Let's help each other identify books we dimly remember reading as kids

That artist (Aruego) did one of my favourite books from childhood, 'Herman the Helper', about a wee octopus who helped all the other see creatures. It was in my primary school library and I've never seen it since. My own kids have Aruego's 'Leo the Late Bloomer'. The illustrations are lovely.

Reposting from the kids' illustrations best of the best thread:

Ugh, now this is really bugging me...there was a picture book (with a fairly elaborate, wordy story, not for little LITTLE kids) dealing with maybe animals living in like, the sewers or the other in-between spaces (clock towers? inside the walls of buildings?) in I would guess London, MAYBE Paris. Really really lavish illustrations, with things like scenes framed like section drawings sorta, so you could see stuff buried in the walls and the ground (dinosaur bones between rooms, that kind of thing).

It definitely had a narrative arc, and maybe something kind of skeevy and seamy was going on, criminals up to something, maybe a cop or detective animal that catches them...? I can't tell how much of this is really in the book and how much of it is garbled up with Danger Mouse which I recall watching a lot of around the same time, so let's say this must have come out sometime before 1992, say, and was likely a 1980s book. Dense, Baroque illustrations, and probably vertical in format - closer to the size/presentation of Stinky Cheese Man or something like that.

oh that sounds very familiar

Another great Aruego book is 'Pilyo the Piranha', about a cranky piranha's failed attempts to eat a sloth. I had dimly remembered it from my own childhood, and managed to google it after some dead ends and got hold of a copy for my daughter, who loves it.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91qKqbwrtEL.jpg

Group of teens in a declining (but not post-apocalyptic future) (urban blight, unemployment, everything's just sort of gone to shit), sign up for some sort of weird virtual reality game thing where they travel to other worlds and survive and make new settlements. Each time they're in it for longer and longer, and then of course the twist is that the last time they aren't in the game at all, they were actually put in suspended animation and put on a flight to this new planet to be the future of the human race.

― Doctor Casino, Monday, September 6, 2010 2:45 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dear past self, it's INVITATION TO THE GAME by Monica Hughes

http://www.scholastic.com/content5/media/products/21/9780671866921_xlg.jpg

still hoping to solve the one from the OP though. i feel like the protagonist proper was the camp counselor (or other young adult chaperone type?) who is driving the van on this road trip. when the one huckster kid does make a super awesome slot-car racing track, it's a moneymaking scheme, people will bet on the cars as they race around. maybe the huckster kid takes his scams too far in the end, or just generally they're a nuisance to the lead, who is trying to keep them all out of trouble as they go. one chapter is definitely titled "the power of positive parking" but i can't remember why. maybe it just details their arrival at the convention hall or wherever they're going for the big tournament/awards show/whatever they're trekking across america for.

whole series where there are robots and i think probably there is an oppression-of-the-robots angle and robots are perfect androids who would be indistinguishable from people except that they walk stiff-legged, and at one dramatic point in one book a protagonist masquerading as a robot to escape some sort of peril gets all the way through a conversation as a convincing robot before exiting the room toward freedom and forgetting to walk stiff-legged

One is a fantasy novel in which this girl has to navigate this labyrinth in complete darkness and looking for a stone (I think?). I think it was part of a series but my library didn't have the others.

this old one sounds a little like u.k. leguin's the tombs of atuan, the second earthsea book? maybe not as it may actually better describe a section in the book of three.

Oh, fuck, I know what this robot thing is, don't I? Or am I just thinking of a Futurama episode mixed up with A Wrinkle In Time?

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=653693

Originally Posted by The Other Waldo Pepper View Post
MY ROBOT BUDDY, by Alfred Slote.

omg yes! pretty sure that's it. thanks!

Don't go around walking like a robot or you will surely be stolen by nefarious thieves is the central theme in Alfred Slote's My Robot Buddy. At least I think so...it's been over 20 years since I have read it.

i see it won a "nene award", apparently we liked it in hawaii.

at least i think that's it. it seems unlikely that there'd be multiple YA books about robots who crucially don't bend their knees.

Well, apparently there are at least five:

My Robot Buddy (1975)
My trip to Alpha I (1978)
C.O.L.A.R. : a tale of outer space (1981)
Omega Station (1983)
The Trouble on Janus (1985)

i def read c.o.l.a.r..

i meant multiple authors/universes, but apparently even that was untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norby,_the_Mixed-Up_Robot

i guess that wiki doesn't mention anything about knees but a post on the straightdope forum above claimed they're a factor.

http://www.applebybooks.com/images/008612.jpg

joints looking a little too loose and flexible here i think

"he's bending his knees!" tom and friend cried, jointly

lol

Late 80s children's chapter book mystery (4th/5th grade reading level). Anubis featured prominently.

― how's life, Friday, January 9, 2015 7:47 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Probably the House on Hackman's Hill by Joan Lowery Nixon

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311039228l/6490424.jpg

Trying to remember the title of a YA book from the nineties about a girl who's living with her mom on the streets of (I think) San Francisco. It starts out with them living in a commune, but something bad goes down or the commune gets raided by the cops or something, anyway they have to take off with hardly anything and end up homeless in the city. At some point she convinces her mom to move to Monterey because her favorite book is Cannery Row, and they find a squat with some other ppl and she starts going to school. I remember almost everything about this book except the title, and google doesn't turn it up.

