<p>There’s a popular thread about people’s least favorite kids’ books, but what about the ones you loved? </p>
<p>These are some that I loved as a child: Goodnight Moon, of course
*There’s No Such Thing as a Dragon
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Tikki Tikki Tembo
The Puppy who Wanted a Boy
Snuggle Piggy and the Magic Blanket
Nancy Drew<a href=“the%20yellow%20hardcover%20books%20were%20my%20favorite%20when%20I%20was%205-6;%20the%20other%20ones%20were%20too%20scary%20for%20me”>/i</a></p>
<p>There are a few others I remember liking, but I can’t remember the names. One was about a sister and brother; the book told the same story from each child’s point of view. That was great for me and my sister, I think. I remember loving a large anthology of myths and also a book of Bible stories for children. I’m sure I’m forgetting hundreds of great books.</p>
<p>Me
Green Eggs and Ham
Now we are Six
Winnie-the-Pooh
Harold and the Purple Crayon
Swallows and Amazons and all the rest of Arthur Ransome’s books
Edward Eager’s books
E. Nesbit’s books
Noel Streatfeild’s shoe books
Narnia books (don’t like them as much anymore)
The Lord of the Rings
The Blue Sword
A Wrinkle in time
The Saturdays
A Space Child’s Mother Goose
Emma’s Rug and Grandfather Journey by Allen Say (not from my childhood)</p>
<p>Mathson
Freight Train by David Crews
Grandfather Twilight
Tuesday
Each Peach Pear Plum
Math Curse
Cam Jamsen
Animorph books
The Forgotten Door
Sideways Arithmetic from the Wayside School
Visual Basic for Dummies </p>
<p>Mathson’s little brother
Go Away Big Green Monster!
More, more, more said the baby
Harry Potter
Redwall books
Ella Enchanted
Lord of the Rings</p>
<p>Runaway Bunny
Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?
anything Shel Silverstein
any Little House on the Prairie series booksA
Are You My Mother?</p>
<p>I don’t remember my parents ever reading to us when we were very little – and I guess my folks really couldn’t afford to buy things like “books” when basic necessities were often scarce in our very large family. However, once I learned how to read myself, I became quite the bookworm, went to the bookmobile a block away when it came each week and checked out as many books as they would allow me, usually about 10 books at a time, and finished them all by the next week. </p>
<p>I was a big Nancy Drew fan, as well as Hardy Boys and another series, “Trixie Beldon”? Also loved all the books by Carolyn Haywood – “B Is For Betsy” and several others. There was another series I liked about 3 girls, Betsy, Tacy and Tib who lived in small-town Minnesota during the early 20th century (by somebody Lovelace??). There was another series, The Boxcar Children about a family of orphans who lived on their own in an abandoned boxcar. I could probably go on and on as I think about it more. Fortunately somewhere along the line I also discovered and read many of the classics, but those are not the ones I remember best…or read more than once!</p>
<p>Both of my kids loved Go Away Big Green Monster! D loved Madeline, all Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl, Sideways Arithmethic from the Wayside School, plus a whole bunch of teenage-girl books (not Gossip Girls, but others). Also, there was a book of fractured fairy tales - I can’t remember the name - but that was one of her favorites. S loved The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy and Runaway Bunny. When he got older, he became a Goosebumps fan and he also liked the Magic Tree House series. Unfortunately, I can’t get him to read anymore without a fight.</p>
<p>What books did we love? Jamberry for sure (I can still recite it from memory), and all of Sandy Boynton’s board books. Dr. Seuss. Janet & Allan Ahlberg’s books (The Jolly Postman et al.), and the somewhat darker American off-kilter fairy tale books, too (can’t remember the names, now). Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, absolutely. William Steig’s children’s books, especially The Amazing Bone. Sendak. Winnie-Ther-Pooh (and Milne’s first book of children’s poems). A British series about Alfie and his sister Annie Rose. The Frances books. Grimm Brothers stories in the “original” form from a straight Penguin translation, and Burton’s translation of 1001 Nights. Nancy Willard’s A Visit To William Blake’s Inn and some book with a long title about angels and a cake. My Father’s Dragon and its sequels. Harriet The Spy. And, as they got older, everything Dahl wrote, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Tuck Everlasting, the Earthsea books, Five Children and It and its American cousins Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, and Knight’s Castle, Tolkein, The Wind in the Willows and everything by E.B. White. My son loved Redwall, his sister not so much.</p>
<p>(Looking at the posts above, I can’t believe what a children’s lit soulmate of mine mathmom is! We even read Animorphs, too. I had completely forgotten about them! There are probably only four or five books on her list my kids didn’t love.)</p>
<p>And, more than any other book I ever read to them, perhaps, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. My son – the less literary of my children – has since read all of Rushdie on his own, and wrote his long senior English paper on The Satanic Verses, and has cultivated an appreciation of Bollywood. That’s how much he loved Haroun. He probably re-reads it a couple of times a year.</p>
<p>Too late to edit, but I dropped them because they were discussed in the other thread:</p>
<p>My daughter loved all of the Wizard of Oz books to death. (My death. I was soooo sick of reading them to her.) Caddie Woodlawn The Bread Sister of Sinking Creek and Maggie Among the Seneca
A series, The A.I. Kids.</p>
<p>I read the entire Little House series aloud to my kids. Wow! What incredible books…they got sweet potatoes, a penny and a candy cane for Christmas and thought it was “just too much.”</p>
<p>I love, love, love Shirley Hughes. I loved the messy house Alfie and Annie Rose lived in and how their Mum always looked slightly frazzled. My kids liked them, but they didn’t love them the way I did. :)</p>
<p>What fun to find other people read their kids “Go Away, Big Green Monster” and “More, More, More Said the Baby”. </p>
<p>I adored reading books from my childhood to my children. The Little House, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Hailstones and Halibut Bones, The Great Brain series, The Pushcart War.</p>
<p>When he was young, S and I loved anything that that was laugh-out-loud funny or silly.</p>
<p>I wept again as I read Charlotte’s Web to him.</p>
<p>S and I both loved all the Roald Dahl books, especially James and the Giant Peach. I think I read them to him first time around and then he read them himself when he was older. He didn’t get into the L’engle books as much as I thought he would; they were favorites of mine, but he just liked them “OK.”</p>
<p>Next came the great boy-lit adventure books, all of which were new to me, so I read them, too.</p>
<p>Later, he immersed himself in the the Redwall series.</p>