David, I've just read (re-read for the first couple, but I hadn't read all) the "Tomorrow When the War Began" series and was thinking about how some of it would be totally different now, with cellphones and all. Heck, even a lot of stuff like Seinfeld is totally outdated with misunderstandings when now they'd just text each other.

Heheh. I think about that a lot! Literary device thwarted by modern technology!

I love the Tomorrow books, but if they were set today, they'd have to include forays to charge batteries. There's been such a shift that I wonder if children today can identify at all with books I loved as a child, like the Edward Eager and Elizabeth Enright books.

Sara is loving the All of a Kind Family and Little House books, but I think they're both so far removed from her daily life, it's fascinating to her. That vague middle ground might be a little harder.

I wonder if children today can identify at all with books I loved as a child

There were no books with events like my childhood when I was growing up. Not even remotely, until I got to school in England. Is that really something kids are looking for?

I think some kids are looking for familiarity, yeah. It's why most little kids (really little) like rules -- they know what to expect if rules are in place.

I loved the whole "other worlds" thing when I was little, but I think what I meant above is that if the world they're reading is *mostly* like theirs, with phones and TVs, but doesn't cell phones or DVD players or video games, it can be a little weird because it's not quite otherworldly enough.

I loved the whole "other worlds" thing when I was little, but I think what I meant above is that if the world they're reading is *mostly* like theirs, with phones and TVs, but doesn't cell phones or DVD players or video games, it can be a little weird because it's not quite otherworldly enough.

Possibly? I read the Bobsey Twins books when I was a kid, and I am trying to remember how I felt about the differences. I know I loved the Little House books but that was because of the other worldliness.

I used to like stuff with the degree of difference you are talking about. Stories about villages with one person in the village having a phone or a shared phone in the pub when everyone I know had a telephone , and all phones operator assisted in the book when calls were direct dial with exceptions. Or people in books using coal and oil furnaces that were tricky to operate when everyone I knew was on gas or electric run by thermostat. Going back a bit longer, gas lights instead of electric which OK closer to an alien world, but not that alien lots I recognized. Obviously kids vary, but I can testify that at least some kids won't be bothered by the alien but familiar thing.

Oh, I loved Elizabeth Enright. I was a country kid and was amazed to read about kids in a town.

My kids love Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, for example, which is weird old technology but not quite The Olden Days. I read The Happy Hollisters (1950s) and Swallows and Amazons (British, 1930s) and Enid Blyton's Five series (British, 1950s) as a child born 1972, and was not fazed by much. Except it took me forever to figure out that a torch wasn't a flaming piece of wood.