Oh fuck I have not seen this thread before.

A comic or picture book with four Aliens in a sports car driving into Madrid.

I have been looking for this for 30+ years with no joy.

@ Lily Dale - not ringing a bell for me but I couldn't help wanting to do some Googling myself. Surprised at how many YA books from the late 80s and 90s involve characters raised on communes. But on further investigation none of them really sound quite like yours...

still hoping to solve the one from the OP though. i feel like the protagonist proper was the camp counselor (or other young adult chaperone type?) who is driving the van on this road trip. when the one huckster kid does make a super awesome slot-car racing track, it's a moneymaking scheme, people will bet on the cars as they race around. maybe the huckster kid takes his scams too far in the end, or just generally they're a nuisance to the lead, who is trying to keep them all out of trouble as they go. one chapter is definitely titled "the power of positive parking" but i can't remember why. maybe it just details their arrival at the convention hall or wherever they're going for the big tournament/awards show/whatever they're trekking across america for.

i'm certain this is some Gordon Korman book, not sure which one though

"No Coins Please" - How much trouble can six kids get into on a cross-country tour? A lot – especially if one of them is Artie Geller.

Artie is the master of the money-making scheme, and his crazy ventures always turn out to be gold mines. He outwits his counselors and seems to be unstoppable – until the FBI catches up with him.

Not a book but an LP of songs for kids about cars. All the songs were about different makes of car and the cover was the title of the LP spelled out in toy cars.

This would have been early '70s.

omg. omg. No Coins, Please is absolutely 100% the book! i found an ebook preview with a table of contents and "The Power of Positive Parking" is one of the chapter titles. THANK YOU!

reading the plot summary, it's a shame the book wasn't a bigger hit, feels like it coulda made a decent low-budget 80s teen comedy.

Much earlier book, maybe from the 50s or 60s. Short, big text, but probably with "chapters" in some sense. Kids dress up in masks made from paper bags, with spears and other things made from household stuff. Book also includes instructions on how to make your own. It all has to do with some secret club that meets out in the woods or in the tall grass. Eventually it turns out that the kids' parents were also members of this gang as kids. Much merriment despite how creepy I may be making this sound. I think the groups are maybe called WOLF and DRAGON but I can't remember.

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, October 31, 2009 7:12 AM bookmarkflaglink

all at once, as i was making coffee this morning, it came to me:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-UO3MBOMxuCs%2FUjw9VymP5aI%2FAAAAAAAADAk%2F0w65PrJG5HU%2Fs1600%2Fsecrethideout.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

John Peterson, The Secret Hide-Out (1965)

I vaguely remember reading a book about a boy who is chased along a river by a man and they end up in a sort of cave (I think) . Quite disturbingly, the man forces the boy to eat some sort of tasteless grey clay? That's all I remember

this is weirdly familiar! but i think your description might just be prompting my brain to fuse Z For Zachariah with the Hatchet sequel The River. hmm...

I always like the vibe of threads like this. They're collections of half-remembered dreamlike fragments -- images and moods -- asking for resolution and mostly not finding it. Feels like you could collect the most evocative examples online into a found poetry thing or at least a twitter feed.

Pretty sure this is a real memory and not a dream, in fact it might be a pretty well-known book: there was a radio station that was only on late at night, and there was some connection with lizard people I think? But not bad lizard people a la V or conspiracists, these were cool lizards. There’s a sense that the radio station was like a portal to another dimension.

I was just searching for another story on stackoverflow so I had a go with yours, I found this which mentions a radio and lizard people: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/46650/childrens-novel-about-a-boy-who-buys-a-device-from-an-old-man-and-travels-to-a - but the answer doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars - but this by the same author sounds closer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63321.Lizard_Music

The story I was searching for involved some kids who decide to take revenge on a bully, they turn up to his birthday party laden with presents which turn out to be empty; maybe they also try to scare him by putting their clothes on back to front and walking towards him backwards ?? sounds lame - anyway it ends inside an old empty warehouse or factory with him escaping through a door which then disappears, one of the other kids wonders where you go if you go through a door that isn't there. Early/mid 80s, probably a short story, probably extremely obscure.

sounds wild, no idea but would love to know.

(re: lizard music, the goodreads summary isn't that helpful but one of the reviews says this: But when he falls asleep in front of the TV one night, he awoke to the strangest thing. After the TV station goes off the air, his TV picks up this show of anthopomorphized lizards playing jazz music)

Awesome job ledge, it was definitively Daniel Pinkwater now that I recall, and it must have been Lizard Music. But now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t so “cool” after all. Maybe it was all part of their saurian scheme.

Sorry I’ll stop. Heh.

Definitely Lizard Music, and they are cool lizards. It's a great book. Worth a re-read.

Yeah Lizard Music is great.