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And we should probably stop trying to foist the books we liked onto our kids, and let the problematic ones fade away. There's plenty of good modern stuff out there.
I've been doing an exercise recently where I've re-read some formative books that I loved as a child. The idea is to pick a significant book published in every year of your lifetime, reread it, and write about it. I'm up to my teenage years now so they're now tending to be just good books, but I read some barely remembered children's books in the early years:
Nicholas Fisk - Trillions and Starstormers - both decent
Monica Hughes - Crisis on Conshelf Ten - still pretty great
Brian Earnshaw - Dragonfall-5 and the Empty Planet - a bit silly (I didn't use this one in the end, since I wasn't sure I'd previously read it)
Patrick Moore - The Moon Raiders - I loved Moore's Scott Saunders series at the time, but this was much more feeble than I remember
And moving into my teens with The Belgariad, Dragonlance and Piers Anthony, with mixed results. There are books I read in that period that I still love, but these were all things I grew out of.
The exercise is focused on SF and fantasy, so I didn't reread, say, Willard Price's zoological Adventure series. I wonder how they hold up?
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