I’m not necessarily asking what your favorite story is, though of course favorites are welcome if that’s what you choose. I’m wondering what work of literature has so moved you, shaped you, taught you, or whatnot that you want your child to read it more than any other.
If you have different stories for different children, please feel free to list them all.
If I had to pick one, it would probably be To Kill A Mockingbird. my daughter just read it in 8th grade English.
Lord of the Rings. Case closed.
…
can I add a couple more? Books I enjoyed and passed on to my daughter:
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Winnie the Pooh (there are a handful) - A.A. Milne
Where the Sidewalk Ends (and other poetry collections) - Shel Silverstein
You are going to get SO many answers!
I’ve encouraged my daughters into skeptical thinking, so I’ve strongly hinted over the years they should read Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies, as well as Sagan’s books.
They’ve taken to reading just about everything on their own, but I’ve also pushed mysteries like the old Hitchcock books, and Ellery Queen their way. They have their own tastes, but they enjoy what I like as well.
Off the top of my head:
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. It’s on my baby registry. I think I learned an awful lot of wisdom from Bill Waterson (and got a lot of joy) and I am hopping that if I just leave it around, the child will eventually start to peruse it.
Fanny Hill. 
Actually, I read tons of books to my kids, so I never thought of one that we just had to read. I particularly enjoyed reading Alice in Wonderland to them, and the first couple of Oz books. I read to my younger daughter right through high school, not because she couldn’t or wouldn’t read by herself (she did) but because it was a ritual we didn’t want to give up.
Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea is the most impressive book I’ve read for teenagers (it transcends these sort of classifications, but it is usually labelled a 'young adult book etc). I’d be happy if the bairns read this.
The watershed book for me that was a big step to becoming an adult reader, for want of a better term, was Crime and Punishment. Prior to that the classics of Eng Lit bored the pants of me and I just read typical teenage stuff. I don’t care whether my kids read Dostoevsky or not, but I hope they read that one gatekeeper book that opens things up.
Gone With the Wind has been so much my book since the first time I read it, that if my daughter didn’t like it, I’d think they must have mixed up the babies at the hospital and sent me home with the wrong one.
Oddly, I don’t mind that the boy hasn’t read that particular one, as long as he reads. And he does!
I’m devoutly grateful that both of them got to experience Mr. Popper’s Penguins before the recent despoilment.
The Lord of the Rings.
My Dad read those books to us when we were little, and I plan on doing that for my kids. When I have kids, that is.
On a more “kids books” level, I’m going with James and the Giant Peach.
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I mean, I hardly remember the specific book I got, but the whole idea opened my mind to this wonderful, wonderful world of fantasy.
ETA: Oops, I am not a parent. Sorry. I’ll let it stand, but that story had so much influence on me I didn’t read anything else in the OP or the title. :smack:
Too many, damn it!
At this age, Where the Wild Things Are. (Check.)
I seriously think that book is great for bridging the child and parent gap.
Was it weird having your dad read to you in your twenties [that’s, what, 4000 pages of reading] :)?
For me, I don’t really have any ‘kids lit’ treasures, but I hope my kids can somehow take a little from ‘Walden’, a book that changed my life.
For little kids, I’d have to go with The Story of Ferdinand.
For older kids, it’s a tie between A Christmas Carol and To Kill A Mockingbird.
Lord of the Rings? Wild Things? Winnie the Pooh? These are givens, but come on, folks: Children have to crawl before they can walk.
Certain fundamental texts form the basis of Western Culture, and for this reason, I would insist first, above all others, upon One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish:
one fish two fish red fish blue fish
black fish blue fish old fish new fish…
After my child has mastered this, then he or she is ready for Winnie, Frodo, Scout and–of course–Leopold Bloom.
I’m am absolutely thrilled that my 4-year-old daughter seems to love Fox in Socks as much as I did as a kid. I had a cassette tape of Suess stories, and FiS was read twice back to back, once at normal speed, and once at “micro-machine-guy” speed. I’d be constantly asking my parents to rewind it on road trips. Surprised that section of the tape never wore out.
Now when we read it at home, sometimes I do the super fast version, or my best approximation. It ain’t easy when you get to
“First, I’ll make a quick trick brick stack.
Then I’ll make a quick trick block stack.
You can make a quick trick chick stack.
You can make a quick trick clock stack.”
and forget about “Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes. Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.”
I feel your pain, Mr. Knox. But I love it. 
My daughter is just two and half, but above all else, I am looking forward to introducing her to Alice.
I love these books because they have immediate appeal from a young age, but the more the intellect matures, there’s just more and more to get out of them.
I am also looking forward to the Oz books and a good translation of Pinocchio. (Have already gone through all of these with my nieces and nephews and am looking forward to returning to that well.)
The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I read it to my son (4 years old) a couple of times a year. He likes that its a “Chapter Book” and it takes several nights to complete it. I like it because it reminds me to think and observe things a little differently. You must never forget your rose!
My two oldest are now 12 and 10, so I’ve had a few attempts at passing on some of my childhood favorites. Some stuck with them and others haven’t. I’ve decided to expose them to but not force feed anything (which of course wouldn’t work).
The Hobbit was probably their favorite. For some reason though, Eldest didn’t cotton to LOTR. She read through to the first 100 pages or so of The Return of the King before just stopping on the grounds that “nothing was happening”.
Other books that Eldest enjoyed, but not apparently on a similarly worldview-affective level as it did me, included Charlotte’s Web, The Little Prince, and The Phantom Tollbooth. (La Segunda has only so far read Charlotte’s Web.) I’ve attempted to get them hooked on The Jungle Book (the original Kipling, not the Disney cartoon) and about a dozen or so hand-picked adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which also hasn’t really caught their fancy.
My Eldest’s one-line response on Charlotte’s Web: “it was fun”. When asked how she felt about the manner of Charlotte’s passing: “Well, spiders don’t live that long.” (I guess they knew too much biology before reading the book, I just know that scene blindsided both me and my wife as children to tears)
The Little Prince? “I liked it OK, but when a boy at school saw me reading it he said he read it when he was 9 and it was like the gayest book ever.”
They both did get very caught up in The Chronicles of Narnia and various books ly Classical Mythology though, as I did as a child, and have tore through the Harry Potter and “Series of Unfortunate Events” books, as well as several other YA sci-fi series I have not read, like series beginning with The Time Travelers by Linda Buckley-Archer (The Gideon Trilogy), and some rather dark and dystopian ones, such as the Shadow Children series by Margaret Haddix or The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
I’m hoping to get Eldest to read Watership Down by Richard Adams this summer, along with the Prydian Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, the Tripod Trilogy of books by John Christopher and eventually, the Amber books by Roger Zelazny.
Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. My little guy’s too young for that right now, but I soon intend to get going with One Fish, Two Fish… I’d completely forgotten it.
As for the One Book I’d wish would resonate with my kids as much as it did me, that would probably be The Little Prince, but as I mentioned, it hasn’t seemed to do that :(.
I am very analytical, objective, empirical, etc., all that when it comes to day-to-day work (first in school and now professionally), and I pride myself on being able to reason through b*llshit and squishy wishful thinking types of arguments… But that book always serves to remind me that in the end, what really matters in life is unquantifiable; that happiness is subjective, not objective; and that close personal ties, even when “lost” or “broken” or unknown to anybody else, enriches one’s life beyond anything counted in a ledger or deed recorded in a book.
It moved me so much that I decided to study French in school (which I did for 3 years) specifically to read that book in its original language.