What was your favorite book as a child?

The Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge gone wrong is better than no revenge at all.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Beautiful Joe

Madeleine’s Rescue.

The Popcorn Dragon is great

I also like The Blueberry Elf. And Harold and the Purple Crayon.

"Never Tease a Weasel"

Not even once or twice.

A weasel will not like it.

And teasing isn't nice.

Whoops, it’s “The Blueberry Pie Elf”

This San Francisco. Also, This is New York, Paris, Rome...a few more. I loved these.

Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman by Dorothy Sterling

Thank you, Scholastic Books!

It was fascinating to me and I just read it over and over again, often starting over right after I'd finished a turn.

I think it's fucked up that Trump has delayed putting her image on the $20 bill.

IMO, she is the quintessential American hero.

The C.S. Lewis Narnia series. I still read all the books once every couple of years.

My most read book was Hiroshima by John Hersey. My older brother had it, and I found it and stupidly read it.

I prayed nightly that - when it finally happened in the US - God would cause the bomb to drop directly on my house instantly vaporizing us so that we would not survive long enough to see our skin slough off us in giant sheets before dying in acidic pools of radioactive rainwater.

A Wrinkle in Time. And no, I never saw -- and would never watch -- the/a movie.

D'Aulaires' Trolls. I still have it. All of my favorite books were about trolls, and monsters.

I loved reading this when I was a kid. I don't know how many times I re-read it.

For some reason I really enjoyed reading Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette.

The World Almanac and Book of Facts. I demanded a new one every year.

How did I even have friends?

These two......

James and the Giant Peach

The Henry Reed books. I would also get the Guinness Book of World Records Hardback for Christmas every couple of years.

James and the Giant Peach

I'm not sure I've ever loved another book like this one.

The Gulag Archipelago.

I was precocious.

Geez, didn't anybody read normal books like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew?

Favorite book: A Child's Garden of Verses

My first Hardy Boy book and my favourite was “The Mystery of the Chinese Junk”. Received it from my mom and dad for my 10th birthday and collected every book. Still have them. Hoped my kids would like them but....oh well maybe the grandchildren one day.

When I was 9 years old, I read "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

That was my favorite book.

Fifty years later, it's still one of my favorites.

Another vote for James and the Giant Peach.

Also, Where the Red Fern Grows.

Mine was faces of death.

Oh wait you said book

The wild things

Mine was “My Father’s Dragon” by Ruth Stiles Gannette

My first favorite book was this one.

I wanted to go to that candy store with the gang so much

Too many for just one:

Matilda, Roald Dahl

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Judy Blume

This one. I named one of my cats Pickles when I got older because of this cat.

The original [italic] Goosebumps [/italic] book from R.L. Stine.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. There's some really creepy stories in these books.

R33, I remember that book! I had a copy.

I loved Henry Reed. I hadn't thought about those books in years.

My favorites were Elizabeth Enright's Melendy Family books.

Airport by Arthur Hailey. I was 9 years old and it was my first "adult" book. I re-read it several times, and I still have the tattered copy 40 years later.

I though my mother would die...

The Sugar Mouse Cake by Gene Zion

I always had a sweet tooth....

In Cold Blood

R39

Comparing Truman Capote to Alexander Solzhenitsyn is like comparing Britney Spears to Maria Calais.

Pathetic.

Wow, lots of favorites listed above. I read a lot of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I loved The Secret Garden, and a somewhat similar French book called the Adventures of Perrine (En Famille). We had large hardbound books in series from the Junior Classics, with names like Stories of Adventure, and Stories that Never Grow Old.

Another vote for Where the Red Fern Grows. I read it on a family road trip when I was 9 and tried so hard not to cry, but couldn't help it. I couldn't stop thinking about it for a long time. Sad as hell, but I loved it.

We also had early (if not original edition ) hard bound copies with illustrations of the complete series of Oz books. Of course we destroyed them - not knowing they'd be worth thousands now.....alas. Just read that a first edition complete set just sold for $150,000. Who knew (at age 7 or 8)?

The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base.

Picture book - Corduroy

After that, anything by Beverley Clearey; Henry Huggins, Beezus and Ramona, Ellen Tibbits, Otis Spofford...

“The Magic Gloryhole.”

I loved Pickles, the Fire Cat, r31. Loved, loved, loved.

