The Great Cancellation

[Brian Peacock]

When I was about 12 or so my uncle gave me some of his old books including Swallows and Amazons, along with some John Buchan, Geoffrey Household, Richmal Crompton's Just William stories, and a collection of Sherlock Holmes. Not very cool among my peers, but I found the Buchan and Household stories tremendously exciting. You don't know what jingoistic tosh is at that age.

[JimC]

Buchan was one of my father's favourite authors. I enjoyed them as a boy as well. Leaving aside the "jingoistic tosh" (which was pretty standard at the time), they certainly were exciting reads...

[Woodbutcher]

Actually, my favourite books as a child, even more than Biggles, were the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. After that, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, then I moved into SF...

I applied and was accepted into high school in Finland when I was 11. The school was in a city a 30 min bus ride from where I lived, a country boy. By that time I had read every book in our public school library, there were probably 50 of them in there, for boys and girls, published any time between 1910 and 1950. My first order of business was to get a library card for the young peoples section in the city library. I read probably 3 or 4 books a week, anything that seemed interesting. I did read every science fiction book in there and loved them. Nowadays I'm more into fantasy, but I did order Ian Tonnessen's book "Critical Asset" and I'm reading it now. It's excellently written and interesting. Get it on Amazon. Here's the author's page https://www.facebook.com/IanOlafTonness ... UI&fref=nf

[pErvinalia]

I read National Geographic when I was a kid. I swear I didn't look at them for the pictures of naked African tribes women.