We're cleaning up the library downstairs, throwing out the trash, and going through the big plastic boxes of old books trying to figure out which ones are donatable. The books on the shelves are mostly fiction and reference. Children's books, old magazines, and textbooks were packed into plastic bins a couple of years back -- these are the ones we're going through now.
We're planning to donate them to
AHON, which is trying to raise a million books to donate to public schools throughout the country. It makes me a bit sad to have to part with them, as many of these books were part of my childhood, and I read and reread them endlessly, but I don't read them these days. Hopefully the kids who end up getting these books will enjoy them as much as I used to!
Lots of Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Choose Your Own Adventure books, Sweet Valley Twins/High/University (I wasn't an obsessive fan: something about them being episodic made me feel as though they were disposable. I could skip a book without having to worry about it affecting my experience of the next one, so there wasn't any motivation for me to go out and buy them. However, I gladly read whatever was given to me. The Sweet Valley High and University ones were passed down to me by a cousin who outgrew them. The detective and CYA ones were bought by my brother).
Sweet Valley Twins were my sisters', and I read those as a kid. Got bored quickly because seriously, grrr. But okay. The one thing I really remember from those was that there was someone named Aaron. Two A's! I couldn't pronounce it, and it bugged me.
Sweet Valley High books I read quite late, some time in my early teens. I remember that I felt so guilty about reading them because theey sucked so much, but I couldn't stay away because they were there, in the home library, an entire box of books I had never read. So I'd grab a few at a time, zoom through each, and sneak them back in. I knew they would suck, and they did, but it took so little time to read each book (less than an hour), that I ended up using that to justify myself ;)
Other than the Sweet Valley books, I think my cousin also passed down something about Pee Wee Scouts, and Birthday Girls and, umm, a couple of kiddy books (New Kids in School? something like that) about kids which were... nice, but too kiddy for me, even back when I first got them. I do remember that one of them mentioned candy corn, which is where I learned about that treat (though I don't remember ever eating it *g*).
I hated CYA books. I always felt the need to know each and every branch, and it was annoying to have to backtrack after finishing one branch in order to go down the other branch. Things got worse when there were three choices. (CYA makes me think of recursive function calls. Or maybe recursive function calls make me think of CYA?)
By the way, does Ellen Kushner sound familiar? She wrote an Outlaws of Sherwood CYA, and the author name sounds very familiar, but I can't quite place her.
Other old favorites, individual books or short series that probably no one has heard of: Jacob Two-two and the Dinosaur, Richard and the Vratch, The Pink Pig, some Encyclopedia Brown (I want to reread these to be honest!), Space Brat (by Bruce Coville), The Janice Project, someone something at Follyfoot. A bunch of the other covers and titles sparked memories, but I didn't remember reading them until now.
I remember always planning to read
A Fine White Dust, which we had two copies of for no reason that I can remember, but I always put it off because the illustration spooked me a bit. Really pale kid, and the blurb talked about a Preacher (yes, capitalized) and it just freaked me out.
There are also some children's books that were my younger brother's for school -- and I used to be sooo envious of him because they actually read
entire books at his school, not just short stories or summaries. Never had that in my school (not even when we took up Shakespeare; now that was a bit of a joke >_>).
Anyway, I am pretty sure that we have at least a couple of hundred ready to be donated. Mostly fiction, but there are a couple of textbooks in the mix as well :)
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chasethestars, I have the icon I needed. Also, I've begun adding your suggestions to the entry, and I'm bolding the stuff that I've done.
