This is by far the best kids’ book I’ve ever read. It’s a little creepy, but not scary. It’s definitely weird. I believe the author is Sylvia Cassidy. I still read it every once in a while.
Also good:
Narnia (especially Dawn Treader)
Anne of Green Gables
Many Waters
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Harriet the Spy
All Roald Dahl books
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
Can’t resist the opportunity to chip in on this thread.
My favorites are some of the standards…
The Phantom Tollbooth
Narnia
The Black Cauldron series
The Robert Heinlein juvenile novels:
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
The Star Beast
Podkayne of Mars
Starman Jones
Space Cadet (Also my Junior High nickname…)
Where the Wild Things Are
The Secret Garden
A lot of Enid Blyton. The first book I ever read by myself was one of her adventure novels.
Edgar Rice Burroughs - all his series.
Tom Swift, Jr.
But it only took me a couple of years to talk the librarian into an adult library card, so I was soon into the Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke school of science fiction, and never looked back. That is, until lately.
Which is the reason I’m posting. If you go to Project Gutenberg’s web site, at http://www.gutenberg.net/, you’ll find the complete texts of some of the most beloved stories discussed here, including the Oz books, the Burroughs books, The Secret Garden, a big chunk of the old Tom Swift books (“Tom Swift And His Electric Locomotive, or, Two miles a minute on the rails”…hehehe…) some Hans Christian Andersen, Louisa May Alcott, etc., etc. Warning; it may kill more time than you can afford at work.