(Answer: No, and even as a child I sort of figured that a famous Laker was unlikely to be writing children's books in the offseason. Sharp thinking, no?)

Of course, Miguel Batista, noe pitching for the Seattle Mariners, does write novels in the off-season.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/newsstand/discussion/pitcher_miguel_batistas_novel_approach/

I pretty much only read comic books up till 7th grade. And then, for some reason I picked up "Huckleberry Finn" from the school library and read it. After that I was hooked on reading "real" books.

since I am a girl my favorite was Nancy Drew. She really made me believe that I could do as well as the boys.

For me, it was reading ALL of Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" series and then moving on to John R. Tunis, starting with the "Kid From Tompkinsville." Although I did read a couple of the Bobsey Twins and Happy Hollisters...

"Encyclopedia Brown", "The Great Brain", "The Adventures of Tintin", classics like "The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen", "Treasure Island", and foolishly my father gave me "The Boy Who Sailed Around The World Alone." I've never been the same since

Ah, Kevin.

Come on, tell us what you really read as a kid. I'll bet the list looks something like this:
"My Two Daddies"
"Origen of Species" (A good fairy tail)
"What Al Franken Gave Me"
"Mine Kamff"
"The Liberal Anti-Semite Reader"
"Jane Fonda's Bedtime Stories"

LOL!

encyclopedia brown, most beverly clearly serials, some judy bloom, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Tintin, the Babysitters Club (couldn't leave the house and had to move onto my sister's books ... may have to turn in my penis for that one).

then read tolkien and started on fantasy, which took me through most of junior and high school.

D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths.

The D'Aulaire "Book of Greek Myths" was good too, but everyone knows those ones aren't true....

My favorite series when I was a kid was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

But my absolute favorite single book when I was a kid was The Phantom Tollbooth.

Three Investigators, some Tom Swift stuff, Oz, Encyclopedia Brown, The Great Brain, The Magnificent Brain, The Mad Scientists Club (yeah, I liked stories about smart kids). Alan Mendehlson the Boy from Mars, plenty of others. I pretty much lived at the library when I was a kid.

Winnie the Pooh, House at Pooh Corner, When We were Six...the whole A. A. Milne opus. He died the year I was born.

When I was a kid, we were fortunate to live next door to an elderly woman from Glasgow who read and told stories to us. She also made these not-so-great (but, what the heck, we were kids) cupcakes with powdered sugar frosting. She read all the classics to us. Her very favorite was Little Women. She was a great storyteller and I feel sorry for children who didn't have a Grandma Campbell to read and tell stories to them. I liked mysteries and we would buy our books at the Goodwill for a nickel or a dime, sometimes a quarter. I read all the books that had been read to me and searched for more. We had some Oz books, Tom Swift, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and the Bobbsey Twins. We had most of Mark Twain's books. But, my favorite was a series of mysteries that would have movie stars as the protagonist. At the moment the titles escape me; but, when I go to used bookstores I always look for them. I have collected some; but the last one I saw was priced at $20. Ouch. I think one was called Ann Rutherford and the Key to Nightmare Hall, which was just a murder mystery is a spooky old mansion--absolutely no gore or blood. My older brother one time asked me what I liked to read; and, I told him mysteries. It seems he had planned to give me a book about a dog for Christmas and quickly switched, giving me my first Agatha Christie mystery. Also, since I am a Pacific Northwest Indian, we had many books and stories told about the myths and legends or our Tribe.

Where is the dividing line of "kids books" and teenage books? If I limit it to the books I read at ages 12 and under, I remember reading "The Great Brain" series, Hardy Boys, 2 or 3 of the Black Stallion books, and many, many books about WW1 flying aces, although "They Flew to Glory" about the americans in the French Lafayette flying corps is the only title I remember. I think I read that book at 8 or so, which was difficult because it aims for a much older audience. There were a lot of gruesome details about the pilots deaths that you wouldn't find in a book for kids. Why I was so transfixed by that sliver of history I have no idea. Snoopy maybe?

Moomintroll!

egbert, just go to your room.

A Wrinkle in Time!

Kevin, you hit on an interesting side point. When I was a kid, in the 1950s, there were still a lot of antique books in circulation and not so many reprints. Things with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and NC Wyeth etc.

Consequently, distinctions were made between books to be cherished and more disposable fare, both in the way we were expected to handle them and to think of them.

Do you think those distinctions could have any meaning at all to kids in this media-saturated age?

I was a weird kid (and I grew up to be a weird adult. Something to do with homeobox genes, I'm sure). I read JFK's PT-109 book when I was 10 or so. I started reading Asimov short stories when I was about that age too.

My first "boys books" were stuff from my father's era. The 20s and early 30s. He had a bunch of boys books by Roy J. Snell who, I discovered later, wrote predominantly for the girl market. (I'm guessing Dad's over-bearing mother -- sorry, Grandma -- knew of the Snell girl's books and hand-picked the Snell books for Dad.)

I loved them when I was a kid, and recently bought a couple on Ebay. (You can get anything on EBay.) Sad to say, I must have been insane. Or very young. Not as comic or formulaic as the Hardy Boy books, they were, nevertheless, obviously for very young readers. I remembered from almost 50 years, a wealth of period detail that had made them, even as a young kid, seem poignant to me. Almost entirely missing. Still, Snell was a very successful kid's author in his day, and if the reader were eight or nine, I'm sure his stuff would even be great today.

Those series are all due to Edward Stratemeyer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardy_Boys

The books are all "ghost" authored by multiple writers who were handed formula plots to fill in. Franklin W Dixon has never existed. The books are updated and rewritten to keep their appeal modern and to meet changing norms. Older versions of some books contain writing that would be considered racist, and that has been cleaned up in the new versions.

Nancy Drew always bothered me because she was always being hit over the head and knocked unconcious, a recipe for permanent brain damage.

The earliest books that I read in elementary school were science fiction. There was a trilogy that really stuck in my mind about space aliens that had colonized the earth and ruled with mind-controlling "caps" that were installed when you turned 13.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods

YES, as I get older (and older) I realize that the OZ books shaped my whole life in some ways! I had them read to me many times and later read them myself. I still have most of that childhood collection--I can follow them right throughthe Lord of the Rings--50-60's sci fi and beyond to the skeptical liberal I am today--weird and wonderful! I read my children the OZ books and recommended them for my grandchildren too--somehow they never get out of date--even though Tik Tok has sort of turned positronic nowadays!

this is fun. I wanna add:

- Bunnicula series
- Redwall series (furry little bastards can barely hold a sword in their paw on the covers)
- Red Dwarf
- Hitchhiker's Guide (read that one WAAYYYY to early)

Of course all these answers depend on one's age. I cut my teeth on the Dr Dolittle books; read every one of them multiple times. Around the age of 7 I discovered science and read kids' science books and later adult popular science books almost exclusively until at age 13 I found a copy of "Fantastic Stories Annual" at the local supermarket magazine stand and was hooked on sf and fantasy until I went to college.
Although they were available I never read any of those kiddie classics that most here mention. I've pretty much lost interest in sf and still read mostly nonfiction at age 72.
What do you suppose Carl Sagan, who was of my generation, read as a child?

