The third big set of books I read in elementary was Goosebumps, by R.L. Stine. I still remember my first book. It was #6. I don't recall the title, but I can tell you exactly what the cover looked like and what it was about. This guy, 12 years old (all the kids in R.L Stine's books were 12. I remember thinking one day I'm going to grow up and be the same age as those people in Goosebumps), ventures up to the attic on his 12th birthday and finds this mirror in a closed-off room. He discovers that if you turn the light on the mirror on, then the person in front of the mirror turns invisible. The guy brings his friends up and the book is about them exploring this. As it turns out, the longer you stay invisible, the harder it is for you to contact the world- so they can hardly hear you- and it takes longer to become visible. After seven minutes, I think, you're sucked into the mirror and replaced by your duplicate. Everyone has a duplicate living inside mirrors, and they're very mean individuals. They'll trap you in the mirror and replace you on the outside.
R.L. Stine's writing style for this series is easy to recognize. Each chapter ended with a shocking turn of events. The endings were always twist endings. In #6, for instance, the guy's little brother is replaced by his duplicate and no one finds out until they break the mirror. Ooops. I think there were fifty or so books in this collection. Stine stopped them in 2000, and started "Goosebumps: The Millinium Edition". To be honest, however, I thought these were not as good as the original. Stine also had a third series of these junior horror books. These were based off his horror series for teenagers, Fear Street. This new series, however, I did find good, and I collected those until he stopped writing them.
I also read a lot of "classic children's lit"- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Bridge to Terabetha, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, etc. You know, that stuff on summer reading lists. There was also this series of books that made classics readable by young adults, and I read those. My first book as a gift was this series' version of The Call of the Wild by Jack London. This series had lots of good stuff- A Tale of Two Cities and The Three Musketeers are two titles I remember. Also, I read the Matthew Martin books. They were about this guy named- get this- Matthew Martin (suprised?) and follow him throughout high school, or at least how I remember it. He went from declaring war on the girls in his classroom to having a steady gal. (Sell-out!)
Yet another author that I remember is Bruce Conville, who wrote science fiction.But moving on to junior high and high school, where I started to read Fear Street. My reading of this didn't last long, because it was pretty much the same thing. In every book, a teenager or a group of teenagers is murdered. The book is about those who weren't murdered trying to find out who did it, then murdering/arresting them, depending on who caught the villian or villains. One thing I did like about this, though, is that Stine would use different characters for each story, but you'd see those characters in other Fear Street books, so you really got into the idea that Shadyside is a real town. I also began to read Animorphs in eighth grade. That was about five kids who are walking in a construction lot one night. An alien crash-lands, tells them Earth is being invaded and if they want to give their planet a chance, touch this blue cube. The blue cube gives them the ability to morph into animals. All they have to do is "acquire" an animal's DNA by touching it, and then they can just think about the animal to morph into it. And the series that follows is about them fighting of the Yeerks- evil slugs who take over people's bodies- through this. You'd think from the premise that it's for kids, but it shows how they suffer through stress and how they react to all the killing they're forced to do.
So far you've made it to 1998...