I read Robin Cook’s Mutation at seven, for some Pizza Hut-sponsored read-for-coupons thingy. That is the first unequivocally non-children’s book I ever read. Curiously, I remember perhaps more about what happens in it than I do about the many other crappy thrillers and fantasy novels I read as an older child and young teenager.
(What? I never read Dungeons and Dragons novels. Nope. You must be thinking of someone else. Had I done so my development would have been stunted irrepairably …)
I’m not sure, but I’d guess The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
I was a BIG Albert Payson Terhune groupy as a youngster :).
The first actual novel ( as opposed to cartoon-type books like Richard Scarry fare or Where the Wild Things Are ) I can recall is Heinlein’s Red Planet, around third grade.
I actually got into children’s classics like The Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh a couple of years later.
Hmm… I can’t answer this question. I really don’t know what the first book I read for myself was. I know I read the complete Chronicles of Narnia by the time I was 9. I read Moby Dick for my own enjoyment at 10, and was whale and things nautical mad long before that. By that time I’d gone through Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember (Fifth Officer Lowe had been one of my heros growing up.) and most of Edward Rowe Snow’s books before starting Moby Dick.
I taught myself how to read about age 4. And the firt thing I remember reading all theway thru was Chicken Little. I was so very proud of myself for figuring out how to read, but when I told my mother (who read a total of 1 book in her entire life) she was like “eh, whatever, now lt me watch my soap”. I was crushed. 
But it never smothered my love for reading.
While I remember being read (in class) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (thank you very much, fourth-grade teacher), the first book that could I read that could be called a novel of any type was Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls (and again, I thank you, fourth-grade teacher). I just wanted to make sure what really happened at the end, that caused 20 fourth-grade students to spontaneously burst into tears, really happened, so I decided to read the book on my own. Thank you, very much, once again, fourth-grade teacher. You taught me that life is not fair, and I shall evermore be grateful for that knowledge. I have a paperback version of Where the Red Fern Grows, and I read it every 18 months or so. I appreciate what I have, whether I’m 9 years old or 36 years old, because of it.
My first novel was Journey From Peppermint Street by Meindert DeJong.
I was eight.
WONDERFUL novel.
I started reading Roald Dahl in 2nd grade, so it was probably either Matilda or The Witches. If that isn’t big-bore enough, it would have to be Where the Red Fern Grows.
I learned to read when I was four and a half. My parents had promised me they would teach me to read once I turned four, and I didn’t let them forget it. I bugged them about it until they made good on their promise. I remember going to the library and borrowing books from the age of five or younger. The earliest title I can remember borrowing from the library was a juvenile one, The Man who Walked Around the World. At this time I was being sent to a Montessori school that was run by Catholics, so at school I had juvenile editions of the lives of the saints to read.
Also at that age I remember reading The Swiss Family Robinson and several science fiction titles that I’ve forgotten. One was about an Earth human defending Mars from an alien invasion—except that the invaders turned out to have been from Earth. The earliest SF title I remember reading was The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey, when I was about 6, but there were earlier ones.
koeeoaddi, glad you mentioned Edward Eager; I read all his magic-titled books one after another when I was 6. By then I was already ordering from Scholastic, so my reading would be too much to list.
Wow. We had to read that in 5th grade. I found that book so upsetting that I’ve never read it again. Those poor dogs!
I wasn’t much interested in books, even though I could read better than anyone else in my (tiny country) school, from age four.
The first full-length proper book I read, i was about eight years old, and it was called The Shark In Charlie’s Window. It was about a flying shark that a boy kept as a pet.
I didn’t read another novel until The Lord of the Rings at age 12, and then I didn’t read much else until I was about 16, when I finally found the subject matter I really liked a lot, and started to voraciously absorb all I could.