Classics Illustrated Junior:

As a very young kid, I loved RL Steins goosebumps . There was another series of scary books I loved but I can't recall the name or title. They were a series of books composed of short ,frightening stories with ghoulish and disturbing illustrations in black and white. The starkness and simplicity of the illustrations made the tales more chilling. One involved a misbehaving little girl being abandoned by her family. I always had dark tastes, haha.

Halfway through reading the Hardy Boys books, I started on Nancy Drew. The covers looked like this, with actual book covers.

R41 I had forgotten about The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I used to absolutely devour those. R50 That cover brings back so much nostalgia

Then they started having the cover built in, with a yellow spine.

R33 Oh, I see somebody has already posted the book I mentioned. I've been trying to remember the title of that series for ages!

I don't really read that often anymore but I used to have the strangest tastes as a kid. I remember finding a copy of Every Secret Thing, the Patty Hearst bio , for about a dollar at a booksale. I finished it in about 2 days. I was only about 11 or12 but I was hooked! I also loved Agatha Christie.

I loved a book titled "What's For Lunch, Charley?" by Margaret Hodges. A little boy who thinks his ordinary life is boring and so thinks of ways to make it more exciting.

I also loved (and still love) any of the many books by Virginia Lee Burton.

I loved reading, and I think I used it to escape from my father's alcoholism. My favorite series was Trixie Belden. Second place were the Nancy Drew series. My fourth grade teacher use to read us a book after we got back from lunch. Mrs Dicks was my literary inspiration, and helped my grow as a reader. Judy's Journey gave me the empathy I carry to this day for the downtrodden. Other Child hood favorites was The Lions Paw, Doctor Doolittle, and a book about Harriet Tubman. I loved Homer Price, Encyclopedia Brown, Harriet the Spy, The Borrowers, From the mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Man in the Moon Marigolds. Sadly, I haven't read a book in decades.

Les petites filles modèles de la Comtesse de Ségur : Camille, Madeleine and Sophie.

R56, I loved From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and all of the Encyclopedia Brown books too.

The Pink Motel

All the books by Elizabeth Enright, especially Spiderweb for Two

The Amulet books by E. Nesbit

Lady Chatterly's Lover.

Sartre’s Nausea.

Come on, I can't be the only one who loved this book! (The Phantom Tollbooth)

Gumnut Babies, May Gibbs

Noddy, Enid Blyton

Charlotte's Web, E B White

"Francie saw the tree leave his hands. There was a split bit of being when time and space had no meaning.... She staggered as the tree hit them. Neeley went down to his knees but she pulled him up fiercely before he could go down.... "And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards"...when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards she smiled tremulously at the kind man...She knew that he was really saying, "Goodbye- God bless you."

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith, however manipulative,corny, deep, and poignant, still is, imho, the best popular family novel. I read it as on older child. It was the first "adult' book I read. To this day, I still pick it up and re-read certain parts.

A loved one of mine who is now deceased, when we were adults and knowing how much I loved the novel, inscribed an early edition and gave it to me for my birthday. She wrote "We all have our Christmas trees to catch, I hope you catch yours." ( Crying as I type.)

It's impossible to choose only one. I was obsessed with books when I was a kid. First book I remember loving was "les marais de la mort" from a science fiction series for kids by Philippe Ebly (I'm french). I also loved the Arsene Lupin series. I used to daydream of being a gentleman thief. Then I read the Lord of the Rings when I was 10 and I was blown away.

I loved "The Boxcar Children" series by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I even envisioned as a young gayling the cast. One of the later books had an elderly great aunt introduced to go along with the grandfather they originally feared but came to love. I cast Laurence Olivier in my mind as the grandfather (having just seen "Clash of the Titans") and Bette Davis as his estranged sister, having just seen "Watcher in the Woods".

R72 continuing here. One of our teachers in the third grade read us "The Littlest Witch" at Halloween about a young girl stolen from her parents to be raised by a nasty witch and rescued by her fairy aunt. It could be compared to the "Harry Potter" books today.

This thread is delightfully nostalgic. I recall our teacher suggesting books by Beverly Cleary. I looked her up to discover that she is still living, at 102! This series of books was the one that best captured my memory.

Good Reads celebrated Beverly Cleary's 100th birthday with this article and some very memorable quotes.

Tottie - The Story of a Doll's House

I was fascinated by Marchpane the celluloid doll. I remember they made an animated series at some point, it's probably on YouTube.

