The Baby Sitters' Club Series

[incognito]

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street. Yay! Apparently Janine Kishi has an IQ of 196. I guess I bought that when I was eight, but now that I'm older and know something about IQ distribution...no way her IQ is that high, and she's still in high school (even if she IS taking classes at the local community college). She's, what, sixteen? I was reading an article in the New Yorker about a kid with an IQ of 178 who graduated high school at age 10 or 11. I guess Janine's just a slacker, then. Heh.

[carrier76]

I guess that it is why these type of serial books don't work after a while. No one wants to stop the cash cow even though the amount of books crammed into a year stop making sense. And they don't want to screw up the series by making the kids older, cause then it would hard to avoid mentioning edgy topics like sex or drugs would scare readers away. Of course they end up shooting themselves in the foot because the readers eventually clue in to the stupidity.

I have often thought of starting a series that actually progresses. Like, you hook 'em in when they're young, and then keep going up to the point when they're older. I think it's an interesting idea. Like, you really grow up with the characters.

[pomegranate]

I think it's called Harry Potter. ;D

[Deleted]

OMG...I love this thread.

I actually got into the books in late elementary school, and kept reading them throughout middle school; picking them up at the used bookstore. It was definitely a guilty pleasure for me. I wish I still had my huge stash! I had a bunch of the original series (right up to Mallory getting mono, which BSC convinced me was a near fatal disease, and Dawn leaving for CA), and a few Super Specials (LOVED the one where they are shipwrecked) and a bunch of mysteries. Haha, remember the one where they are at the zoo? I don't even remember what the mystery involved anymore...I just remember something about an emu...

I never realized until now how dysfunctional it was, hehe.

Sadly, I missed out on all the Abby/Stacey Leaves BSC/Mallory goes to Boarding School/Claudia gets Sent Back/Mary Anne's House Burns Down/Friends Forever/California Series goodness. I have actually considered trying to put together my collection again for...I don't know why.

I remember thinking they all sounded so cool and wanted a group of friends like that, hahaha. And I actually liked Mallory a lot - I was awkward and a bookworm and wanted to be an author too. Other than that I really liked Mary Anne, and actually thought Stacey was pretty cool and mature too, before all the 'I'm too cool for the BSC' stuff started, although the tru luv was rather annoying.

You guys are cracking me up with the random details you remember, because I remember so many of them too. Hah, do you remember when Karen wanted to wash the car, so she did it with steel wool? I think it was in Kristy's Big Day. I think my favorite book though was Logan Likes Mary Anne...partly because I was such a dork and it was about the first day of school and I liked reading about that. And because I liked Mary Anne

[luciano]

Hah, do you remember when Karen wanted to wash the car, so she did it with steel wool?

I remember that - whatever babysitter was there [Kristy?] was all, "Wow, the car looked shiny" and then walked closer to it before seeing what happened and freaking out. I don't think it was in that book, though.

The Friends Forever series was meh - they tried being just a tad bit more grown-up by getting away from the babysitting, but the books were written in such a way that they seemed dumbed-down from the BSC series, which is a mighty feat to pull off. The California Diaries series was much better.

[ivy]

incognito said:

I managed to get my hands on a copy of Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street. Yay! Apparently Janine Kishi has an IQ of 196.

An IQ of 196?! As if! Although then again, this series always did make everything more dramatic than in real life, such as diabetic Stacey practically dying after, like, licking half an M&M, so with that in mind, I'm surprised they didn't give Janine an IQ of fifty million.

I always thought it was suspicious that we knew so little about Janine and her brilliant mind. All we ever got was stuff like, "Janine is so smart! She's an honest-to-goodness genius! When I saw her yesterday she was wearing a long gray skirt and a blazer! That's how genuises dress!" But we never got any actual evidence of Janine being brilliant, other than her throwing in a big word here and there a la Ashley Judd.

If Karen was real she'd probably grow up to be an axe murderer. She never did anything that wasn't horrible.

[carrier76]

I think it's called Harry Potter.

Well. I don't read that stuff. So there.

[Mutagen]

Well, Claudia was kind of stupid, so maybe she misunderstood the number of her sister's IQ. By the way, for such a talented artist, Claudia's chickenscratch handwriting pissed me off.

[littlecatfeet]

celestina said:

Sadly, I missed out on all the Abby/Stacey Leaves BSC/Mallory goes to Boarding School/Claudia gets Sent Back/Mary Anne's House Burns Down/Friends Forever/California Series goodness. I have actually considered trying to put together my collection again for...I don't know why.

This was pretty much my BSC experience. I was 12 or 13 when the series debuted and I read it from the beginning. I remember waiting for the next books to come out! Of course, this meant that it took me...oh, about 8 months to outgrow the BSC.

celestina, around age 27 I gave in to the surprisingly strong desire to start purchasing books from eBay. I won a lot of 60+ books, and now they sit in my parents' house in my old room. I can't quite get up the nerve to move them into my home, but I must admit, when I go visit my parents, I devour those puppies!

[linared]

Give into the urge to the buy the books. I started getting interested them again while reading the FT thread. When I went to grad school and didn't have the attention span to read a real book but still wanted to read, I started buying the books. At first I hid my habit but eventually come out to my family, who accepts my weird behavior but still look at me like a freak. Sadly, buying BSC books is a gateway behavior because now that I have most of the books I want, I want to start buying up SV books and Christopher Pike. The only things that are keeping me from doing this are that I don't have storage space, I moved to an area with no used book stores and I don't want to pay for shipping. Someday when I have a library, I will have shelf after shelf of YA books.