Your favourite children's books

Rinki-Tink in Oz- Frank Baum
Choose Your Own Adventure tm books
Any Roald Dahl
The Jungle Book -Kipling
The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Fog Magic by Julia L. Sauer

and in picture books...

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

When I was a child, I loved anything about horses, so: My Friend Flicka, all the Black Stallion books, and Black Beauty (Anna Sewell). I also loved The Pinballs by Betsy Byars and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

My kids have loved (read aloud by me): all the Harry Potter books, The Secret Garden, The Thief Lord, The Hobbit and The Little House in the Big Woods.

On his own, my son (9) has read and enjoyed: Holes (Louis Sachar), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (Judy Blume) and The Bridge to Terabithia.

Hope this helps!

Secret Garden
The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe
The Velveteen Rabbit - my kids get incredibly mellow and calm when I read this one. They love it.
My son is a huge fan of Peter Pan movies, has seen as many variations as he can get his hands on and since he loves bedtime stories I just ordered Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barie. I can't wait to get it!

board books for really young kids: ANY book by Sandra Boynton - My favorites (that I've actually read so many times I've memorized) are The Going To Bed Book and Pajama Time.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise
Are you my mother? by P.D. Eastman
Winnie the Pooh by A.E. Milne
Any Oz book
Superfudge by Judy Blume

So hard to choose!
However, I do love the Term books by Antonia Forest, and the family books that were set in the school holidays - easily the best girls' boarding school series.
Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth is brilliant (her Roman hero is searching for the lost eagle standard of the Ninth Legion).
When I want to wallow in nostalgia, I turn to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (two families of kids messing about in boats on Windermere in the 1920s)
I love Madeleine L'Engle, too.
Bridge to Terabithia made me cry when I first read it, as an adult.
Geoffrey Trease wrote a brilliant series about kids at a day school in the Lake District (before this, almost all school stories had been boarding school stories). No Boats on Bannermere is the first one, and they all have Banner in the title.
Lucy Boston's Green Knowe series, about the history of an ancient house, are wonderful too - the young hero meets the ghosts of the children who used to live there. Even better, you can visit the real house! She based the stories on her own house, Hemingford Greys, which is now open to the public by appointment (the gardens are open all the time), and some of the things mentioned in the stories are still there, like the rocking horse in the attic.

Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead - I can't believe that a used copy now goes for $110

As a kid I used to read a lot of Enid Blyton - famous five, secret seven, all that.
In more recent years I love the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, but it's debatable if they are really children's book. He won the Whitbread award for one of them, but they have some pretty grown-up themes.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are superb books of course too, but again they can be enjoyed by kids on one level and by adults on other levels

So I wondered what everyone's favourite children's books were?



Where the Red Fern Grows

Hands down, the Frog and Toad Series: Frog and Toad are Friends, Frog and Toad Together, and Frog and Toad All Year, by Arnold Lobel. He was the master of writing simple stories about true friendship, in a way that was never condescending or patronizing to kids. In fact, he'd be number one on my list of authors I wish I could have lunch with, just so I could thank him for all the warm, fuzzy, feel-good moments I've had while reading his stories.

If you're asking about YA or MG fiction, it would be the Little House series, particularly On the Banks of Plum Creek, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

If you're talking about true children's books, I would have to say Goodnight Moon, and anything by Dr. Seuss except for Fox In Socks because the tongue twisters kill me but my son loves it. My favorite Dr. Seuss book is definitely There's a Wocket In My Pocket.

If you're talking about YA and not true children's books, I would go with any of the Black Stallion books (I read them all at least a hundred times when I was younger), the Trixie Belden series, and Where The Red Fern Grows. I read that one for the first time in 5th grade and it was the first book that made me cry. It still makes me cry!

As with the previous posts, I also enjoyed Enid Blyton with her amazing output, and Roald Dahl with his refreshing sugar-free style.

The whole Narnia series by C.S. Lewis was brilliant and read many times, but Prince Caspian my favourite.

A few specific books I do remember well are The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit and Fattypuffs and Thinifers by Andre Maurois.

I'd agree with rosebud1981 about His Dark Materials and Alice in Wonderland operating on different levels. That's their charm and (potential) longevity I suppose.

