From this week’s issue of The Onion, a joke newspaper:
“Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children” – http://www.theonion.com/onion3625/harry_potter.html
The Wind in the Willows. And the sequel, The Willows in Winter.
I still read these books as an adult . . . makes me kinda wistful and all swelled up in the heart.
your humble TubaDiva
former Raggedy Ann and Andy fiend
Ike, doesn’t matter if they are picture books, middle-grade readers, chapter books or full-bore novels. Children’s books is children’s books.
That’s sorta why I started this thread. I figured most Dopers were voracious readers, especially as kids. And I just wondered what sort of memories they had of the books they read growing up. Or what sort of books had become their favorites as they shared reading with their children.
You notice I included picture books, short chapter books and more hefty novels in my own list. The only criterion I had was that the books were clearly geared toward kids. Let’s be open-minded and liberal here, and not think less highly of picture books because they have limited vocabularies. The good ones serve their purpose and the great ones are eternal. By the same token, let’s not let something like Treasure Island get away because the language may be tougher than some contemporary novels. It was written to be a boy’s adventure story, and it succeeds magnificently (one of my favorites I, alas, forgot to include on my list).
I wasn’t talking about books you read as a child. As a child, I read Of Mice and Men and Macbeth. These are not children’s stories.
I read Orwell’s Animal Farm when I was eight or so. At the time, I thought it was a children’s story. Talking animals? Easily understood behavioral metaphor? Kickass ending? No problem.
Read it again when I was twelve or thirteen. Enjoyed it again, but started to get the inkling something more complex was going on.
Read it again at fifteen or sixteen, now that I had some grounding in world history. Realized what it was really about – was blown away that I would have liked and “understood” it years before, without knowing anything about the Russian/Soviet transition it parodies. It still sort of makes my head spin, when I think about it.
Maybe Animal Farm should be a children’s book…
P.S. Adds postscript commenting on the fact that much of the above grammar seems to be heavily influenced by the “Thread” thread currently featured on Threadspotting.
I was surprised that the Tom Swift books didn’t show anywhere. “Tom Swift and his _________ ______” Giant cannon, giant airship, etc. I wonder how well the handyman Obidiah (sp?) would be received in today’s pc climate. His speech was almost unreadable.
Don Laughery
ah, i can’t believe no one’s mentioned the Harriet the Spy series!
but i second many of the other posts.
some other favourites:
The Dreameater
Every One Knows What a Dragon Looks Like
Skog Island
Tolkien books
Lion, Witch and Wardrobe series
James and the Giant Peach
Charles and the Chocolate Factory
Alice in Wonderland
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Anne of Green Gables
can’t even begin to name them all - still have most of them, too.
my favourite collection of poetry:
Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls
a collection to inspire the most evil of children.
Cervaise beat me to it.
I also loved “Dom and Va” and many others by the same author.
the running line in it is sweet and lovely.
“Mother mother I want another”
Woo! Most of the books I liked have been mentioned (I’d forgotten all about <i>There’s a Monster at the End of This Book</i>!), but there’s one series no one has mentioned yet.
Anyone else read the <i>Choose Your Own Adventure</i> series? Those were great! I remember using all five fingers on one hand just to keep track of the previous decision points so I could go back and read the other story tracks. =)
Powers &8^]
Oh, almost forgot.
If you liked the Pooh books you’ll like “The Tao of Pooh” and “The Te of Piglet”.
I would tell you the author’s name but they keep disappearing from my bookshelf every time I re-purchase them. (Some friends I got!..hmmph!)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (and short stories by Mark Twain)
The Animal, the Vegetable, and John D. Jones
The Little Princess
the old Nancy Drews
Anything by Judy Blume, or about witches
Mathilda! <sp?>
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Stuart Little
Anne of Green Gables
Beatrice and Ramona
oh! I have no idea how to use quote thingie, but someone mentioned Wrinkle in Time. That was my absolute favourite!! i read it about twice a month for over four years. i lived for aything science-fictional or magical. i read nearly every book on the children’s floor (except for boy books ew!) eventually, i even read the choose-you-own-adventure books on the sly. only those geeky role-playing nerds read those! (that eventually lead to my obsession with king’s quest games, but that’s another story!)
What a great thread - I’ve never stopped reading children’s books!
Almost everything I love(d) has already been mentioned (and a few that I’d forgotten about!). A couple I didn’t see, though:
“Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH”
“Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass”
I still own both of those. 
When I WAS a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on,
but my favorite books FOR kids were
OZ series
Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series
Freddy the Pig series
Betsy/Tacy series
Sue Barton series
Any fairy tale
Mary Poppins series
"The Children's Hour", a collection of children's lit published by Sears, I think. (I still have it.)
As a pre-teen, I switched to fantasy and sci-fi, but the shelves were pretty bare in the libraries, then.
When my children were born, I really indulged myself reading to them. Our favorites were
Chronicles of Narnia
The Bagthorpe Family Saga
Richard Scarry anything
Lately, we have been reading David Sedaris out loud to one another. (I should add that the youngest of us will be turning 33 next month.)
The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series! Yes! I love those. I can identify with the “holding pages” you mentioned, as well … I used to do the same thing. Some were better than others, of course. The first one I ever got was “Deadwood City”, and I loved it! I still have them, and recently loaned them to my six-year old niece to begin reading.
I also loved Bridge to Terabithia – a book I reread at least once every couple of years, and which makes me weep each time. Another juvenile fiction book with the same effect on me is A Summer to Die – by Lois Lowry, I believe. A lovely, haunting book, that again, makes me weep.
How about the Berenstein Bears series? Anyone remember those? One of those was the first book I ever read on my own. Or (couldn’t find where these had been mentioned, though I just may have missed it) how about the Richard Scarry books? There was one which had a tiny picture of GoldBug somewhere on each page. My brother and I used to race to find him when Mom or Dad read that book to us.
Ah, good times, good times.
I can’t believe that I had actually forgotten about the Rats of NIHM!! That was one of my all time favorite books as a child.
I also second and third the above books because I read almost all of them as a child. A few others that I haven’t seen are:
The Girl With the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Diary of Anne Frank
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt
I also read Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor when I was about 13. It was not a novel directed towards children, but any teenage girl would fall in love with it.
Ah…The Phantom Tollbooth. Gets better every time.
I never did learn to make a distinction between kids’ books and books for grown-ups. I finally read Eloise a few weeks ago when my boss recommended it.
Anything by Roald Dahl, Judy Blume, and Ruth Chew (anyone remember Ruth Chew? All the girl-books about witches?)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang–the original book is nothing like the movie; it reads more like a James Bond story (natch. It’s written by Ian Fleming)
The Mad Scientists’ Club! I recently spent a sinful amount of money to buy one of those books, a slender mass-market paperback, from a used bookstore via bibliofind. Oh, I loved those stories.
And Richard Scary did a book called (I think) What Makes it Work? What Makes it Go? What Makes it Fly? What Makes it Float? All very simple explanations of basic physics. To this day I can remember the speed of light as 186,000 mi/s because of that book, read when I was about 5.
–E
I don’t believe (and I’m very much surprised) that no one has mentioned Daniel M. Pinkwater.
Probably his best one (which is actually for younger teenagers) is called “Young Adults.” You gotta love an author who bases a children’s book on the nature of Dadism.
And of course, my kids favorite picture book, “Harvey Potter’s Balloon Farm” by (I think) Jerdine Nohlen.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=15703
reviving my thread from last year.