Found it.

There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. . .

'Charlotte's Web'. I still vividly remember that summer day 60 years ago, sitting under a tree reading CW and being enchanted by it. I still have that book.

Babar Goes To America

I liked my sister's Beverly Gray books. I thought the covers were great.

I was a voracious reader- anything from “The Cricket in Times Square”, “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH”, “Watershiip Down”, “Phantom Tollbooth”, “Shogun”, “The Island of the Blue Dolphins”, “The Genie of Sutton Place”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, “Charlotte’s Web”, “The Shining”, “Dracula” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allen Poe.

I loved this series of Disney books, especially the one on world travel and simple science. Every week the A&P supermarket in my town would sell a different one and my mom and I would buy it. I think there were 19 total. I spent so many hours reading these guys.

“The Magic City,” by E. Nesbit.

My mother, born in 1909, was an Anglophile collector of now obscure British authors. She read Nesbit’s books to me and my two older brothers. Nesbit created the paradigm of four young siblings having magical adventures, later copied by C.S.Lewis. Such titles as “The Enchanted Castle, “Wet Magic,” “Five Children and It,” are all wonderful.

But my favorite is “The Magic City,” about a boy, alone in a Victorian country house, who constructs a city, made of period bric-a-brac. Dominos make a floor, moroccan-bound books make walls, upended candlesticks become pillars, with an upturned ornamental bowl for a dome. And, of course, the boy is able to go inside, and have fantastic adventures. It would make a great movie.

I was so inspired that I built my own city, which took up most of the space in my room. Over the years, as I became more and more interested in the ancient world, it grew and morphed into a more Classical assemblage. (I still have photos of it somewhere, and a friend even made an 8 mm film.)

Nesbit’s books are still in print. They are well worth reading.

Spencer’s Mountain

Thanks to Scholastic Book Services I enjoyed Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. Plus bios of Helen Keller and Madame Curie. I read all my brother's Hardy Boys but cannot remember one plot. I remember Homer and the Donut Machine, Danny and the Homework Machine (an early computer). I wish I had dared to read Little Women but boys were not supposed to read girl stuff.

Through the Looking-Glass

Man, this board is OLD.

Man, r88 is PERCEPTIVE.

This.

Stuart Little

War and Peace.

The Joy of Sex. I found it in my family's basement and very much enjoyed the illustrations.

City of Night. My stepfather read it to me every night after he tucked me into bed.

This edition, actually.

R82 I loved Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH too!

The Witches by Roald Dahl

Bread and Jam for Frances

The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was In It

by Carl Sandburg

Pictures by Harriet Pincus

The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White.

I remember my Dad reading "Pippi Longstocking" to me. I am not sure what he thought about it, but he read it with great gusto, I guess because he understood that I was enjoying it so. I later re- read it myself along with the follow up sequels.

I discovered "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats when I took a Children's Literature course required for preparation for elementary teaching, so it was not a childhood favorite, although it sparked a childlike response from me at age 20. What a lovely little picture book, incredibly creative use of materials and methods used to create the illustrations.

" The Mystery of the Mooncusser"--- a Scholastic purchase in 5th or 6th grade. Not great literature, as I look back, but I must have read it 4 or 5 times.

I grew up in the South and thought The Long Winter described a perfectly cozy, snowy, chilly, fireplacey winter.

"J.T." by Jane Wagner. Not sure which came first , the children's special on CBS or the book, but it matters not. Both were/are very touching and both had a profound effect on me as a kid.

I read everything by Edward Eager.

Amelia Jane books by Enid Blyton

SEX by Madonna

Some of these books look pretty good. I'm going to get some for my nephews.

Thanks all

[quote]“Red Riding Hood screamed, not out of alarm at the wolf's apparent tendency toward cross-dressing, but because of his willful invasion of her personal space.”

Has no one mentioned Harriet the Spy yet? Where are the lesbians at, I always heard it was their favorite and one of mine.

R12 Yes Wrinkle in Time for me as well in 1967 in 4th grade. It was the moment my mind expanded greatly

Flowers for Algernon. I can’t remember if I liked it or if was “first” book. Sad, so probably first book. Never mind.

I loved The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, and its sequel, The Shy Stegosaurus of Indian Springs.

The Robber Barons, by Matthew Josephson. An inspirational book about America's titans.

Jane Eyre - the woodcuts were fascinating.