The John R. Tunis books about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Were the Tom Swift books the ones where every new invention was based on nuclear power? I remember reading a whole series of those books without ever noticing the pattern. I didn't catch on until I read some line where the boy genius says that the people opposed to his latest gadget must "want everyone to live back in the Stone Age."

I've always wondered if those books were underwritten by some atomic energy consortium.

i used to dig the freddy the pig books. i thought that 'animal farm' corrupted the genre.

your pal,
blake

What? No Jim Kjelgaard? No wonder you don't get dogs. Should have read Big Red, Irish Red . . . the library never stocked enough of them.

Also Henry Gregor Felson's great books on hot rods.

And the Rick Brant mystery adventures that kicked the Hardy Boys butts completely. Heck, even Nancy Drew was better than those bozos.

My favorite books for kids starting to read are the Freddy the Pig series by Walter R. Brooks, illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Sort of an American version of Winnie the Pooh, Freddy is a talking pig that lives on the Bean farm in upstate N.Y.

Brooks wrote 26 books about Freddy between 1927 and 1958. I lived near a library that had a good selection and spent a few years growing up with Freddy as a good friend. It seems odd, but Freddy was intelligent and mature (for a talking pig in a kid's book.)

'Complete set' is kind of a murky term when applied to the Oz books. Do you mean you had all of the Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz books (which includes Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz) in addition to the L. Frank Baum ones? And what about Jack Snow or John R. Neill?

Andre-Louis, I haven't thought about Freddy the Pig for maybe 30 years...but I read all of them I could find when I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me.

Ah, glad to see another Brains Benton enthusiast. By a starnge coincidence the one whose image you posted is the one book in the series I still own. I also wish there had been more of them.

I read Encyclopedia Brown and the Beverly Cleary books as well. And a couple of the Hardy Boys books, but I never got hooked on them. Meanwhile, my sister liked the girl-detective Trixie Belden series.

We had all the Baum OZ books too, beat up but intact original editions. I think my nephew has them now.

My older sister actually taught me to read before kindergarten, using Dr Seuss books and the like at first and then moving up to more advanced kids books. I was always a few years ahead, so school was incredibly boring. I distinctly remember the day I realized that I could pretty much read everything in the newspaper, even if I didn't always understand what they were talking about, when I was in second grade.

I was into Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (Jupiter Jones rules!), Encyclopedia Brown, and stuff like that, when it came time to raid the school library during my early years.

I did accidentally mess up my mind sometimes when I took books off my parents' shelf. I read Lord of the Flies when I was in like 4th grade, which is way too early. I stuck to history after that for quite awhile.

The only "girls book" I recall reading and enjoying was The Secret Garden.

Brains Benton and the Case of the Counterfeit Coin. Hoo-boy. The only one I could find where I lived. I wanted his garage lab like nobody's business. And for some reason where he and his sidekick lived they could bike on the interstate; darned significant for a nine-year old with limited horizons.

That and the Hardy Boys. Everybody had to read those from what I could see. I checked out my sisters' Nancy Drews once and found disturbing similarities: widowed father, nervous motherly housekeeper, boring or odd sidekicks. Then the elementary school bookmobile showed up with my first James Blish Star Trek. Things got weird after that point . . .

I'm reading Charlotte's Web to my daughters. 'Nuff said.

And I second Brock's recommendation of The Phantom Tollboth, but my girls are a bit young for it.

The Little House books, as well -- it's fascinating reading about a family for whom getting enough to eat was their major preoccupation.

There was a great series about frontier people, written by Joseph Altscheler mostly in the '40s, that I devoured in our little Arlington County public library after finishing off the Nancy Drews, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swifts. And the early Andre Norton and Heinlein were great introductions to science fiction - I still think that "Citizen of the Galaxy" did more to introduce me to international affairs, anthropology, and economics than any other book I read in childhood. I read it again in my forties and the scene of Thorby Baslim standing in the Replica Lincoln Memorial made me cry. But perhpaps the most entertaining books of early childhood were the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books by Betty MacDonald, about a pirate's widow who lived in an upside-down house, who was adored by all the neighborhood children, and who had all sorts of magical potions to cure naughty children of their evil behavior, such as interrupting, not picking up toys, or refusing to take a bath. From children with the dreaded I-thought-you-said-itis, I have taken the delightful "Whistle biscuit." for "This'll fix it."

I read the Dr. Doolittle books, too, but the tipping point for me was the Huntington Beach Bookmobile in 4th grade. I started reading nonfiction, history, kids science, mysteries. I wasnt a book-series kind of guy. Read a few Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but never got hooked. I should remember a favorite book, but I dont. The book I remember best from 4th grade is the book about different metals, because I still use the information. By sixth grade I started reading the Time-Life books about ancient civilizations, and those had a big effect.

My seven-year old daughter, on the other hand, is a reading machine. Last year at six she read the Chronicles of Narnia, seemingly in one extended sitting. Since summer she has read the first six Harry Potter books. She is devouring dragon and cat-warrior series while waiting for Harry Potter VII.

The Virginia Lee Burton books that we knew about: Little House, Mike Mulligan, Choo-Choo. When I had kids I found Katy and the Big Snow and also the San Francisco Trolley one. Still haven't read Calico the Wonder Horse though ;-)

Cranky

My dad read to us from "the elephant book" (its end-papers had elephants on them). The first half of the book was a collection of stories & poems by different authors and the second half was "Uncle Remus".

God, we loved Uncle Remus. "Please don't throw me in the briar patch!"

And the AA Milne books, particularly the poems.

I read a lot as a kid: Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, English girls at boarding school (oh, to be away from all my siblings and playing hockey and getting chilblains...).

It wasn't until "A Wrinkle in Time" that I was hit by the notion: "Wow! Ideas..." Funny, I've never liked science fiction (too many stupid gadgets), but Wrinkle most definetly influenced my later interest in Budhism.

I read it again recently. Gawd, there's a lot of preaching I didn't pick up on. It was definetly the wrinkle that grabbed me.

But, for my everyday adult reading entertainment, I guess I was most influenced by Nancy Drew and the mysteries my dad and his mother enjoyed. And, I suppose, AA Milne led to PG Wodehouse addiction.

http://www.freddythepig.org/

Everything you ever wanted to know about Freddy is at the above address. Most everything you need to know about politics can be found in Freddy the Politician.

