I recently watched the film version of The Outsiders (a decent watch for reasons I won't get into here), which caused me to reflect on the young-adult literature of my youth. It seems that all has changed since the arrival of one Harry Potter. At the age of 14 when the first Potter book was released, I was much too old to catch it on its first wave of popularity among kids. ("Why should I bother with such trifles when I'm reading 1984 for Honors English and writing an article on girls' lacrosse for the Panther Press?") However, as I was forming a legitimate taste in literature in those heady turn of the century years, it was not a terribly long time ago that I was knee-deep in some of the greatest young-adult literature that my local library had to offer. Matt Christopher
When I was a kid, I loved sports. I mean, I'm really into sports even today, but as a kid - sports was everything. And to Matt Christopher, also, sports was everything. The dude wrote a book about every goddamn sport you could think of. I personally would only read the ones about baseball, basketball, soccer, and hockey maybe, but there are books with the Matt Christopher name on them about golf, tennis, running, and all manner of extreme sports.
I haven't touched a Matt Christopher book in a long time, and I certainly don't own any now. However, even at the time I think I kind of felt that this guy was probably exploiting sports-mad children. The books weren't particularly well written in any way. You could pretty easily guess what was going to happen based on the title alone. The storylines were just exciting enough to get you fantasizing about scoring a goal for your youth soccer team, but that's where their appeal largely ended. Even so, Matt Christopher held his own in the competition for space on my bookshelf.
The Great Brain series
I'm not sure if I'm the only kid who ever read The Great Brain series or not. I found The Great Brain at the Academy in my aunt's basement one holiday afternoon, though, and there was no looking back from there. The Great Brain is a profoundly weird series, however, the type of weird that could have only come from a work that is semi-autobiographical. It takes place in Utah at about the turn of the century, and the main character, the Great Brain, is the middle child in the only Catholic family in the town. In that respect, I guess, it was a pretty appropriate book for me, an utterly precocious, Catholic youth. Anyway, he spent all his time tricking other kids out of their money and possessions. Hence, the Great Brain. What a weird series.
R.L. Stine
My little brother's friends were more into R.L. Stine than I was, but I still certainly read my fair share of the Goosebumps series. Goosebumps was cool because it was kind of like the book version of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which every kid knew was quite a bit more truly scary and less cartoony than Goosebumps. Despite this, they definitely shared more than a couple of storylines, usually having to do with cameras that steal people's souls or scary clowns. Each, of course, had the completely de rigeur twist ending. But as in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, the twist endings were awesome, and kids loved them.
In the early 90s, kids where I lived loved sports more than anything, but freaky stuff was a solid second. R.L. Stine was more than happy to provide us with more than enough freaky stuff. Goosebumps clearly peaked somewhere around when Stine started publishing third entries into his most popular sub-series (i.e., Monster Blood III, Night of the Living Dummy III). I will say, however, that I quite enjoyed the Goosebumps TV series revival on Cartoon Network this past fall, especially while being lonely in hotel rooms while on interviews.
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl is probably the most legitimate author in this entire list. I'm almost completely certain that he has inspired the most movies from his books, anyway. Anyone who is reading this probably knows more than I do about Roald Dahl, but he's too important not to include. If I had to make a hierarchy of Roald Dahl books I've read, it would go something like this:
1. James and the Giant Peach
2. Danny, the Champion of the World
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
4. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
5. The BFG
6. The Witches
7. The Twits
8. Matilda (also probably the inspiration for the stupidest of all Roald Dahl movies)
9. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
The thing I remember most about Roald Dahl is his weird vocabulary. Snozzberries. Even as a child, it struck me as too grotesque. Something slightly off. Even though he was a ridiculously popular author, he had about two or three books that no kid had ever read. I was never sure why that was. Also, according to Wikipedia, he's anti-Semitic. Just to let you know.
Redwall series
For some kids, Lord of the Rings was a bit long and complex, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was too boring to read another Narnia book, Watership Down was a little too weird, A Wrinkle in Time was way, way too weird, and The Wind in the Willows was too goofy and excessively English. For those kids, if they were up to the task of tackling massive book after massive book, there was the Redwall series. Taking the strangest part of each series menioned above, Redwall placed mostly mice and other rodent characters in the middle ages and forced them to fight rats and cats. Awesome, awesome stuff.
The coolest thing about Redwall, besides the fact that you felt like a badass carrying around a 400-page book, was that they kept continuity throughout the entire series. Brian Jacques (whose name would be the source of endless pronunciation debate) would come out with a new saga every year that illuminated a new piece of Redwall lore. It went into the future, it went into the past, but in every era there were sword-fighting mice, moles with indeterminate (I think maybe Welsh?) accents, rabbits with Australian accents, and odd religious overtones.
Redwall eventually became too complex for its own good. No self-respecting middle schooler would ever be caught reading a book about sword-fighting animals, anyway, so there was kind of a built-in expiration date for my Redwall fandom. These books, for me, have probably aged the worst out of all. But I definitely enjoyed them at the time.
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