My 4th grade teacher read aloud to us The Boxcar Children and Little House books. I liked that too.

I forgot to add that one to my list!

I was a rather precocious little fella.

I remember it like it was yesterday!

I was just elaborating a little. It's Sunday, I'm loquacious.

Blue Dolphin or The Yearling.

This is my normal predicament:

And I loved the movie with Yul Brynner

I found it difficult as an adult, and I was an English major. I'm impressed.

Sometimes I'm guilty of exaggerating and using sarcasm here on the DU for comedic effect (not always successful, mind you).

This may be one of those occasions.

good jest

There isn't one better than others because so many were wonderful and memorable.
Just some:
Treasure Island
The Pearl, The Pony (both short, but wow!)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Jean Val Jean (a condensed book from Les Miserables)
Little Women
Any and all fairy tales

My Montesori teacher would prompt me to get a book and I always got that one much to her sagrin.

I leart to read later than 4 and my parents didn't have the book.

But it took zero effort on her part to make me a bookworm!

when i was 5 but I just memorized them. In grade one I did the same thing in French. Total memorization of words. I still don't get phonics at all. When l learn a phonics rule today, I try, I can't remember it after a period of time. My spelling and proof-reading is atrotious. I can't read novel words. I've taken many english classes to try and learn grammar but to no avail. I am a total dyslexic but I love to read, particularly non fiction. I don't always get all the themes in a book but my general knowledge increases with each book I read as novel ideas sink in.

One of the reasons I am a gardener

That special to me.

teaching and donated them to a grade school in s poor school district next to mine. I kept one copy of each for myself.Do you ever go back and reread them. I like to do that.

it was of the Albert Payson Terhune dog books. I was totally taken by them. I read lots and lots but those were my favorites.

In Jr. high and up it was more Sci Fi and Fantasy.

I guess it would be Lad a Dog.

At the time it amazed me that both my grandmother & mother had read it when they were kids. (It was a new book when grandma read it).

I read the whole Anne of Green Gables series. Starts when she is 10 and I remember reading about her wedding.

I went back and reread the first book. Anne is in almost every chapter accused of something she did not do - so you instantly feel so sad for Anne.

Once in grade school, a teacher accused me of something another kid did. I almost could not believe something like that could ever happen to me - I felt like Anne.

My daughter was really into the Dorrie the Witch series. So into Dorrie That after I read her all the series, I had to make up a Dorrie the Witch story to tell her every night before bed.

I had a paperback version that was dog-eared from multiple readings.

hearts content.

Nancy Drew

Heidi. It was probably the last of that sort of literature I remember reading.

Heidi. Pollyanna, .

A reading family, we went to the library often and had a small library at home as did my grandparents. Theirs was much larger. We also had teachers read to us in school back then. Also traveling thespian troupes who would come and perform some of the stories we knew and some we didn't already know. Schools really were quite good back in the the northeast in the 1960s.

Still a big fave. I was so jealous in later years when a virtual friend told me her dad had traveled a lot to the UK and had sent her first editions of the entire series.

Of course, the movies were so well done, they did nothing but cement the stories as my all-time fave.I still wish I were an elf.

when I was little.
Then I became a Nancy Drew fanatic, along with every horse themed book, The Black Stallion books, Flame, National Velvet. I read them all.

The Little Princess, Little Women, Eight Cousins, Parsifal Rides a Time Wave, Joe's Boys, The Princess and The Goblin, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, At the Back of the North Wind, Heidi....

I loved to read.

I had a high school English teacher who turned me on to Ray Bradbury and Herman Hesse.

I went through a Hesse phase in high school, too.

Also Black Beauty but it was sad in many places

Characters, I did read Black Beauty, Old Yeller and The Yearling. but I still loved. the books.

Loved it!

again. I sometimes reread books from my youth.

Bartolomew and the oobleck (dr. Seuss)

Winnie the Pooh

Babar

Little House books

But Babar had such a good heart!

Their adventures and mysteries captivated me in elementary school. There were lots of books in the series!

a Boxcar. Loved them as did my students.

I'd take it to bed to read. Learned a lot from it.

I actually had my mother's 1939 set
The print was very tiny

When I got older it was Call of the Wild by Jack London.

2nd grade. It was the thickest book I saw in the library, so i went for it.