Oh, damn. How could I forget Pipi Longstocking!

When I was really little, there was Russell Hoban's Frances and Crockett Johnson's Harold books. And, of course, all the Maurice Sendak--especially Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More To Life.

Also, I vaguely remember loving the animal stories of by Thornton Burgess.

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time series. T. H. White, The Once and Future King. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In the Willows. All the collie books by Terhune. All the Oz books. All the Andrew Lang color Fairy Tale books. Tove Jansson's Moomintroll series. All the Lloyd Alexander I could get my hands on. All of E. Nesbit, when I could get them. A Scot named George MacDonald wrote a lot of very peculiar and beautiful children's books, my fave was At the Back of the North WInd. The Phantom Tollbooth is great--worthwhile at any age. Any George Seldon book is guaranteed terrific. I loved all of Frances Hodgson Burnett, but those might not hold up so well now.

I went through a Shakespeare and a Sherlock Holmes kick, but I was an odd child. Later, there was Ursula Le Guin (and still is).

Charlotte's Web is one of the all time great ones. I still re-read it. And Hugh Lofting, I think, wrote the Dr. Doolittle stories in letters home to his children, during WWI, from the front in Flanders and France.

Edward Eager! Half-Magic, Magic By The Lake, Knight's Castle, and The Time Garden. Two of the books take place in the 'present' (the 1950s) and are the magical adventures of some cousins, and two take place in the 1920s and involve their parents when they were children.

I still reread those books sometimes. I can't believe they haven't been made into movies - and Knight's Castle would be great for a musical. I can almost see the big "Lead Soldiers" production number.

"It happened just the other day, to a boy named Roger."...

gummitch, absolutely. Rick Brant's Science Adventures, by John Blaine. There's a website devoted to the books, if you're interested.

Second the Freddy the Pig series.

And Peter Benchley's The Deep.

Wow! Nostalgia time.

I remember reading Rick Brant, Ken Holt, The Hardy Boys (now apparently available only in bowdlerized PC versions), Tom Swift. My sisters and I got to go to the Library once a week and pick out four books each time, so I also read all the Bobsey Twin's (little sister) and Nancy Drew (older sister) books.

My very first and favorites, though, were the Tarzan books. I was a retarded reader, not really reading until I got glasses in third grade. At that point my mother, who had patiently been reading Tarzan to me, made me start reading myself, and I made up for some lost time.

Later, all the SF classics.

My own kids got Louis Sacher, and other more modern authors, but we read Tolkien to them.

I'm somewhat older that most of your readers. I began my experience with books around the kitchen table listening to my mother or father read Tom Sayer. We ranged in age from 7 to 15. There were six of us (Irish-Catholic). I recall my not paying attention once (I was 7) and my father stopped and said "What did I just read?"

I stared blankly up at him. Suddenly the flat of the book landed on my head! It didn't hurt, but it did suprise me.

Ten minutes later he stopped again, looked at me and began the same motion with the book. I covered my head and shouted out the last lines he had read. The whole family broke into energetic laughter.

Penrod and Sam, Treasure Island, and finally Huckelberry Finn. Within my family, when Huck finally decides and says "Well then, I'll go to Hell!" That was a telling passage and very instructive for us.

My personal favorite, one I have read to thirty years of students, is a lost classic, David and the Phoenix. There is a recient reprint... you will not be sorry!

The Phantom Tollbooth and Around the World with Nellie Bly, an especially good book for girls. Wish the Nellie Bly book was also in movie form.

Brains Benton? If so many of you didn't swear his book series existed, I'd take him for a cousin to the Venture Bros.

Oh, and let's not forget, for the very formative years, the Old Mother West Wind stories by Thornton Burgess. That lead me in a crooked path to Saki's "Tobermory", among other places.

When I was a kid - back in the dark ages - there was a children's bio series with light blue covers. I must have read every single on of those things, especially the ones about women. They introduced me to Clara Barton, Jane Addams, Maria Mitchell.

Nancy Drew and Sue Barton, Student Nurse. Anne of Green Gables series. All the Baum Oz books (tried the others but they weren't the same). Black Stallion series. Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House Books.

I love "A Wrinkle in Time" and its sequels. "Wind in the Willows."

And my all time childhood favorite, "The Princess and the Goblin."

Encyclopedia Brown and Robert Silverberg's science fiction for me.
"Time of the great freeze" was my favorite

Kevin, I love it when you do pop culture entires!

As a kid, I read Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books avidly. I wanted to *be* Nancy; I was utterly convinced that if I kept tapping walls, someday I'd find a secret passageway. I was also addicted to the fluffy Sweet Valley Twins series through middle-school. And of course, the Three L's: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lucy Maude Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott were all childhood staples.

I also read all of the Tamora Pierce books. She was the first fantasy writer to write about female warriors. I guess you could say that my childhood reading list was full of grrrrrl power.

Here's a bit of trivia. One of my favorite children's illustrated book artist/writers was Taro Yashima. He wrote "Crow Boy", "Umbrella", and "Momo's Kitten" to name his best known. He came to America to study art before Pearl Harbor was attacked. He had left his young son, Mako, in Japan. During the war, Mako lived with his grandparents. Yashima joined the U. S. Military and used the pseudonym "Taro Yashima" to protect his family in Japan. His actual name was Jun Atsushi Imawatsu. After the war, his son Mako came to America and had a very successful film career that included an Acadamy award nomination for his role in "The Sand Pebbles". One of his last acting jobs was as the voice of "Splinter" in the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Mako died of cancer last July. Momo Yashima, the daughter who was the "star" of Momo's Kitten and Umbrella, is an actress who has been in many films and TV shows.

Encyclopedia Brown, Tom Swift, and Asimov. "I, Robot," baby!

Marooned Off Vesta. I took away from that one that you don't just resign yourself, you keep thinking.

But Nightfall? I rejected the premise of that story at age ten or eleven. A society that advanced didn't have electricity? Puh-lease!

My own favorites were the six books in the "Tom Corbett, Space cadet" series. Could the disparaging nature of the space-cadet moniker have come form htis source? Of course a modern reader, even a ten-year-old, would laugh at some of the howlers one finds in the books, such as liberty for the cadets to travel Venus, where they intend to hunt T. rex in the jungles but walk into a colonial revolt instead which is put down by overwhelming forces from Earth. No Spirit of '76 in that novel, just a twitchy element of McCarthyism. The books apparently originated from an early- or mid-50's radio drama. Despite their shortcomings, the books inspired me to wonder what it was like on the far-flung planets.

All Summer in a Day was another early favorite.

I like this one.

When I was a child in Puerto Rico my older brother frequently bought stuff from the Molino Editorial in Spain. He always let me pick one or two books and it was really cool when they arrived months after we had made the order.

