Nostalgia, Round 2

It's pretty cool they got the cat to pose like this.
Unless he's ACTUALLY READING.

I really enjoyed writing my last post about my favorite childhood TV shows, so I decided to follow it up with the sequel: favorite childhood books! I'm excited for this one. My love of reading began at a very young age, when I used to literally eat the pages out of my books as a baby. I wanted to learn so badly I was willing to put my tender digestive system at risk to gain that knowledge. When I finally learned the goal of books to read them, not ingest them, I loved books even more! My parents tell me that they would read my books like Dr. Suess over and over again to the point I had them memorized and could recite them exactly. I tricked my parents for a while into thinking they had some kind of prodigy child who could read at age two. This is false. However, I did learn to read at a pretty early age, which led to my parents enrolling me into kindergarten when I was four. At elementary school I attended there was this program called Accelerated Reader, where I would take little book quizzes on the computer and would be awarded points based on how well I did. I have never been more competitive than in winning those Accelerated Reader points. In addition to the pride associated with being the Best Reader Ever, the points also won you cool prizes, like coffee mugs (?). Anyway, these are some of my favorite books as a kid:

1) Sideways Stories from Wayside School 
I don't even know where to being with these books. They were so wacky and unrealistic but so much fun to read. There was one story I recall, where a new kid came to the classroom and he was really smelly and rude. He was also wearing a ton of jackets, and as the teacher took more and more jackets off the kid got smaller until she took the last jacket off and he was a dead rat. What.

2) Harriet the Spy
I still think it's the coolest thing ever to hide in people's little elevator things and spy on them. Plus she got to eat chocolate cake everyday after school... I was really jealous of that.

3) A Series of Unfortunate Events
I feel like as a kid I didn't comprehend what about 60% of what was happening to those poor orphans. Because I remember I desperately wanted to be one of them. The fourth Baudelaire! MEEEE!

4) A Wrinkle in Time
This book kind of terrified me as a child. These kids' father get trapped by some powerful other-worldly entity known as the Black Thing and the kids have to travel through dimensions to rescue him. My mom originally read it to me, and I had some freaky nightmares for a while. I've read it myself lots of times after than first episode... it's still faintly disturbing, but awesome at the same time.

5) Harry Potter series
Does anything really need to be said for these books? They speak for themselves. JK Rowling, you could kill 20 people and I would still love you.

Television Nostalgia

Today when I returned home from school I was feeling pretty sickish, so instead of starting on my homework I sat down and watched TV for a couple hours. Anyone who has watched television during the 3 pm - 5 pm time slot knows that the options are rather limited. As I scrolled through the stations, failing to find anything at all appealing, I couldn't help but miss all the great shows I watched as a child. Even the children's shows today fail to meet the quality of the kid's shows of my day. Now, as a child, I was not allowed to watch any station besides PBS, until pure stubbornness won me the ability to watch Disney channel when I was nine. I still do not fully understand why my parents had this rule, since they let my sister, Liesel, watch whatever she wanted once I won television freedom. I am still bitter about this. Anyway, these are the television shows of my childhood, which I would gladly trade for anything on the air today.

1) Arthur

Upon further inspection of this show I've noticed that almost all the minor characters are rabbits. And Arthur's family owns a dog... but they are aardvarks and some of their friends are dogs. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but this show was still one of my favorites.

2) Wishbone

A little dog dresses up in costume and plays the main character in famous books. So. Awesome. One episode I distinctly remember was an adaption of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (which is actually a short story, that I just read... it was better with Wishbone).

3) Liberty's Kids

This show had it all: battle scenes, romance, investigative journalism, George Washington, French people. I probably would have failed the APUSH exam were it not for this show.

4) Cyberchase

Just like Liberty's Kids taught me about the American Revolution, Cyberchase taught me math, probably better than any teacher ever had (except for Mr. Maas, of course).

5) Zoom

 I'm not really sure what this show was about, at all. A bunch of kids did stuff on TV for half an hour, which was always entertaining. It was from Zoom that I learned how to make chin-people.