Inspired by the fact that I just finished reading The Little Prince for the first time.
Wow. How on earth did I manage to miss this one when I was a kid? I’d heard of it, of course, but somehow I never got around to reading it. I loved it, but I wish I’d read it as a child, so that I could compare my child response to my grown-up response. I bet I would have cried.
What books have you read that you missed on your first trip through childhood?
I read Peter Pan fairly recently. Actually, I guess I still would have counted as a kid at the time I read it, but I think I would have really enjoyed it when I was about six in a different way than I enjoyed it when I was twelve.
I’m pretty sure I still haven’t read A Little Princess. I saw the movie, and I definitely knew the story before I saw the movie, but I don’t remember how anything was worded or any of the descriptions from the book. Perhaps I read an abridged version. I think I’ll check it out on my next trip to the library.
wow… oops. I’m an idiot 
I read the OP too quickly and mistook The Little Prince (which I have read, and quite enjoyed.) for A Little Princess- a totally different story.
I didn’t read The Secret Garden until I was grown up.
I still haven’t read the Mary Poppins stories, or the rest of the Oz stories except for The Wizard.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Both are freaky, but Through the Looking Glass verges on downright scary, and not in a kid-scary way. I probably would have missed most of the Victorian-era allusions in it and the more psychologically unsettling parts might not have been so bad had I read it as a child. All in all, I’m glad I waited.
The Little House on the Praire series and the Anne of Green Gables series.
About 20 years ago, I saw the PBS series of Anne of Green Gables. Having enjoyed that, I read the whole series of books, one after another.
Where the Red Fern Grows. It didn’t affect me emotionally as much as I had been told it would, maybe because I had a pretty good idea how things were going to turn out. Also, I don’t like hunting.
Alice in Wonderland, which I read in Martin Gardner’s annotated editions (I now have the third edition, with lotsa notes)
The Wizard of Oz and The Land of Oz, which I first read in grad school. I got the annotatecd edition a couple of years ago, which my daughter MilliCal read and loved. She’s been reading others in the series, too.
Winnie the Pooh, which I really don’t get the appeal of.
I never did read the Little Prince, or any of the Babar books (hated reading the cursive script), or Curious George. And I still haven’t read Peter Pan.
I’m going to read Swiss Family Robinson soon, because I want to read the two sequels Jules Verne wrote of it!
The Little House series, LoTR, and the last few books in the Little Women series. Goodness, Little Women is glurgy.
I read and enjoyed A Little Princess after seeing the movie. I think the movie adaptation was just beautiful, though not particularly faithful.
And I read Peter Pan not too long ago. Hooooooo lahdee! That there is a dark little tome.
I read both of these, incidentally, on to the Gutenberg Project, a great source for classic literature.
I also picked up a copy of Treasure Island at the Friends of the Library sale when I was on a nautical kick. A very good straightforward adventure tale.
I have been planning on reading Charlie and the Chocholate Factory for some time, but keep putting it off.
The Hobbit, and A Wrinkle in Time. Also, the Dragonlance books, mainly because my husband loved them as a kid.
I just wasn’t into fantasy when I was younger, and now I am. I suppose that reading Harry Potter opened me up to it–beforehand, it was just this big, unfamiliar genre and I wasn’t going there. Plus, it seems mostly marketed toward young boys, especially the more sci-fi-leaning fantasy and high fantasy.
Me too. Along with the Glass Elevator one. They’re at my daughter’s house.
Didn’t read Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit until after the first movie came out. Just read Watership Down a couple years ago, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Alice in Wonderland is in the TBR.
Jon Scieszka – The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and others – wasn’t writing when I was little, but I’m enjoying his books now.
Not to imply that Dragonlance is classic literature, just to illustrate how the whole genre has been an adult experience for me. Y’know. 
I first read The Wind in the Willows and the Narnia books in my early 20s.
When I became a parent, I got exposed to some things that I’d never heard of when I was a child. Some, like Where the Wild Things Are didn’t exist back in neolithic times. Others, like Goodnight Moon must have missed our little corner of Ohio. These are little kids books, of course, that take an adult about 3 minutes to read. I don’t think I ever read a full-length children’s book after my 20s except for Harry Potter. I’m still working my way through those. So’s JK Rowling, I guess.
All the Beatrix Potter books. I found her to be unbelievably creepy. The kids, however, couldn’t get enough.
You want “unbelievably creepy”? Prepare yourself for The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, which I didn’t read until last year. Eyyyyyuch. Even the author’s portrait made my skin crawl.
On the other hand, I didn’t read Tolkien’s The Hobbit all the way through until four years ago, and enjoyed it immensely.
The Little Prince when I was 19. Loved it, but somehow I don’t really think it’s for kids.
The Narnia series when I was 27. I tried to read this when I was a kid, and just couldn’t get into it (and I was an avid fantasty reader). I did enjoy The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when I read it as an adult, but didn’t particularly care for any of the others.
The Hobbit, and Fellowship of the Ring when I was 28. Really did not enjoy The Hobbit at all. It just didn’t do anything for me. However, I really dug The Fellowship.
The Secret Garden, Little House on the Prairie, Little Women—I probably avoided these when I was a boy because they were too girly.
Peter Pan, Pinocchio—I was already familiar enough with the stories from other adaptations that finally reading the books themselves was rather meh.
The Railway Children and several other E. Nesbits, the Green Knowe books, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Neverending Story; and probably several others I’m not recalling right now.
And that’s not to mention the books I re-read as an adult, and maybe got more out of then. Or the soon-to-be-classics that didn’t exist when I was a kid (like Harry Potter).