I loved Little Women and sequels, but my favorite Alcott were “Eight Cousins” and “Rose in Bloom.”
I’m so glad people got around to E. Nesbit and her American disciple, Edward Eager. Me, too. The only one of those books I read as a kid was Knight’s Castle, but I loved reading them to my kids, and they love re-reading them (and so do I, although not so much recently).
The book my kids cared most about, hands down, was Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. They, and I, have read and re-read that book many times, and one of my kids became a Rushdie completist because of it. It also led us down a Bollywood rabbit hole, and probably had something to do with my child’s eventual marriage to an ethnic South Asian.
No one has mentioned Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting yet. That was written long after I was a kid, but it floored me when I read it to my kids as an adult, and I re-read it several times.
The first chapter books my daughter wanted to have read to her were The Wizard of Oz series. We went through all of the L. Frank Baum volumes at least twice, but the favorite ones got read four, five, six times, over the course of many years. (The actual writing is terrible, by the way, but the ideas are marvelous.) In addition to the first, most famous book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the ones that were most re-read were The Road to Oz (Baum’s unsuccessful attempt to end the series after five books), The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and Glinda of Oz, the last book Baum wrote.
When my kids were read-to age, we went through all of the classics N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle illustrated, that I had devoured as a child: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Men of Iron, Robin Hood. Also Ivanhoe and The Scarlet Pimpernel . And The Little Princess and The Secret Garden (but I had never read those as a kid).
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbitt. I read those for the first time in 6th grade, and re-read them constantly through college. Reading LotR out loud to my kids, I discovered how turgid and awkward Tolkein’s prose is. We never re-read the whole series, but my kids used to ask for specific chapters to be read periodically. I decided The Hobbitt was really the much better book, not my view as a teenager.
Adding: Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
also a huge fan of Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom and the Oz series, but haven’t read any of those books in a couple of decades.
The Dark Is Rising: I read that with my kids. I feel very ambivalent about it. Over Sea, Under Stone and The Grey King are great, but Greenwitch is merely OK, and The Dark Is Rising and Silver On The Tree are hot messes, the latter practically incoherent. For several years, however, my kids would march around chanting, "When the dark comes rising, six will turn it back / Three from the circle, three from the track . . . " and the other poem that shows up in those books.
Similar, but more positive feelings about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Northern Lights is marvelous, The Subtle Knife interesting, and The Amber Spyglass valuable mainly to shock people by telling them what you can find in YA fantasy novels these days. I have re-read The Golden Compass. And all of us eagerly read The Book of Dust within a few weeks of its publication.
I just remembered: books by Beverly Cleary. I could reread those.
I also loved Eight Cousins & Rose in Bloom. I keep meaning to re-read them, along with Little Men & Jo’s Boys.
Funny, I thought I could run away to our local park and live off the land after reading My Side of the Mountain.
What a fun thread. There are a lot of books mentioned that I have not read or even heard of!
@mom2and I loved the All of a Kind Family books too!
I also read The Hiding Place several times - detailed personal account of the Holocaust by Corrie Ten Boom. Loved historical fiction as a child.
@Sue22 I think we had the same childhood. I loved reading as a kid. I had the attic in my closet and my mom had q whole set of the old Nancy Drew books in there. I would love going in there, put on her wedding dress and reading and re-reading those books. I also loved Beverly Cleary. I remember checking Ellen Tebbits out of the library so many times. We didn’t grow up with a lot of money and buying books wasn’t really an option for me so she took me to the library every week, especially in the summer. I’d get out 10 at a time. When I wasn’t reading I was outside playing and pretending to be a spy. A great thing about having kids was getting to read all those books again to them.
I’m so excited by this thread. I am making a list for myself of all the books I loved to reread - so many books that I have loved and forgotten made it into the list because of all the great posts. Keep it coming, y’all.
I was a precocious reader and read a lot of books that weren’t suitable for young children at an early age mostly because my parents also read a lot. They used to hide certain books, cover them with brown paper so I wouldn’t be curious but I guess it only worked sometimes. I remember reading 79 Park Avenue by Harold Robbins in secret and my parents being absolutely furious with me. I was about 7 or 8 then(2nd or 3rd grade) and didn’t understand much of it, lol.
I do consider that I’m very lucky to have been exposed to some great books by my parents and our family and friends circle.
