As a child, did you read many books from places other than US/UK/Canada? Any favorites?

29 comments

1. Would books written by UK authors not be foreign?

   Chronicles of Narnia? LOTR? 1984?

2. Yeah plenty, I had a decent amount of Irish storybooks as a kid. As well as a smattering of Mexican and Continental European ones as well.

   Are the UK and Canada not foreign?

3. Some books but all translated.

   Little Prince is French. Tin Tin (if you count comics). Asterix the Gaul (again if you count comics). Grimms fairytales, Hans Christian Andersen. And if you count the Bible as foreign literature then that.

   Later in life I have read a ton of foreign books. My undergrad religious studies included stuff like this https://i.imgur.com/GftbdYx.jpg

   I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in Spanish… that was a chore. I think I spent more time using the Spanish to English dictionary than actually reading the book (this was also pre-interwebs dictionaries so it was all thumbing through a paper dictionary).

4. I didn’t read any non aglosphere books when I was a kid. I was older when I started on the D’Artagnan romances, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Grimm’s fairy tales, etc. I read the translation because I don’t speak French fluently and only know a few words in German.

5. I’m realizing that pretty much all of the books I read growing up were by authors from the countries you mentioned.

   The Artemis Fowl books and Don Quixote were the only exceptions I could think of, and I read a tonnnnn when I was younger.

6. Is it only the UK, US and Canada that you want to exclude or would you exclude the entire Anglosphere? As in, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland as well?

7. Don Quixote in high school.

   I think the Diary of Anne Frank technically falls into that definition and we read that too.

   Can’t think of any others off the top of my head

   Edit: Count of Monte Cristo. Forgot about that one, but we read that in my senior year literature class.

8. I mean, does all the manga I read as a kid count?

9. A lot of foreign books I’ve read have to do with some part of history. Like “Night” by Elie Wiesel, “A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah, and “Sold” by Patricia McCormick. Admittedly, the last one is an American journalist, but the story is basically based on the sex slave girls she interviewed in India. So while it probably doesn’t count, the book is definitely a good one and I highly recommend it.

10. My mom majored in French so I grew up with a lot of classical French authors, Dumas, Hugo, etc. I also had a lot of Babar the Elephant and Tintin, which is Belgian French.

11. Jules Verne is the main author I can think of that I read when I was young. TBH, even as an adult I haven’t branched out that much into foreign authors.

12. I went through a Russian Lit phase as a 12/13/14 year old so read a bunch of that then including Anna Karenina which was my favorite, and most hated, of the lot. Otherwise I definitely had a Holocaust period around age 10/11 as well so Number of Our Stars, Night, Anne Frank, etc. Oh and I recall being obsessed with Yeh-Shen when I was super little.

13. I read Battle Royale multiple times. We also had to read So Far From the Bamboo Grove which apparently now is kinda taboo and Korean Americans have lobbied to get it banned. The author came to our school and talked to us and all I really remember was thinking she was old.

14. I read the communist manifesto just to piss off my carpentry teacher. Good man but very easy to work up.

15. I liked series by Australian authors Garth Nix and Alison Croggon, a couple different Cinderella retellings based in India (Homeless Bird) and China (title might just have been Cinderella, but I don’t think I have the book any more), and teen romance books by Austrian/later British writer Eva Ibbotson. I’m sure there’s more, but those come to mind first. I didn’t care where something was written as a kid, and I grew up all over the US and abroad, so I had relatively a lot of exposure to different children’s literary tastes.

16. The Grimm brothers and other varied European fairy tales if that counts. I’m fairly certain there was a British author that I really liked as well whom I can’t remember now.

17. I adored *Babar* and *Madeline*! Also, just any myths or folk-tales are great.

18. What if they’re an immigrant? For instance Kite Runner was written by an Afghan-American novelist born in Kabul

19. I honestly can’t tell which ones are of British origin or which aren’t.

    Madeline was fairly popular I think. Both the books and tapes.

20. Not a child, but I’m currently reading the 3rd book in “The Three-Body Problem”. Written by Chinese author Liu Cixin, translated to English.

    It’s fantastic! If you like sci-fi and a very unique premise for a story I’d highly recommend.

21. Cornelia Funke’s books were reasonably popular. Not like Harry Potter level, but enough to later get movie. I read those and half of Three Musketeers and the 1001 Nights (the latter is definitely not for children).

22. Yes ofc – super common to read books by authors from all over. Source – I worked at a bookstore for 7+ years lol.

23. Madeleine and Babar are both classic children’s books that are French.

24. The little prince when I was a child. As a teenager I read Kafka and a bunch of French existentialist writers. Simone De Beauvoir was a favorite.

    French, Spanish, Latin American, and German writers tend to be the ones that get translated more often into the US.

25. The Bible

26. Little Prince and Babaar definitely. Brothers Grimm. Hans Christian Anderson. Dumas. Chekhov. Technically Shakespeare is foreign.

27. Not a lot, but I found out as an adult that the Inkheart series was translated (from German) and I loved that series as a kid, so it’s possible I just didn’t notice. If you count Middle school and high school assigned reading, then there’s more as well (Diary of Anne Frank, A long walk to water, I am Malala, night, kite runner, I have lived a thousand years, various old Greek plays/Iliad/odyssey, importance of being earnest, red scarf girl – though a few of these authors did immigrate to the US or UK)

    In high school Spanish we also read El túnel and Cuando era puertorriqueña (though Puerto Rico is actually part of the US ofc so I’m not sure if you count that), though we didn’t read any other actual books in Spanish until college which I assume is not what you’re talking about. (Also if you like the show You you’ll love the book El túnel – it was so creepy)

28. When I was a kid, I had a very old version of the Grimm Bros fairy tales. The stories were much gorier that the Disney versions, or even the more modern written versions. Alas, I lost it somewhere along the line.

    The only detail I still remember was that Cinderella’s stepsisters hacked off parts of their feet, to make the glass slipper fit.

    Since then, I’ve read that most of them were originally even gorier than in my book. Fairy tales were meant to prepare kids for the harsh realities of life, not to entertain them.

29. When I was in High School my class read ‘Things Fall Apart’, a novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe.