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An Interview With Simon Loxley

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Tales of a Sixth-Grade Library

Jim Roeg asks what you were reading in sixth grade? He says he chose that year because it’s an awkward time for most.
“As the oldest kids in primary school, we’d just reached the pinnacle of the social hierarchy…and were about to slide right back down it, into the scary and unforgiving world of junior high.”
Sounds like Lewis Barnavelt in The Figure in the Shadows.

John Bellairs and his Lewis Barnavelt trilogy surfaces at #2 on his list. What else? Alfred Hitchcock Presents The Three Investigators, which we recall as fun adventures with three inventive kids that had as much to do with Hitch as does that Psycho remake that we didn’t understand.
 The Three Investigators books were scary and thrilling, but ultimately they provided Scooby Doo-style solutions to weird mysteries that only seemed supernatural. Bellairs’s gothic fantasies were more deeply unsettling, preparing the ground for my junior high obsession with horror stories and novels of all kinds, from Poe to Dean Koontz.
And Choose Your Own Adventures, those oddly assembled stories that made little sense when read straight through from page 1 to page 50 (not that we tried).

How about you? What were you reading in sixth grade?

Also, our thanks to Jim and his comments about this cool blog you're reading!

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