These are some of the books I loved to read as a child(and still read from time to time) that I think haven’t been mentioned before. I may have gone overboard a bit 
Billy Bunter by Frank Richards(Charles Hamilton)
Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries by Agatha Christie
Just William by Richmal Crompton
Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy L. Sayers
Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom comic-book series by Lee Falk
Malory Towers, The faraway Tree, and The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton
*One thousand and One Nights/i
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and stories from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Aesopica
The Arturian Saga books: ‘The Crystal Cave’, ‘The Hollow Hills’, ‘The Last Enchantment’ and ‘The Wicked Day’, and A Walk in Wolf Wood by Mary Stewart
The Earthsea Cycle Series by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Gift of the Magi and other short stories by O. Henry
The Happy Prince and Other Tales, The importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Kon-Tiki Expedition by Thor Heyerdahl
The Man-eater of Kumaon by Jim Corbett
The Ruskin Bond Children’s Omnibus by Ruskin Bond
Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Was God by Paul Gallico
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes
Trixie Belden series written by Julie Campbell and Kathryn Kenny
What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge
@Midwest67, My Side of the Mountain was my childhood fantasy, but even as a child I recognized how insane the premise of the book is. What parent in their right mind, even in the age of free range kids, would let their kid go into the mountains to survive the winter on his own with no communication or backup plan?
@eyemamom, my Cleary first, and therefore favorite, was Ramona and Beezus.
All right all you middle aged moms out there, who’s going to admit to having read everything they could get their hands on by Judy Blume? (Raises hand
Yes, yes, yes to almost all of these (and adding some to the reading list)! A new childrens series that I discovered at the library is The Penderwicks, which reads much like some of those nostalgic books from my childhood.
Judy Blume was downright scandalous!! My mom never talked to me about my period, so I had to figure it all out from Are You There God and of course who didn’t sneak and read Forever?
Poetry is a separate topic. When I was a kid, I loved Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales For Children, Don Marquis’ archy & mehitabel, and A.A. Milne’s poetry books, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. I still love them. Those I do re-read from time to time, even recently.
Then there are graphic novels. I think a great deal of my sense of humor stems from a racy graphic novel I bought at the “underground” bookstore when I was 13: The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, by Michael O’Donoghue (later of National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live fame) and Frank Springer (one of the great comic-book artists of all time). It vanished when I was in college – my brother took it and lost it. When eBay became a thing, I was able to find and acquire a hardcover first edition, which of course (and inappropriately) I made my kids read. But not until I had re-read it several times. I probably re-read Phoebe Zeit-Geist every couple of years.
My local library must not have had a very good children’s / young adult librarian, because I swear I read everything there and some of these titles are either completely new to me or are titles I’ve heard of but not read. I too will have a new list to read.
I haven’t seen many mentions of horse books, but a couple I owned and read multiple times then (but not much as an adult): Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague and National Velvet.
I read a lot as a child - mostly series mysteries like Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. I also read one series that hasn’t been mentioned yet about three boys who solved “weird” mysteries - the series was called “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.” Yes, THAT Alfred Hitchcock; the use of his name was a marketing ploy to attract buyers’ attention.
Although I read all the time as a kid, I wouldn’t re-visit any of those books now, and I wouldn’t read any of them again and again as an adult. I think that the reading choices for kids now (especially the YA literature) is richer and more varied than it was when I was younger. I took an academic class in YA lit a few years ago and was bowled over by the books we read.
Taash and the Jesters
By Ellen Kindt McKenzie
Another Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom fan. As an excuse to re-read Rose in Bloom I managed to incorporate it (and Mary Ware’s Promised Land) into a paper about the settlement house movement for a women’s history class.
I read Tuck Everlasting as an adult and thought it was thought provoking, my kids read it for school and hated it. 
I agree that the later Dark is Rising books are annoying and confusing.
I have a secret fondness for the Enid Blyton school stories - Mallory Towers especially, but I also liked The Twins at Saint Clares and the Naughtiest Girl books. But boy some of her stuff is pretty cringe-worthy! Even at the time I hated when she dragged in some stereotyped spoiled American girl.
When the kids were little we really enjoyed reading the Bill Peat books together.
They have great illustrations and are very cleverly written. I bought a few and I still laugh out loud when I read them.
Oh, Judy Blume reads in the back of the band bus…we passed them around until the pages fell out !
The Penderwicks is a lot of fun. Lots and lots of great books out there.
My sons loved Ramona. There’s a scene where she is successfully learning to spell a word, and everytime she gets it right she yells “BAM! I got you”. We all still quote that as a sign of a job well done.