I really liked Enid Blyton's Adventure Series, also read some of the Famous Five, Barney Mysteries and Mystery series. I really enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators by Robert Arthur, and the Just William series by Richmal Crompton. That last one was pretty funny, and the life of a middle class kid in 1940s England was a complete fantasy world for someone in Puerto Rico's working class. Oh man, I got all nostalgic now.

Started off with Freddy the Pig, Thornton Burgess, all the Oz books the library had and then went to Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Along the way there was "The Invisible Island" which had a quote from Gollum which led to The Hobbit. Also Nesbit's Adventure series and Ransome's boating books which led (because they were British?) to Wodehouse, Christie and Churchill by my teens. In between I sandwiched Heinlein and Asimov. Didn't read simply "children's" books - especially remember Ignatius Donnelly's book "The Antedeluvian World"

Once my folks figured out that SciFi wasn't just a passing fancy, my dad walked into my room one evening right before he shipped out for Vietnam and handed me his copy of Starship Troopers, telling me it was mine. I still have it, over 30 years later, and I wonder what Johnny Rico would say about the Bug Hunt that our soldiers are on today?

The really scary thing about that book is, a lot of junior officers have discovered it and think it's an ops manual, not a dire warning.

Well, comments here remind me of two reading binges I'd forgotten to mention in my prior post. After reading about Dr Dolittle talking to animals I, too, graduated to Freddy the Pig and his friends who talk to humans. But even more influential to my psyche were Albert Payson Terhune's heroic dog books, starting with Lad, A Dog and continuing through a whole series of adventures. They made me not only a dog person but a collie person, though I've learned to at least tolerate cats (and chihuahuas) in my Golden Years.

The earliest I remember were the Wrinkle in Time series. Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (the Veldt was an elementary school assigned reading and I loved it). Asimov's Foundation series later.

I never read a comic book. I remember "winning" a free one from 7-11 (Captain America I think?) and it was just dumb.

Dang, I guess I'm a how-to on building a better Dilbert.

I grew up in the 60's in a household that had no TV. Consequently I always had my nose in a book. I remember reading as many Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys as I could get my hands on. I only ever saw a couple of Hollister books, but I remember reading a lot of Cherry Ames books. (She was a nurse that had an awful lot of mysteries to solve all the time.) I read all of the Mary Poppins books, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, the Borrowers, Pippi Longstocking, the Little House on the Prairie series, Encyclopedia Brown (of which there weren't that many yet), and all of the Ramona and Beezus books that were out. I thought I had died and gone to heaven when I discovered a friend who had ALL of the Oz books in her house. I had not realized that there were more books, and the Wizard of Oz was my all time favorite book, so I spent that year working my way through her collection.

I also remember reading all the Robb White books that I could find. He wrote excellent adventure novels, including "Up Periscope", and many of them were for young adults.

Somehow, I missed the Rescuer books, which a friend in college turned me onto. It was later still that I discovered the Johnny Dixon series by John Bellairs, and his Lewis Barnavelt series. Both series center around supernatural adventures of their central hero. I still enjoy well written children's stories, since good story telling is ageless.

Not a lot of Roald Dahls here. Could that be a more recent phenomenon? My son is twelve, and all his friends know Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, not to mention Willy Wonka et al.

Freddy the Pig, Dr. Dolittle, Narnia, Pippi Longstocking, Moomintroll.

My librarian at school was terribly elitist; she wouldn't allow the brighter students like my sister and me to check out the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.

When I was a kid, I read one of my brother's books, Mutiny in the Time Machine. I think that it might have been a Boy's Life book, but I'm not sure. It is probably out of print, but that book was soooo good! I remember what happened even now, many years later. It's funny how the names of some books come back to you through the years.

I feel sorry for kids who don't like to read. They don't know what they're missing.

It was fun reading about the books that other readers' loved as children--there is a lot of overlap with my favorites. For anyone who doesn't know it , I recommend Francis Spufford's 'The Child that Books Built', which is the most wonderful thing I've ever read about what it's like to be a child reader. Also don't miss Noel Perrin's 'A Child's Delight', about his favorite out of the way children's books.

Ditto "Freddy the Pig"

For the record, I've got a 10 year old girl. We started reading the whole series when she was 7 -- they became her favorites.

Best book in the series -- "Freddy the Magician." These books STILL WORK -- great "read aloud" books (and the humor works for adults -- Walter R. Brooks was a master)

Holy cow, someone else has read The Case of the Counterfeit Coin! I was crazy about that book when I was 11, I probably read it a dozen times in a row.

Alas, I never knew until years later that there were other books in the series, and by the time I found out I was way over it.

I still have fond memories of being read the Horatio Alger stories, and biographies of the great presidents. Later, I moved on to the Book of Leviticus, and as a teenager the Book of Revelations.

I read Enid Blyton's adventure series. I remember there were four kids, two sets of brother-sister cousins. The mother of two kids was always in the story, but the father was never mentioned. The books were written in the 1950's, so it would strike a chord with kids whose fathers had died in the war.

The mother had a friend, Bill. There was never a hint of romantic involvement, but my feverish 13-year-old mind always imagined that Bill was having his way with the mother while the kids weren't there.

When I was 8, I was partial to the Homer Price stories. Surrealism in the midwest. My favorite was a tale about a man who had invented the world's greatest mousetrap. It seems he was a hermit who after a while decided he wanted visitors. He had read somewhere that if you build a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door so he spent years working on his moustrap but when he was done no one turned up. So he took it out on the road.

Did anyone mention The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles? That one my dad read to me, at I don't know what ridiculously tender age, and when I was able, I read it for myself. Great fun, highly recommended to anyone who (like me) loved The Phantom Tollbooth.

I already could read when I started school, and my Catholic school had a huge combined grades 1-2 class that was learning to read from Dick and Jane books. My wonderful teacher let me sit in the back of the room and read from the bookshelf there...all lives of the saints, with a few Raggedy Ann and Andy books. At home we had the Childcraft books, and Journeys through Bookland. The series others have mentioned were what I discovered at the library in third grade and beyond.

ditto, ditto, ditto. most everything that I loved has already been mentioned, some of them multiple times, upthread (though I can't believe how few mentions of Mary Poppins -- was I weird, or is that an age-cohort thing? or both?)
Here are a couple I haven't seen mentioned a lot yet:
The "Danny Dunn" series (baby sci-fi, w/each adventure kicked off by some "headstrong" move by eponymous hero lad)
A super kid-mystery by one Kin Platt, called "Sinbad & Me" (long out of print and worth big bux now IIRC; two sequels that were letdowns)
And then the Heinlein juvies snagged me, & I was down the sci-fi sinkhole for like a decade. (It's a wonder I'm not a libertarian; I bet 90% of the FReePer males were Heinlein fanboys starting in their still-not-outgrown youths)
And despite having read all the usual suspects, over & over, I still say Alfred Bester and Chip Delany rule.

the only "series" i recall enjoying was The Hardy Boys series.

