NPR did an interview with Beverly Cleary, who grew up in Portland, Oregon and based many of her books there. Yay Portland!
FYI: The children's library in Portland's Central Library (one of my favorite buildings) is dedicated to Cleary and there's a sculpture garden in Grant Park with Ramona, Henry Huggins and Ribsy.
What's your favorite Beverly Cleary book?
I've always loved Socks (because it's about a cat and I liked how they cleaned Socks up after his fight and forgot about their dumb baby for a while) (you see, I've NEVER been a baby person) but my favorite Ramona was always Ramona Quimby, Age 8 when she got a whole egg broken on her head. I still have all my old Dell Yearling paperbacks, $2.50 a pop.
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I read this article in Newsweek last week, and it made me so nostalgic. I love both my grandmothers, but I wish the lovely Beverly Cleary were my third.
My favorite was probably Beezus and Ramona and also Ramona the Pest, although I also loved the egg-breaking in Age 8 and the toothpaste all over the counter, too, in Ramona and Her Mother. And I loved Henry Huggins (even though I didn't quite get why the talcum powder was pink) and Ellen Tebbits (even though the thought of those woolen stockings made me itch).
I guess her Ralph books are extremely popular, but I never got into those much.
I'd like to think that my original books are in my sister's old closet, but I'm not sure. Sarah, I'm jealous of your inventory. The covers today just aren't the same.
Mine is whichever one in which she pulls out all the tissue paper from the box in high glee. Probably the Pest?
And I love Ralph S. Mouse. More than Ramona, whose exuberance always frightened me a little bit. I wasn't like that at all.
But she tells everyone at her fake birthday party that the Fig Newtons are filled with chopped-up worms! You gotta love that exuberance! : )
Worms -- that's a great line.
I liked the Ralph books but I only read them once. I read the Ramona stories over and over.
She names her doll Chevrolet, because it sounds pretty. She calls the mean older kids Pieface. Nyah! She's the baddest witch in the world! -- and carries a name tag so people can tell her apart from the other witches.
Skimming though them now, I see how spot on Cleary is with everything, like the kindergarteners being concerned about having a sub because she can't possibly know the rules of kindergarten.
Poor Beezus.
I always wanted to squirt all the toothpaste out.
I still have my copy of Ramona the Pest complete with my name scrawled in it and a dolphin/mermaid bookmark. The pages are all yellow because it was a cheap RIF book, but yeah, nostalgic. The scene that I remeber the most is pulling the boing boing curls and her eating one bite of every apple because the first bite is always the best.
Check this out:
A Ramona quiz!
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