When I was six. Review on Favourite Books Of Childhood

The title should give you the clue that I was a big fan of A.A. Milne when I was a kid. Winnie and his gang were just too cool. Come to think of it the majority of my reading then was centred around animals. There were the classics, Paddington, Black Beauty, I even picked up Arthur Ransom's Swallows and Amazons thinking it had something to do with animals, was a little disapointed to discover it was about sailing, but continued to read them all anyway.

I had a couple of British grandparents with a variety of great aunts in Scotland so my brother and I would be sent a variety of typically English stuff for Christmas and Birthdays. Some that I remember were The Jennings goes to school series, boarding school type stories(when I first read Harry Potter many years latter the similarities were striking, Enid Blyton's Five series, the adventures of four children and their dog, plus all the wonderful historical fiction novels for boys, C.S. Forestor, Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyal, Geoffery Trease, and Ronald Welch. I first learned about European history through the eyes of Hornblower and various other fictional characters of English Literature.

As a child I quickly bored with most kids books and graduated to adult books young. The first of these were the works of British naturalist Gerald Durrell. I loved reading his tales of collecting animals from all over the world. It was by reading him that I first became aware of the fragile state of the world's environment. Oh and how could I forget Alan Gardner's slightly dark fantasies, or Bram Stoker's Dracula(still the scariest book I have ever read) or Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

I think the only difference between then and now was that I'm quite a number of years older. I love the Harry Potter books and still will read Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series. So maybe I still haven't grown up. Now where did I put that Paddington book anyway?