I noticed Bridge to Tarabitha is in theatres. This wasn't a series, but i am curious whether the film is worth the $7.50. Has anyone seen it?

Wow. Memories. The Happy Hollisters saw me through being at home with the mumps. As I recall, they were the first 'real' books that I read. And from there to anything and everything. I remember though a couple of my great grandfather's books still in remarkably good condition, R.M. Ballantyne's Coral Island and Ungava (both written in 1857) and my father's copies of the H. Rider Haggard books. Treasure Island. Hardy Boys and all the usuals - my mum had me down to the public library every Saturday morning. Absolutely any book that touched on Hamilcar and Hannibal.

Anyone here read The Mad Scientists' Club? I loved those books. (There are four of them in total, if anyone is interested.)

Oh yes, Freddy the Pig. And Agatha Christie. Started reading relatively "advanced" books at a very early age. I must have been in 3rd or 4th grade when I got Chitty-chitty Bang Bang (the original Ian Fleming book, not the movie) and had a tussle with the librarian over checking it out.

Elaine Jarvis McGraw (Mara, The Bronze Bow, Witch of Blackbird Pond) and Sylvia Engdahl (Enchantress from the Stars.) Anything by Andre Norton.

I see so clearly this front-piece of a book: A boy and girl on a giant book raft heading down the river to the sea.

bemused, was that "Journeys through Bookland"?

As far as series, Farley's Black Stallion books and Edgar Rice Burroughs -- Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar.

Does anyone else remember Bomba the Jungle Boy? The sweet little lady who lived next door had them from her kids' childhoods, and she loaned them to me. Nice lady, pretty bad books (and this from a kid who liked ERB!).

Wizard of Oz, Narnia, Dark is Rising, Chronicles of Prydain, books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Half Magic, Secret Garden, The Hobbit, 5 Children & It (Edith Nesbit) Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars (Daniel Pinkwater), Secrets of the Shopping Mall and the Ghost Belonged to Me (Richard Peck), Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle), Dragonriders of Pern books (Anne McCaffrey), books by Judy Blume. Old books full of nursery rhymes, fairy tales, Aesop's fables, etc.

As I got older I finally made it through the Lord of the Rings and drifted into horror: my mom's H.P. Lovecraft and Manly Wade Wellman (Silver John) books, and picked up Stephen King too.

I didn't read that much of my father's extensive collection of yellowed sci fi paperbacks. I've always enjoyed sci fi but every single book on the shelf seemed really sexist, even to a young girl who hadn't been exposed overtly to feminism. It took years for me to come back and read through Asimov and Heinlein.

But the Conan series was so over the top, it didn't bother me as much. I also began a lifelong practice of buying Glen Cook's pulp fantasy even though most of it is pretty bad.

The Wrinkle in Time series was, and still is, too religious for me. I had a friend who had lots of Nancy Drew books but the only one I wanted to read was the one with a killer robot on the cover. :^)

I was a total tom boy as a kid and couldn't get enough Hardy Boys. It turns out my husband as a kid read tons of Nancy Drew. I think this says something about us and has something to do with the success of our marriage!

Let me second someone saying Alan Mendelsohn and the Boy from Mars. That is my all time favorite of the jillions of books i read and was read as a kid. My dad read it to us (my mom read us lizard music which is good too).

And someone said Cherry Ames! My mom read those as a kid and gave them to me. Also Donna Parker. That brings back memories.

I read the oz books during the three months my dad took us to go live with his sufi guru in a refuge camp in the west bank. They were the only books we had with us, so we read them again and again. So very oddly Palestine and the Oz books are inextricably linked for me.

Librul,

A Wrinkle in Time was too religious for you? I'm surprised, if you got through the Narnia books. I had no idea that L'Engle was classified as a "Christian author" until I worked at a bookstore, which was maybe twenty years after I read the books. The most prominent identifiably Christian character I can remember in that series was one Pastor Mortmain in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and let's just say he wasn't the hero of that segment.

The Narnia books, in contrast to L'Engle's, really did require you to have some basic clue about Christianity. Or, rather, you could read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with no idea that Aslan was a Christ figure (I sure hadn't), but if you then went into the other books you'd be puzzled (as I was). What was up with the lamb at the end of The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader'? Oh, now I get it. D'oh!

OT a bit, but I wonder if the Christian subtext (hell, in Perelandra it's practically the main text) in Lewis's "space trilogy" puts people off reading them. It shouldn't, because the first two, at least, contain very beautiful and fully imagined alien worlds in a way that very little sci-fi I know does.

Learning to read in the sixties,I read the Hardy Boys, Emil and the Detectives, the Chronicles of Narnia series, books about the children of Fatima, books about JFK, and a lot of strange hand-me-downs from my older brothers, mainly science fiction. Mostly Marvel comics; I never liked the DC comics very much.

After I read all the dinosaur books at the school library by 2nd grade, I discovered Lloyd Alexander's The High King and the rest was history. I also had access to Narnia books through my older brothers.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (coming to a screen near you in a movie made for Germany), Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, Hardy Boys, the Ghost of Dibble Hollow and as many comic books and Peanuts paperacks as I could get my hands on!

I read as many books as the Bookmobile would let me take (anything with 'Mystery', 'Secret' or 'Ghost' in the title, or bi-wing planes) and I would start on the way back home and finish waaaaay before the van came around again. Now, I collect copies of those books, and get to read them all over again.

dp,

What's not to like about Edgar Rice Burroughs? I only vaguely remember Bomba though.

The hurtling moons of Barsoom were the best, though.

Hmmm...

Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew (I was more interested in the mysteries than being gender-appropriate)
Encyclopedia Brown
all the AA Milne "Pooh" Books
Peter Pan
Mary Poppins
The story about PING
Paddle-to-the-sea
The Berenstain bears books -- the wife always had the best wry facial expressions...
Whichever boy-sleuth series had "Jupiter Jones"...the "three investigators", maybe?
All the Judy Blume books
Edgar Allan Poe (everything)
Everything by Jack London
Chronicles of Narnia
Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain
Hobbit + Lord of the Rings
Wrinkle in Time and sequels (If you want a truly annoying, grating experience, try the audiobook version with the author narrating)
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, etc.
The Forgotten Door
The Pigman (Zindel) - I remember this one being very affecting for some reason.
Charlotte's Web
The Yearling (Rawlings)
The Phantom Tollbooth
Little House on the Prairie (all)

My father always read us kids books like Catch-22, The Caine Mutiny, Animal Farm, The Old Man & the Sea, The Secret Garden, Herzog's Annapurna, and Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki...not exactly children's lit., but it was well-received.

best of all? The Incredible, Amazing Adventures of...The Rock. Anyone remember this? It was about an ordinary rock that dreamed of adventure but wound up being disappointed...I think the high point was two kids who couldn't find a xmas tree and wanted to make a "christmas rock" instead, complete with tinsel and red & green paint. Very droll.

