And the first ever Flashback Friday topic is…drum roll, please… books we grew up with. I could bore you for months with my love affair with the entire Black Stallion series by Walter Farley, or the plethora of dog stories that used to steal all the space in my room (like Big Red and Lion Hound—hey, how ironic is that? Have you SEEN the giant lion hounds that take up the bed in my room nowadays? They put the books to shame in space-hogging ability!)

?

Wait, that's not an Irish Setter.

Um, wait. That’s not the Big Red I remember.

Anyway, if it had an animal, I read it in grade school. I also read my sister’s Wrinkle in Time series ad nauseam. That giant thing with eyes and feathers was kind of like an animal, right?

Do you think I can leash walk it?

By high school, I’d moved on to beasts of the two-legged variety. I gobbled down the romances I stole from my mom’s closet—the more sordid the cover, the better—but honestly, all of the bodice-ripping, alpha males kind of ran together in my mind. Plus, I think the sex scenes traumatized me. I mean, reading Skye O’ Malley at age fourteen? MEEP!

The two books that really stand out from my high school years are: Fletch by Gregory MacDonald, and Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews. One is an adult mystery, about a fast-talking investigative reporter with a string of ex-wives and several alimony lawyers hot on his trail while he tries to solve a murder before it happens and bring down a drug ring (and, OMG, NO! The movie is NOTHING compared to the book! Nothing, I tell you! Chevy Chase is NOT Fletch!) and the other? About a brother and sister who get it on after being locked in an attic for years with their other siblings by their evil grandmother. Or aunt. Or the creepy nanny who wanted to steal them for her very own. No wait, that was a movie. I can’t exactly remember who anymore, but trust me when I say someone locked them in the attic. Because if they just stayed in there of their own free will to have kinky brother-sister sex, well, that’s just kinda lame. A later book in that series has the dubious honor of introducing me to the word corprophagia. You know, in case you were wondering.

creeeppppyyyyy

Hmmm. Maybe I should have stuck with my dog stories, after all. At least when they eat poop, it’s kinda normal. Seriously, though, I love, love, loved Fletch, and ended up reading every book in the series (cuz I’m neurotic that way). I’ve loaned it to just about everyone I know and hubs and I still have a battered copy lying around somewhere. I’m not sure what I’d think about Flowers in the Attic nowadays, because I haven’t read it in forever, but this post has given me a hankering to go check it out. But not a hankering for poop. Because, ew.

I think his sign says it all.