I have been spending a lot of time on book search websites lately, the ones where people post the vague, half remembered pieces of stories and others try to ID them so that we can all reclaim our childhoods. It's similar, but more often the opposite, of what I always enjoyed on The Onion's Ask the AV Club, which was mostly people asking for brief fragments of nightmares so that they could rewatch the movie/reread the book and make the horror go away by realizing how silly it is now. In both cases, the answer is Ray Bradbury or William Sleator 90% of the time. I read Sleator's House of Stairs almost purely because of this.
On the side of regaining childhood memories, I have very few of these. So many people post multiple messages on the book finding boards, trying to recreate whole libraries, I am pretty sure that I'm not in this situation because I 1)have a pretty good memory 2)am a rereader, so that memory is more likely to be firm and clear 3)I hung onto most of my books BECAUSE I am a rereader. Even now, if I had to pay money, even fifty cents, for every single book I read, I would go broke. I would need another hobby. I get books from the library, from netgalley, free online from Project Gutenberg or publisher/author deals. Galleys from work or conferences, cheap books from used book stores, free for me books from used bookstores when I go out with my Dad and he insists on paying. As a child, I couldn't get every book I wanted, or enough to fill my need to read (and I was a notoriously irresponsible library user at a very small library. My brother and I both read through everything in that branch, and this is back in the dark ages of the 90s, before requesting from other branches was as easy as it is now). So, when I was tired of my books and/or my Mom made me clear out some of my room's clutter, I would pack up the books and they would go in the basement, waiting for the day several months later when I would open the bag or box and see a stack of books that were almost as good as being completely new. It was brilliant.
I still have a bookshelf full of books in my room in my Dad's house, and likely boxes of books throughout the house. I haven't had a chance to forget them because they are still there. My Redwall collection, my Tanith Lee, The Giver, Number the Stars, the Phantom Tollbooth, everything I have reread over and over again. For me to forget a book or only have wisps of the memory, it would have to be pretty inconsequential in my life.
Then I thought of one I wanted to remember. It was a painful book, one I didn't want to reread because I hated it. Perhaps the first book I read where the bad thing HAD to happen, it was the point and the character had to learn to live with it as well as the reader. Perhaps other children have a similar reaction when Beth dies in Little Women. All that I could remember was that the book was about two sisters, very Beezus and Ramona -like in personalities. The part that I could remember strongly was something that I wasn't sure was the focus of the book, but that the young girl had a stuffed elephant that was her beloved comfort animal, and she gave him away to charity by mistake, but her mom sat with her and helped her come to peace with giving the elephant away, rather than the ending, I-as-a-child wanted, which was to say that it was too big of a sacrifice and to give something else.
This devastated me as a child. I clung to my Danny bear, the best bear in the world, and railed against a world that would tear apart a girl and her stuffed elephant. I remember discussing the book and the ending with my Mom, sitting on my bed and just talking about a book. The kind of insignificant nonsense that only means anything once you have lost that person and you are desperate to cling to every piece of her and every single tiny memory you can grab. I don't want to reread this book, I just wanted to know what it was, what author hit me so hard that I, at 25, spent an hour or two googling "stuffed elephant". I finally hit on using Google Book search, and it was too easy from there. I only needed that phrase, because the elephants name was Stuffed Elephant. The book was Oh, Honestly Angela! and it doesn't appear to be any great work of literature.
The second one was a fragment of memory from when I was young and obsessed with wanting a cat, but my Dad hated cats. This book was tailor made for me, about a little girl who wanted a cat but her mom was allergic. As I thought, memories came back that I didn't know I had. She found a cat, yes, but I knew for sure that it was a Siamese, possibly even a blue point siamese. I remembered her taking the cat and hiding, then I remembered that she hid in this sort of room under the porch in her house, she could hear all of the comings and goings of the search team, her mom crying, and her mom sneezing from the cat. I don't remember the ending. I did a google books search and found only an excerpt from Library Journal or similar with a review, gave the date as 1971 and the girl's name as Millicent, but no author or book title due to what google books lets you read. So I went to WorldCat, set the date, language, and juvenile, used cat as a keyword, and slogged through 400 results until I saw "The Easter Cat" and thought...that could be it...I didn't remember Easter at all. Amazon gave me the cover and a description and yes. This is my book. This one, I am pretty excited to find, and I have it on order from the library right now.
I have been finding myself drifting back in my memories lately, trying to recover something else that I can hunt down. Now that I have stalked my prey, I either want new, or I will have to settle for helping others find their own lost books.