I spent my childhood summers at my mother's home(small) town and discovered her childhood bookshelf which included Oz and the George MacDonald books (Back of the North Wind, the Curdie series)..Victorian fantasy...in his time, he was bigger than Lewis Carroll. The hook was set.
Next I ran through Heinlein in the local Carnegie (/there/ was an act of amazing philanthropy) library.
H was as much a fantasist as science fiction writer.
These days I'm still reading fantasy (both "juvenile" and adult) there are some powerful writers. Fantasy deals with the trial of the spirit in worldd with added dimension, altered myths/archetypes and different first principle (in principio). Interesting that the most mythic authors are so predominantly female...
BTW, I regard the Potter books as grade B, or B minus, though Rowling may mature if her readers will let her write something else ...
After a long string of excellent scifi, Lois McMasters Bujold has written some thunderously strong work; I suggest you begin with /Curse of Chalion/.
Diana Wynne-Jones has been writing great advanced juvenile fantasy since forever, but she's lately come to prominence as HHGH has made an animated movie of her /Howl's Moving Castle/ (and is about to release her Castle in the Air). I suggest her
Chrestomanci series, which begins with /Charmed Life/
Diane Duane has a wonderfully imaginative advanced juvenile series /So You Want To Be A Wizard/. In the first one, the teenage protagonist go up against Lucifer and give him the possibility of redemption. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Wizard_Series
Her Adult stuff is even heavier, the Door Series; get /Tale Of The Five: The Sword And The Dragon/
For those that think that fantasy is literarily and substantive light-weight, I suggest they sink their teeth into Charles Williams

Friends kids are reading the Hardly Boys Mysteries (see amazon.com for Nancy Clue and the Hardly Boys) and seem to enjoy them immensely.

I grew up a sci-fi reader as my parents subscribed to Isaac Asimov's magazine, OMNI and a few others.

Being somewhat of a bookworm as a kid, I was enraptured by Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators series. I loved Jupiter Jones and his band of teen sleuths! What great reading fun. I even turned my own kids on to them. They loved them as well.

Here’s the book that our brain-dead conservative friends like Jay and American Hawk read to their kids, Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed. I am not kidding about this, sadly enough.

Many excellent recollections above - For those beginning their second childhood, I highly recommend the Jane Eyre series and the Nursery Crime series (Humpty Dumpty) by Jasper Fforde.

Being both a detective and horse addict as a kid, along with the others mentioned here, I really liked the Linda Craig mysteries (they reinvented her for a while, but the new one is younger and not so cool), the Robin Kane mysteries, the C W Anderson horse books and Marguerite Henry's books.

Also fun were Mrs. Coverlet (While Mrs. Coverlet was Away, Mrs. Coverlet's Magicians, and there were a couple of others, I think). Full of bad puns and silly situations.

Another favorite, though not a series, was Mr. Pudgins. These days, a middle-aged man who was a babysitter for 3 kids would no doubt be under suspicion of something. As it was, he and his magic pipe were just a lot of fun. Sigh for a more innocent age.

Trixie Belden mysteries were just awesome!!

WELL, I'm loving this thread...must take notes. Lionel H. and I have common reading tastes it appears BUT I was most heartened to see a reference to all the Albert Payson Terhune books about collies...that was the beginning for me of having to read ALL of a series and it continues to this day with my pleasure reading of mysteries by Kellerman, Woods, Brown (RM), Albert, and others. I did the Farley books because having a horse was a dream from childhood that didn't come to be until I was 50...as we were both teachers AND had three children (who were indoctrinated into the benefits of reading EARLY!!!)...we also dipped into many of those authors that captured them. I continue to think A WRINKLE IN TIME is a classic! MORE OF THESE KINDS OF DISCUSSIONS, PLEASE!!! I'm sick to death of Bush and Company, far out religious fanatics, and WAR...

I haven't seen anyone mentioning the Wizard of Earthsea books. Those were my favorite fantasy books as a child after Lord of the Rings.

I've just browsed through the comments quickly, but it appears that no one has pointed out that the name of the LA Laker was HAPPY HARISTON, not Hollister.

So far unmentioned, two series I was utterly addicted to as a child: One was a multi-volume Civil War series, can't remember title or author. Each volume chronicled a crucial Civil War battle from the point of view of a young drummer boy or bugler (I forget exactly) on either the Union or the Confederate side, and each book was appropriately bound in blue or grey cloth, depending on which side the young protagonist was on. The series was out of print at the time I read it, which was the early 1950s, and I'd search for them on eBay but I don't remember what to look for! Anybody else remember these?

Finally, and then I'll shut up, the Howard Pease books--thrillers on board a tramp steamer plying the exotic tropical waters of the South Pacific, featuring a young first mate Tod Moran, with seductive titles like Secret Cargo, The Black Tanker, The Ship Without a Crew...both series were completely captivating and utterly un-put-downable. (sorry, I get so enthusiastic remembering these books, I devolve into blurb-speak)

Bowdlerized Hardy Boys?

My elementary school had a collection of biographies on famous people. I read all of them (probably over fifty altogether). In addition, it had a complete collection of Nancy Drew and Hardy Brothers mysteries, and I think I read them all more than once.

I was also a big science fiction reader from ages 7-14, and read everything I could find from Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and others. When I was 14 I discovered Stephen King and read everything he wrote until I was about 30 years old.

Today, I have mostly abandoned fiction. When I was doing post-doctoral work, I discovered poetry and continue to read a lot of that even today (13 years later), and read it all on-line which is absolutely wonderful. My sister has piqued my interest in historical philosophy with a gift she gave me last year, but it remains to be seen how much more reading I will do on that topic.

Yes, this thread does bring back memories. I know very few people who don't look at me like a crazy person when I start talking about Oz book number 24. So many titles mentioned are things I remember, but I can tell my worst and most memorable sci-fi down-the-rabbit-hole moment was when I started the Dune series in fourth grade. I really was not ready to deal with the sexual free-for-all that was Chapterhouse: Dune.

Kevin, were you ever active on Abuzz, the now-defunct NYT discussion web site? This question, and other similar ones you've asked, have a distinctly Abuzz flavor.

Okay, here goes: The Bobbsey Twins (all of them-they were the first thing I read after learning to read for myself.)

