton, then moved swiftly onto what was terribly exciting for us all, Jilly Cooper. She was a goddess. At school there were a couple of rather raunchy books one of which was called Black Lace. We used to keep it well hidden from the teachers eyes, and pass it round whilst giggling over the naughty bits.

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  15. I was thinking of rereading the Lord of the Rings too. I even pulled out Fellowship of the Ring from out my bookshelf last week.

    I read The Hobbit when I was seven and The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. I loved them both as well as the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin.

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  16. I remember thinking the films seemed so much darker than the books; re-reading again, I realized the darkness was there but Tolkien just dressed it up in a different perspective.

    And I HATED that Peter Jackson made the two brothers (Nitin if and Faramir) succumb to the power of The Ring.

    And and, lay off me hobbits and elves, ye leprechaun!

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          1. yeah… I could forgive a lot because I can accept that movies differ from their books. What I had a really hard time with was when Eowyn revealed herself to the witch king of Angmar on the battlefield. When I read that in the book, I had NO IDEA that was Eowyn. It was a powerful moment. “I am no man!” I almost dropped the book! Why couldn’t they have kept her identity a secret from the audience in the movie? They pulled it off when Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli met Gandalf in Fangorn. In the book and in the movie you think they’re meeting Saruman, the White Wizard. I was really pissed about the whole Eowyn thing in the movie. I think I’m finally over it and ready to forgive Jackson but it took a long time and as you can see, emotions sometimes flare up, raw again. LOL

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    3. I thought Jackson’s interpretation was brilliant. Of course it wasn’t exactly like the books, but all the important themes were present and celebrated, even up to the three or four ‘endings’, wrapping up each of the several parts of the story woven by Tolkien.

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      1. Yeah, I used to be such a purist hardass about movies adapted from books. I’ve changed my thinking, I guess, because they’re such different media and different artists are behind each. It’s impossible to make them identical and perfect. I think that Peter, Fran and Phillipa did a great job in the right spirit, trying to honor the essence of Tolkien’s work. It was a daunting task but they did Lord of the Rings very well…
        The movie adaptation of The Hobbit, however, was an unmitigated mess. I love the book and always will but the movies (one short book into three overly long movies????) are banned from my home.

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      2. Oh, I agree. His is one of few book adaptations to film I like.

        Really, out of 9+ hours of screen time, disliking Faramir’s reaction to The Ring is hardly a reason to throw out the baby and the bathwater. 🙂

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  17. I loved Judy Blume’s books, especially Superfudge. I loved the Little House on the Prairie series, the Narnia series, Bridge to Terebithia, Jacob Have I Loved, The Diary of Anne Frank, Huck Finn, Charlotte’s Web, any Amelia Bedelia book, Heidi, The Cat in the Hat, The Giving Tree, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series. We had this book about the Knights of the Round Table, which I can’t remember the title or author, but I loved it. I also had a picture book about Nellie Bly that made me want to know more about her. There was book on our shelf that I’m pretty sure is now out of print: The Unlikeliest Hero. The writing was terrible, but the story about Desmond Doss was really amazing. They made the movie Hacksaw Ridge about him.
    I think that books we read during childhood stay with us and become a part of us like no other books we read in our lifetime.

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  18. I have to be honest that except for the Hobbit, I found the Lord of the Rings books to be very boring and drawn out. The story itself is good but there are parts that just drag on forever.

    My favorite books as a kid were Charlotte’s Web, The Babysitter’s Club Series, The Boxcar Kids, and Nancy Drew Mysteries. Also pretty much any book you put in my hands. Books have always been my escape. I was bullied a lot as a kid and books helped me forget for a little while.

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  19. Picking one book is cruel and unusual. Shame on you! I read EVERY Oz book I could – there were still new ones being written into the 80’s, I think. Anything by Beverly Cleary, all the Nancy Drew, all the Anne of Green Gables, Judy Bloom – basically I read anything I could get my grubby hands on. I loved The Hobbit in 3rd grade – I think I read the first of the trilogy about then, and it was a slog. The movies have about 75 points to end, and they still keep going. Nope.
    As I got older, I really appreciated (and still do) The Whole Earth Catalog, The Hitchhiker’s Guide and everything I find by Pratchett. Agatha Christie was a huge draw as a teen, I’m an eclectic reader, so if I find something to tickle my brain, it goes into Mount To Be Read.

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  20. I agree, Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”. It’s still my favorite and I’ve read it at least a dozen times through, plus all his extra works at least once. Tolkien’s writings are what inspired me to become a writer in the first place. I eagerly await your updates!

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  21. I was an avid reader. I read everyday of my childhood. I haven’t read Lord of the Rings but I’ve seen the movie a dozen times. I read everything growing up, Fantastic Mr Fox, Sounder, where the Red Fern Grows, The Outsiders, Boxcar children, Sweet Valley High, RL Stine was my favorite. I liked horror as a teenager. I just loved books

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  23. My favorite book I read in 8th grade. Steven King The Stand. I then read the unabridged version twice. By far my most favorite scary end times book ever!

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  25. I am a Tolkien fan though I didn’t read the books until I was an adult. I am looking forward to the movie about him. I think CS Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was one of my favorites, and I enjoyed it just as much when I read it to my kids.

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  26. My favorite book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Although I will say I also enjoyed The Hobbit and its series. Another book that made a big impact on me was On The Beach by Nevil Shute. That book really made me think about what is important in life when I was in high school.

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  27. Since I am a teenager now so my childhood was a past but it actually feels weird addressing it as ‘was’.
    My favourite books were Gernimo and Thea Stilton series.

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