The Jungle Books
The Chronicles of Narnia
Harry Potter
His Dark Materials
Where the Red Fern Grows
Watership Down
The Giving Tree
Sweet Pickles
Kavik the Wolf Dog

I'd say The Twits is one of my favourites - The Witches, too. I could happily read them now.

For reading to my wee lad (he likes to lick the book and vomit on it - doesn't seem to really care much for any plots or the like), there is a great book called "Peace at Last" about a bear who can't get any sleep - it's fantastic for making noises.

My favorite books as a kid were Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and Judy Blume's Otherwise Known as Shelia the Great. Gotta love spunky heroines. I wrote so many stories inspired by those two books.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were like comfort food to me. I read The Long Winter so many times!

Beverly Cleary's books about Ramona were favorites of mine too. Ramona The Brave was the first novel I read by myself, and I still count Ramona and Her Father as one of my favorite books of all time. Oh, and around the same age, I liked Carolyn Haywood's Betsy books. The first Betsy books came out in the 1930s, and the final one was published in the 1970s. They're still in print, with new covers. "B" Is For Betsy was the first one, and the final one was Betsy's Play School. Great books for 7 and 8-year-old girls.

(Also, I appreciated how Beverly Cleary's Ramona referred to reading books about Betsy, too: "Ramona liked reading about Betsy because everyone in the books was so nice to her." Paraphrased to the best of my memory. It made the budding sardonic 8-year-old me laugh out loud.)

About 2 years ago, I started doing contract work for Scholastic, putting together foreign language editions of their picture books, and around the same time I got interested in reading and writing YA lit. So now I have a whole host of new favorites. I won't bug you with the full list, but here are some highlights.

Favorite picture books: Zen Shorts, by Jon J. Muth, and Ella Takes the Cake, by Carmela and Steven D'amico
Favorite middle grade novel: The View From Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg
Favorite YA novels: Looking For Alaska, by John Green; Markus Zusak's I Am The Messenger and The Book Thief

Harriet the Spy!

The Phantom Tollbooth!

I've read both these a couple times since I've been an adult, and enjoyed them fully.

Mine are the "Junie B. Jones" books by ... name escapes me. These are great read-alouds for my kids because they lend themselves to doing voices. (Not that I long for an audience or anything ... )

Ann

Illustrated storybooks (longer than a picture book): The Griffin and the Minor Canon by Frank Stockton, illustrated by Maurice Sendak; The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard

Middle readers: all of E. B. White (yeah, I'm a dinosaur), The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Frankie! (title character is a griffin) by Wilanne Schneider Belden

I almost exclusively read MG and YA books now. The stories seem to be so much better crafted, the fantasies more fantastical.

Harry Potter (of course), Madeline L'Engle's books, Tamora Pierce anything, Peter Pan...

I had a big children's books phase. There's some great stuff out there.
Some of my all-time favourites are Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, also his Victorian books, a series of four starting with The Ruby in the Smoke. Great, atmospheric stuff with plenty of adventure, heartbreak, politics and a fabulous heroine.

Pretty much everything by Joan Aiken, esp. the Dido Twite books, starting with The Wolves of Willowby Chase. If I had to chose eight books to take to a desert island, there'd be at least one Joan Aiken among them. Glorious stuff. In fact, the Victorian Philip Pullman stuff is rather like the Dido Twite books in some ways.

Some Jenny Nimmo - The Snow Spider Trilogy is really rather good.

Rosemary Sutcliffe is a bit old-fashioned now but I do like some of her stuff like Song for a Dark Queen -- about Boudicca. Very good.

Helen Cresswell, both her funny books, esp. The Bagthorpes; and some of her mysterious/mystery ones like Moon Dial and The Secret World of Polly Flint. Oooh, I must re-read that one, it's such a security-blanket of a book.

Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye and the Arm - a fabulous adventure tale set in the future in Africa. I do wish there was much more about like this.

No one has yet said one of my favorites: Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Also liked LtW&tW, & Harriet the Spy.

A not very well known book that I really enjoyed was Voyage of the Basset. Anyone read it? It's a great crash course in fantasy and the illustrations are wonderful.