Thornton W. Burgess nature books--life in the Green Meadow, the Great Forest, etc.

Albert Payson Terhune collie stories--I see I'm not the only fan. Any Terhune fan should treat himself/herself to "Master of Sunnybank," a fascinating Terhune biography. I don't recall the author, but he was at Washington University in St. Louis at one point. The conclusion of the introduction will have you in tears.

Nancy Drew, of course--all of it
The Judy Bolton series, similar to Nancy Drew but with much more social class tension.
The Cherry Ames nursing series.
The Black Stallion series
The Janet Lambert books--a series that follows a military family (the Parrishes) from the beginning of WWII through the mid-sixties.

The romances: Gone with the Wind (9 times)
Katherine, by Anya Seton
Desiree, by Annemarie Selinko
Marjorie Morningstar, by Herman Wouk

Single favorite book: The Secret Garden

Little Women, of course

Are there any other former Abuzzers here?

Read all boys series mentioned here. Just a quick plug for Jules Verne

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Around the World in 80 Days

and the greatest boys adventure novel of alltime:
The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle

Thanks to dcbob upthread, and his mention of Joseph Altsheler, I hit Google and found gold. Turns out Altsheler wrote the Civil War series I mentioned above, plus one I'd forgotten on the French-Indian war, plus a frontier series, a World War I series...AND, they're up online at OnlineLiterature.com (apparently public domain). Stilted, mock-heroic, and portentous, but somehow still compelling. I hope you all will excuse me, it's time to go read some...er, Proust. Yeah, that's it, I'm going to go read me some Proust.

Dear Kevin

I was very much an Oz book fan as a child, but for some reason I have never met anyone of my generation also inclined. It also seems strange that none of the later Oz books were ever filmed.

Ed Cogburn

My mother signed up for a "book of the month" type program for the Happy Hollisters, and I still remember the excitement of getting that package every few weeks. When the HH ended, they automatically signed us up for the Tom Swift Jr. series - but it wasn't the same. I kept the box of HH books for decades, hauling them from place to place, to share someday share with my kids. Here's how that worked out: they told me that they didn't like the stories and besides,the books smelled bad. I donated the box to a local book sale.

I highly recommend Diana Wynne Jones' "Archer's Goon." A young boy, Howard, comes home one day to find a giant, slow-witted thug sitting in family's kitchen, refusing to leave until "Archer" gets his "2,000." Howard and his family finds out that his author dad has been writing 2,000 word a month for a magician by the name of Archer, who is magically trapped in their town with his six brothers and sisters. The siblings have had enough of the town and are itching to break free -- they make life increasingly and hilariously difficult for the family as Howard tries to figure out where the words are going and why. A wonderful, twisting mystery in which all the pieces fit together at the end, in a satisfying conclusion that has none of the pat-ness of most kids' fantasies (and I speak as one who loves those types of books.) Other great ones by her -- "The Lives of Christopher Chant," "Howl's Moving Castle" (so much better than the movie!) and "Fire and Hemlock." The last two are better for those getting near their teens.

A lot of people have mentioned the Prydain books -- my favorite Lloyd Alexander book though was "The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha." I still think it's his masterpiece. A young ne'er-do-well visits a street magician and gets transported to another land, where he's quickly hailed as king. The country is on the brink of a war, and ... well, you'll have to read it. Funny, clever, wise, with layers upon layers of stories due to the episodic nature of the tale and fact that one of the characters is a storyteller.

"The Dark Is Rising" series was great -- Arthurian legend worked into a modern day fantasy.

Past my time but still fantastic are Neil Gaimin's "Coraline" and Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men series. Those are going to be classics someday. Sometimes I wish I had kids just so I could read the Wee Free Men's elaborately-accented dialogue out loud.

I add my vote for Diane Duane's "So You Want to Be A Wizard" (just the first one, I thought the follow ups were only okay) and Madeline L'Engle's "Wrinkle in Time" series (stick with the first three, which include "A Wind in the Door" and "A Swiftly Tilting Planet").

I remember loving the Great Brain series, about a 12-year old con artist in -- was it 1800s or early 1900s? -- Utah. And some series about kids and a magic chemistry set. Anyone remember the name of that one?

Ozoplaning? You have Ozoplaning?

All the non-Baum Oz books were out of print when I was a kid. I remember being beguiled by the list of books by Ruth Plumly Thompson, Jack Snow, etc, that appeared in the Rand McNally paperbacks. I joined the Oz Club in order to find these mysterious and attractive books. I own them all now, though I've long since given up on the idea of first editions & such. Many of the sequels I didn't read till (young) adulthood. Ozoplaning was a weird one. These days there are ever stranger versions of Oz showing up on bookshelves, in comics shops, on stage.

I read a couple of the Swallows and Amazons books after we got the first as a gift. Kids boating? I thought, how dull! But I remember loving them. There were many more than I ever got to, though.

Slave Girl of Gor
Doc Savage

The Hardy's get updated, sorta...

In the mid 1950s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the originators ofthe Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew (Tom Swift, Bobsey Twins, Bobmba, et) books, thought the boys (and Nancy) were getting dated. They started rewriting the early books, taking out any racial slang or characters thought demeaning, updating clothes, cars, detective methods, excetra. They also ended up throwing out the plots of several books, keeping only the original titles, completely changing them and the characters contained therein. Some say it took the life out of the series, particulary Nancy Drew, who seemed drained of a lot of her spunk and nerve.

In the orginal stories, the boys are more rough and ready, taking a lot of crazy chances (Frank and Joe stow away in the fuslage of a small early 30s plane? are repeatedly kidnapped and held at gunpoint?) and seem to wear ties everywhere they go, even exploring caves with knickers, ties and caps. Applewood publishing has, until recently, been reprinting the original stories and you can find these fairly easily new or used.

To Doc at the Radar Stations: Wow...! I read those Tripod books as young kind as well, and boy , I loved them....! I haven't thought about them in 20 years...thanks for reminding me..

As a family we read the Hobbit and started reading The House of Seven Gables. My god was that boring. We also read the Bible, which is sort of odd sense we were Agnostic Unitarians. My mom wanted us to have a knowledge of the bible since the stories are known throughout our culture.

I read a lot of comics, Encyclopedia Brown, all the Matthew F Christopher sports novels, the Boxcar Children Series, and finally Douglas Adams. I wish I'd discovered Terry Pratchett sooner.

I've been reading what I call the plucky orphan girl series to my six year old - the Secret Garden, the Little Princess, and my all-time personal favorite as a girl, Anne of Green Gables.

The books are all "ghost" authored by multiple writers who were handed formula plots to fill in. Franklin W Dixon has never existed.

I recall hearing some yrs back that original Hardy Boys author was the father of Hockey Night In Canada's Brian McFarlane.He used the penname Franklin W. Dixon. I imagine, the "other" ghost-writers were hired to perpetuate "the franchise".

