Tag Thursday – The 90s Kid Book Tag

Good morning! It’s time for another Tag Thursday and this week’s is very close to my own heart – 90s childhood nostalgia!

Now as a girl born in the late 80s the 90s was certainly the era of my childhood, while this tag has a very definite American twist I’m the girl whose Saturday mornings consisted of camping out on the sofa watching The Racoons and Live & Kicking while my dad vacuumed the living room, casually moving the sofa with me on it. At school I played Zoombinis on the computer (as they tricked us into learning while we thought we were just playing). I sat at my hi-fi during the chart show to record my favourite songs of the week, hoping the DJ didn’t talk over the intro or ending too much!

I first discovered this tag on Reading Parental‘s blog back in March and I’m finally completing it!

Rules:

1. Please, please, please steal this tag and spread it around!  I only ask that you link it back to The Literary Phoenix so that I can see everyone’s answers!
2. Freeze tag was all the rage in the 90s.  Tag someone (or many) you think would have fun with this!
3. Have fun!

I was never really a Pokemon fan if I’m completely honest, although of course I knew who Pikachu is! My brother collected the cards for a bit though… For me there could really only be one answer to this question, the fabulous James Oswald!

I must confess I don’t yet have his high fantasy series but I do own every book in his original crime series that follows Inspector McLean around Scotland, and I also own both books in his new crime series that focuses on DC Constance Fairchild. I love them both and I can always guarantee these will be pre-ordered!

I was more likely to be found on MSN Messenger than AIM to be honest but I loved it so much! The challenge of thinking of a deep and meaningful song lyric to set as your status! I’m picking Gilded Cage by Vic James for this book. It helped connect me with one of my best blogging friends – Charlotte from Charlotte, Somewhere. She’s a wonderful human, and a fantastic blogger so you should definitely check her out!

I never had a Furby, to be honest I found them kinda creepy…

My book of choice here is possibly a little controversial, mainly because it’s not really the book’s fault. It’s certainly not the author’s fault… Back in 2017 I was in a major Hamilton fangirl. I was listening to the musical’s soundtrack on repeat so when I discovered a YA romance supposedly based on Alexander and Eliza’s romance I was all for it and when I saw Alex & Eliza appear on NetGalley I jumped at the chance to request it. I was fortunate enough to receive it but the formatting on the eARC was so bad, there were words missing, sentences missing and some randomly repeating a paragraph or two later it was just unreadable and it completely put me off. To this day I’ve not gotten around to buying a finished version it just left that bad an impression on me…

N*SYNC were okay, they had a couple of good songs but they were definitely the worst of the boybands that made up my childhood, Backstreet Boys and 5ive were much better in my opinion!

I’ve chosen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows it wasn’t so much the book itself I didn’t want to see end, but more the fact that it was the last book in a series that had been a huge part of my life for nearly a decade and I didn’t want to see the last of Hermione and friends!

I’m sure there’s a certain group of people around my age from whom Get Your Own Back on CBBC was a must watch! Many a time I’d wish I could take one of my parents on for the chance to get them gunged!

For this one I’m picking How Do You Like Me Now? by Holly Bourne. Did everyone like be this? I’m not sure I know Holly is a very popular YA author, and this was her first adult novel, I just didn’t like the characters – I finished it but I was glad it was over.

I’m not sure I’ve ever hated a book quite that much… I’d like to think I’d put it down before I reached that point…

Who didn’t love putting together a mixtape? Though I must admit life became much easier when CDs came along and I had a laptop that could write information to them!

Recommending these three books is a little like putting a song from a musical, a little rock and some R&B all on the same mixtape! A little eclectic but all wonderful in their own ways! Gilded Cage by Vic James, Natural Causes by James Oswald and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee are all books I will not hesitate to recommend to people!

I so don’t miss dial up! The amount of time it took to download things, or the fact I had to come off the internet every time mum wanted to use the phone. Mainly I will always remember the sound of the modem connecting! A sound today’s kids won’t get the joy of hearing!

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith took me both forever and yet no time at all to read. I know that makes so little sense but bear with me and I shall explain… I pre-ordered this book and even left work early to collect it from Waterstones on release day 18th September 2018, I got a few chapters in and then stopped because it was far too big to carry in my bag on my commute. Then I used one of my audible credits to download it, and listened to a few more chapters, however I have a terrible habit of falling asleep midway through a chapter and spending half of my listening time the next night trying to work out where I was so that wasn’t working for me either. Finally in July this year I spotted the eBook on offer and downloaded it. Then ten months after first picking up the book I absolutely devoured it over the course of a couple of days!

In the early 2000s my mum went from working part-time to working full-time and my parents decided to spend some of the extra income on Sky TV and for the first time me and my brother discovered the joy of Nickleodeon. With Nickleodeon came Kenan & Kel, how me and my brother loved that show! I think it was already on repeats by the time we saw it, or maybe it just didn’t reach the UK until a fair bit later but I loved it, much like Kel loved orange soda!

At the risk of repeating myself here I’m going to pick Harry Potter, the series was a phenomenon that seems to have taken over everything, I doubt there are many people throughout the world who haven’t at least heard of Harry Potter even if they’ve not read any of the books or watched any of the films.

I really don’t remember ever playing this game. However we did play a game called Heads Down, Thumbs Up at primary school which looks similar…

I haven’t peeked at the ending for the longest time! If I remember rightly it was probably one of the early Harry Potters, either Chamber Of Secrets or Prisoner of Azkaban. I would have been 11 or 12 and needed to know Hermione made it through!

What even are Dunkaroos? They look like a sweet version of a Dairylea Dunker! I’m not sure we ever had these in the UK and if we did they certainly passed me by!

My ideal bookish snack… it’s a tough one for me, I’m not really a fan of savoury snacks so that’s a huge section of snacks ruled out straight away! I’d have to say a good biscuit (chocolate chunk shortbread would be my biscuit of choice) or some chocolate but then you have to be wary of melting! You don’t want to stain your book!

Again this is something that passed me by here in the UK. I read a couple of books in the Goosebumps series but never any of the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark anthologies!

I’ve picked The Exact Opposite Of Okay as the book that kept me up all night, not because it’s a scary book I just reached a certain point and had to keep going until I finished regardless of how late it was getting

Bill Nye is another very definite American twist on this tag – I was completely unaware of who he was until a character loosely based on him turned up on the TV show Bones in 2010. I did used to enjoy How 2 on CITV as a little girl though!

A book that taught me something new… I feel for this one I should pick a non-fiction book and so I’m going to go with No Such Thing As A Fish’s Book Of The Year. There are two editions of this so far, one from 2017 and one from 2018, eached filled with page upon page of interesting facts the team behind the No Such Thing Of A Fish have discovered over the course of the year. I’m very much hoping there will be a 2019 edition as well!

Thanks for reading! I’m going to tag anyone who fancies taking on this tag! I created the graphics to suit my blog but feel free to use them if you want to take on the tag yourself!