Some threads on datalounge are ones that I can count on to be more positive than others. A little snark here and there, I can handle, but some topics are mostly snark and thevproverbial pointless bitchery. This thread is relatively a safe zone, as are a lot of the ones about various music/arts related topics. Many of the responses on this topic were like "oh yes, I forgot about that one" and I enjoyed and appreciated being reminded of a particular book or author. Good job, OP, for what it is worth.

The Happy Hollisters by Jerry West and Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It by Miss Mae West

Fattypuffs and Thinifers

by André Maurois

A very funny anti-war book.

Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard

The Mouse and the Motorcycle. With this cover.

I don't know if this counts since it's not fiction, but the nerd in me was addicted to and mesmerized by these children's encyclopedias when I was a kid. . .

Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White.

"The Wizard of Oz" is very different than the movie. "The Wiz" utilizes characters not in the 1939 movie, and even "Wicked" has references to characters not in the movie. Certain physical aspects of the witch from the book are mentioned in "Wicked" such as only having one eye that always stays awake. As a kid, I read various editions, including an abbreviated version. Each of the books had very unique illustrations that give a completely different visual.

A novella, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

R84 -- I love E. Nesbitt but never heard of that book. I'm going to buy it right now. Thanks.

The Borrowers by Mary Norton. Also The Littles, similar theme but quite different, by John Lawrence Peterson.

Cover for "The Littles".

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin.

Did You Carry the Flag Today, Charlie? by Rebecca Caudill.

The ending had a sense of triumph, and I somehow related tightly to Charlie, who had a good heart.

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

This book is genius at capturing a child’s perspective.

Anything by Madonna

Marvin

Marvin.

The Monkey and The Crocodile

The Five Chinese Brothers

R56 I used reading as an escape, too. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew books.

“Summer of My German Soldier” was also a huge favorite.

The Ghost of Windy Hill

I loved Robert Lawson’s ‘Rabbit Hill’ and ‘The Tough Winter’. I also enjoyed the Mrs Piggly Wiggly series.

We also used to read a children’s etiquette book called ‘Goops and How to be Them’

Marvin

I used to like the Tillerman novels by Cynthia Voigt

BFG, SuperFudge, Tom Sawyer. I had that sanitized version of Tom Sawyer. I read it 1 million times. I didn’t know until I was an adult how much they took out. I was aware of Huckleberry Finn and it’s contents, but I didn’t realize how much of Tom Sawyer was censored in my copy

Upvote for R65, R100, R122 and R125. I loved sci fi/mythology and any kind of adventure books. I recognize a lot of old favorites here, but would add "Dar Tellum" by James Berry, sort sci fi with training wheels, and the Three Investigators series which has some subtle gay undercurrents to it on rereading:

All of the “Eloise” books but especially “Eloise in Moscow.”

I'm thinking of a series of books I loved as a fairly young child but forget the titles now.

There was a young female character, a child, but not a human being, she and her family were like "brutes" and she had a doll made of rocks, or with a rock for a head. She liked this candy bar called.....I can't recall "bobos"? "Bonjos"? She was a brute-like creature but sweet and very sensitive. I think she had a younger sister too. I really loved her and read all of the books. I am in my mid 50s if that helps.

No idea r146 but it sounds weirdly familiar

Animal Farm.

"Sneezer"--- this was sort of like one of those Golden Book type books that parents read to their kids. It had been a favorite of my older brother who of course outgrew it, and my Dad started reading it to me and I loved it dearly. It is also a very dear memory of my Dad that he read it to me so often. It got thrown out or given away. As a teenager, I cried. As an adult, about ten years ago, a fellow teacher found a copy on ebay and gifted it . She remembered me referencing it and the fact that I figured that a copy could not be found. Very much not much of a literary masterpiece, even for a children's book that was never going to be nominated for a Caldecott Medal, but I am so indebted to Sara, who helped me reconnect with an actual copy of "Sneezer".

Lots of good memories here - here's a few I haven't seen mentioned - Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright - The Trouble with Jenny's Ear by Oliver Butterworth - The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg --------Big Red Irish Red ---- Black Beauty - Treasure Island. - Two Years Before the Mast - Johnny Tremain --

Does Archie comics count?

Oops, r146 here. I just googled "brute family", and apparently that IS the title, lol. I complicate things all the time!

Put Me In The Zoo. I loved when he made his spots multicolored. And then when he made them very small.