The books are updated and rewritten to keep their appeal modern and to meet changing norms.

When I was a kid, our school library had a well-worn early edition of The Tower Treasure. A few yrs later they got the "new version" about half the pages and MUCH LESS interesting.

Thanks for the blast from the past with that cover from "The Counterfeit Coin". I, too, was the proud possessor of all 6 BB books. It was preparation for the Sherlock Holmes stories and novellas I enjoyed later as a young adult.

I read a lot of the Oz books as a kid in the 1970s, but being from the library, the titles were not complete. I didn't care for WRINKLE IN TIME. Some others I liked included:

Beverly Cleary, in her pre-Ramona phase

Eleanor Cameron's Mushroom Planet books

The Tripods (I bought a set of those a couple years back, and they're still good. I understand that the BBC adapted 2/3 of the original trilogy for TV, then dropped it).

ERB's Barsoom Books

James Blish's novelizations of Star Trek episodes.

Homer Price

Heinlein's "Juveniles"

Henry Reed, Detective

Some Hardy Boys and some Tom Swift, as well as the first three books of a teen spy series called Christopher Cool, T.E.E.N. Agent. Those were great back then, but now the thought of a CIA youth outreach program run out of an Ivy League school strikes me as a bad idea.

Half-Magic (mentioned by others earlier in this thread).

Note to Joe Canuck: Bill and the Mother get married in the last of that Enid Blyton series ("The X of Adventure" were the titles if I recall, with X = 'sea','island','valley' and such like).

In India, directly inherited from the British, we read the William stories by Richmal Compton, Enid Blyton, Billy Bunter, Biggles (of the RAF), Winnie-the-Pooh, and a whole bunch of abridged classic adventures (Dumas, Scott, Stevenson ...). From the US we had the Three Investigators (a real falling off in quality after Robert Arthur and the second writer Holden(?), though M V Carey wasn't too bad) and the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series.

Are you sure we aren't all clones?

I LIVED for Albert Payson Terhune's books, and we even had collies (Echo and Biddy, not Lad and Lady)

About Nancy Drew - in the early 50s, when the great rewrite started, about half my books were the old style and half the new. It was very weird, going from coupes with running boards in a later book, to an early book with convertibles.

But our favorite books were the Roy Chapman Andrews' books about his Gobi expeditions, bowlderized for children - All About Strange Beasts of the Past. We thought he was an old professor, when actually he was a passed-over Indiana Jones.
Yup, I did grow up in NYC, and the American Museum of Natural History was my favorite place.

To G. Kerby:

Yep, Leslie McFarlane did indeed write most the early Hardy Boys books, from plots by the Syndicate. He was able the breath some life, fun and humor into the plots. He wrote about it in his book 'Ghost of the Hardy Boys', published shortly before he died. He never made much of his writing for the Syndicate (he also wrote for the Dana Girls and Nancy herself), and it wasn't until nearly yhe end of his life he admited to write the Hardy's at all.

I am suprised there was only one other person mentioning the "Danny Dunn" books. Perhaps they were before most commenter's time.

One odd fact that sticks with me from Danny Dunn is that Professor Bullfinch played the string bass and would play duets with another Professor playing the piccolo. Even as a kid I thought that was a very odd combo.

My mother read us kids the Childcraft stories and poems, while we snuggled in bed before sleep.

All those mothers killed in Iraq. Dear God.

Wow, memories bubbling up from the bottom of the memory well. I was a mere puppy lo these many moons ago when I saved my allowance to buy each new Tom Swift Jr. book as they came out. Wish I'd kept 'em now.
Doesn't anyone remember "Mr. Bass and the Mushroom Planet" by Eleanor Cameron? What about the Tom Corbett Space Cadet series?
I loved the "Wrinkle in Time" and it subsequent volumes. I even liked C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet" trilogy.
Yes I grew up to be a geek ;-)

The earliest children's book series I can remember reading is all of Beatrix Potter, but the only one I still have is The Tailor of Gloucester. I have no idea where the rest went.

Wow, great thread! Here's my list:

Encyclopedia Brown series
The Boxcar Children series
Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series
Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys series
Little House on the Prarie series
A Wrinkle in Time/Madeline L'Engle
Bridge to Terabithia
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase/Joan Aiken
Beverly Cleary
Lucy Maude Montgomery
Judy Blume
E.B. White

Mr. Bass and the Mushroom Planet! Ah, the memories. I always think of this book when I eat hard-boiled eggs.

I read everything that didn't run away fast enough. Many of my favorites have been mentioned many times. Others that haven't been mentioned (or not enough!) that I adored include:

Heidi (and the sequels). I still want to be Heidi.
Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book (and the others, but especially those with the fabulous illustrations)
My Book World (all of them)
Caddie Woodlawn ("if at first you do not fricassee, fry, fry a hen.")
Johnny Tremain
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (with the original Arthur Rackham illustrations)
The Little Lame Prince
The Oriel Window
The Diamond in the Window (Jane Langton)
The Astonishing Stereoscope
Dozens of books about Abraham Lincoln (I had a whopping crush on Abraham Lincoln at age 6+)
My Side of the Mountain (Jean George -- I still want to live in a tree in the woods and make acorn flour pancakes)

And the beloved lost book from my grandmother's house that disappeared, and that I have never found again: about a boy who hears about a country with a strange name (Hungary), and decides to go there. He ends up traveling with a goose, and running back and forth between Buda and Pest, among many other adventures. Beautiful illustrations of things Hungarian.

Thanks for reminding me of My Side of the Mountain, Weezy.

It's been too many years and way too many books to remember all of them or what came when, but most Hardy Boys novels were in there somewhere along with:

The Bobsey Twins
Encyclopedia Brown
The Great Brain (plus sequels)
Pippi Longstockings
Tom Sawyer, Hucklberry Finn and close to 90% of everything else by Mark Twain, especially including his short stories.
Maybe half of the Tom Swift novels (I couldn't find the rest)
The Wrinkle in Time and sequels.
The Narnia series
A few of the Little House on the Prairie series.

I also read a lot of animal stories including the Terhune novels mentioned above, plus:
Flight of the White Wolf
Old Yeller
Big Red
A Dog Named Wolf
The Incredible Journey
Frosty, a Raccon to Remember
Brighty of the Grand Canyon

and of course, all the Dr. Doolittle novels, Winnie the Pooh and Babar the Elephant.

When I was in 6th grade my parent read the Hobbit to my younger brother and I. That lead me to reading the Lord of the Ring Series the following summer which was my first serious foray into sci-fi and fantasy. Those two categories with a varying but consistent tilt toward sci-fi have made up the plurality of my reading since.