The first novel I remember reading was a two-foot high copy of Alice in Wonderland (I don’t remember if it was abridged) with Tenniel’s illustrations. I was seven and I read it over and over. If I wasn’t reading Alice, I had four other books that I read constantly, interspersed with library books, I’m sure. The Cabin Faced West - Jean Fritz, Outlaw Red - Jim Kjelgaard, The Shy One and The Boy Who Stole the Elephant. I can’t believe I got rid of them all at one point or another.
Me, too. Mine was a condensed version, but I loved it. I also read Black Beauty when I was very young.
It’s so weird to me how you can all remember your first novel. I seriously cannot remember anything. English is my second language, and all I remember about that is looking at a book about the dentist and not being able to read anything, then reading novels. The first time I thought “Oh gee, I read a big book all by myself!” was in 9th grade after I read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Which, obviously was not my first novel.
In Chinese, I don’t remember my first novel, I don’t remember learning to read, I don’t remember being unable to read. And now that I’m slowly regressing back to illiteracy it’s a bit hard to remember when I was able to read, too. It’s largely a blank.
My father had hundreds of books, so many that he had bookcases full in my bedroom. I can remember when I was young reading the James Bond novels (the original hardcovers with the Richard Chopping dust jackets) while pretending to be sick and unable to go to school. I don’t know how old I was but I didn’t let on that I was reading them. I know that when I saw Dr. No I had already read several Bond novels.
I remember my little sister crying because “she was the only one in the family who didn’t know how to read.” We were big on it as a family. Such a milestone when you finally get it.
The first “real” book I ever read was *A Wrinkle in Time * by Madeleine L’Engle. I think I was six or seven and my mom helped me pick it out at a school book fair. It’s still one of my favorite books and I’ve probably read it at least once every year and a half since the first time through.
Don’t regress back to illiteracy, FlyingRamenMonster! Turn off the TV, turn off the computer, settle into a comfy chair with good lighting and relax with a good book.
The best recommendation a grade school librarian ever made to me was A Wrinkle in Time when I was in third grade. I was 8 and the right age for this. It had just won the Newberry Award, the great pinnacle of juvenile book awards. (The Newberry Award was for writing, complemented by the Caldecott Award for illustrations.) I had a strong preference for books with female protagonists*, and I was already a juvie science fiction fan, so L’Engle clicked perfectly.
*The nuns thought I was an abnormal child for preferring girl-books, and they forced me to read football novels instead, even though I hated football.
The adventures of Meg in outer space defeating evil alien brain overlords with help from a trio of witchy wise women, and rescuing her father and brother from enemy clutches, was overwhelming to my young imagination. I was eager to find more books like this, but L’Engle’s other novels bore no resemblance to this superb adventure of the human spirit. (This was before the two sequels to A Wrinkle in Time were published.)
A Wrinkle in Time deeply absorbed me; it definitely had a more powerful impact on me growing up than any other book, until I read The Lord of the Rings when I was 9. Speaking of female characters: in 1970 when I was 10 I went to a Tolkien fan convention and bought my first book by Ursula K. LeGuin, actual fanfic by a major author in her own write, and published zine-style: Men, Halflings, and Hero-Worship. In it she commented how relatively few female characters there were in The Lord of the Rings, and that made me consider the whole thing from a woman’s point of view.
The first book I read that I considered to be a real, “grownup” book was Firestarter, by Stephen King. I read it when I was eleven and I feel safe saying it changed my reading life forever. It was like, “Wow. Long books with small type and a lot of words can be GOOD.” It was also the first book I’ve ever read with full blown swearing in it and I was shocked. If you’ve read it, you’ll know the F-word is used every other page or so. Up until that point, I’d thought that any time that word appeared in print it would be represented as @#$%! Or some variation thereof. 
Correction: Men, Halflings, and Hero-Worship was not fanfic; it was an essay of lit-crit. I think afterwards it was republished in hardcover in some collection or other of LeGuin’s writings. But it was first published through the same channels of SF fandom used to distribute fanfic, zines, etc.