Which I took as part fiction part instruction manual

Lord of the Rings
The Alfred Hitchcock boys series
The Mad Scientists Club
The Great Brain series

Also, books by A. E. van Vogt were favorites...Sorry, I can't pick just one...maybe, "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle.

times.

.

Last edited Mon Jan 19, 2026, 11:57 AM - Edit history (1)

She was the most amazing nurse to my 9 year old eyes.

But the book that probably made the greatest impression on me was Three Came Home by Agnes Newton Keith, a memoir detailing her experiences as a civilian prisoner in a Japanese interment camp in North Borneo and Sarawak during WW2. My sixth grade teacher read it aloud to the class every day after noon recess. I remember borrowing the book from the teacher so I could actually read it again. Pretty heavy subject matter for 11 year olds.

I like to go back and reread the stories that i read to my classes even if they were for 5, and 6 grade. To read it as a 70 year old. with a different view of life. They still speak to the heart and soul.

And Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain.

Also cookbooks and anything by Andre Norton.

A captivating book about four children in middle America of the 1920s finding a magic charm that only grants half of their wishes--but they never know which half it will be!

And before that, Heidi. The mountains and the jungle lived in my imagination. My earliest one was The Tent. I wish I could find that one now, it was a very simple early reader, and still funny.

But maybe I should say The Hobbit and LOTR, because they were magic and I was absorbed for many months.

Thanks for the fun trip down memory lane Deb! 😊

Last edited Sun Jan 18, 2026, 09:53 PM - Edit history (1)

I read it while I recuperated from whooping cough for six weeks when I was in third grade and staying with my godmother and godfather so my brother and sister didn't catch it. My aunt Anna had this lovely BIG old book of fairy tales and I fell in love with it! Read it cover to cover...."The Wild Swans", "The Snow Queen', "The Tinder Box".... man, I DISAPPEARED into those stories!



(Oops! Had to edit.)

My mom was the oldest of 4 - 3 girls, then a boy. The book was given to her when she was about 10, in 1932+/-, and was purchased at a Dayton's department store somewhere in Minnesota, based on a teeny tiny sticker on one of the front pages. She and both her sisters read the book many, many times, and some of the pages have seriously tattered edges, and others are tear-stained from where they all cried over some of the sad parts of the story - or so I was told.

My grandmother had the book re-bound for me in 1963, at the Hutchinson (MN) Maplewood Book Bindery - that is noted in ink, in her handwriting about 3 pages in, under mother's name and street address written in pencil, probably in my mother's somewhat childish hand.

The book has 12 illustrations, including the one on the cover. The artist was a C M Burd - Clara Miller Burd, born in 1873. The cover and 3 of the others illustrations are in color. One B&W illustration page is missing -according to the list of illustrations, there is supposed to be one on page 230, but there isn't. Page 230 is present, but is all print, no picture. She did the illustrations for Little Women in 1925. She also did work in stained glass, and for a time worked for Louis Tiffany of the famous Tiffany lamps.

This book will soon be 100 years old. I consider it a family treasure. An antiques seller on Etsy is offering this same edition for $140.00.

I also loved Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. I always thought it would make a great movie, and I know 2 versions have been made. I've not seen either of them, as my mind has created such vivid images of all the characters that I'm quite sure I would be disappointed in the movies. I know the 2018 version shows the 3 old ladies as looking rather glamorous, which they definitely do not in the book, and the Murray family was cast as biracial, which makes it impossible for Mrs. Murray to have the flaming red hair and violet eyes that L'Engle so often refers to in the book.

Thank you very much 3catwoman3 for sharing with us.

I think I saw my first Science Fiction Book - a paperback on my dad's side of my folks bureau. Early 1960's.

Having already been exposed by TV's Million Dollar Movie to Forbidden Planet, a few atomic monster movies (but not the Japanese ones), Twilight Zone, and The original Outer Limits (usually; eeeks!) but not yet to Star Trek... I was intrigued!
Didn't understand it all (the paperback), but on my way to bering hooked! And then came "A Wrinkle in Time".

My class loved it.

and Call of the wild

I was ten. It was the longest book I had ever read all the way through at the time. I became a JRR Tolkien fan on the spot.

Nowadays, I have paperback reading copy, the limited hardback edition with slipcover, the annotated version, an edition illustrated with watercolor paintings, a German-language edition, and one in Latin.

I like “The Hobbit”, is what I’m saying…