Old Old Tales Retold, by Frederick Richardson, P.F Volland Company, Chicago, 1923.

My favourite has been The Little Red Hen since before I could read.

I just reread this book last week. :)

The first book that I will always remember is The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey.

Why? Because the local dairy had a copy of it, and I was fascinated by the cover and also the blurb but it was much too expensive for a 10 year old to buy. That book sat in the rack and faded slowly in the sun, unpurchased over the years. Yet I would pick it up and fondle it and wish I could have afforded it.

Fast forward several years and I get to High School and a whole new library. Imagine my UTTER DELIGHT to find not only does the library have a copy of The White Dragon, they have the WHOLE SERIES - there was a SERIES!!!!

Yes I fell utterly in love with dragons in space and firelizards and opened my eyes to an entirely new genre of books. 30 years later I am still reading fantasy :)

The first book which is vivid in my imagination is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I'd been reading for three years already, but I read that one, in the low light of a solitary solation ward in Birmingham Children's Hospital.

Oh, that's hard because I can't always remember when I read something (or had it read to me). And books don't always mean the same thing to a child as an adult.

'Wind on the Moon' by Eric Linklater was the book that was read to us at school when I was eight and I adored it, but I don't think it affected any emotion other than 'I desperately want to know how this story ends.' maybe around the same time I read 'Wish for a Pony' by Monica Edwards which was the beginning of a lifelong liking for her Romney Marsh books written between 1947 and 1967. I've collected them ever since and now have all of them though one is in an omnibus with 2 other authors, not a standalone.

I came to the Narnia books comparatively late. I was probably about ten when I found 'The Horse and His Boy' (which is still my favourite) and then looked for 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe' but I took it all at face value and missed the allegory altogether, though I appreciated the sentiment in 'The Last Battle' about it doesn't matter what you call it, evil is evil and good is good and shall be recognised as such in the end.

Edited at 2013-02-10 04:33 pm (UTC)

I'm not sure if this counts because I remember the context but always seem to be losing the specific book title. It was a children's sf story about a girl on Earth who was really from some other planet/reality/something whose connection to her past was a necklace (when I try to remember the title is seems to revolve around "necklace of stars" or "star necklace"). A couple of times the hivemind has helped me track down what book it must have been but I keep losing the information again.

It's memorable because that's the first book I can remember losing myself in so utterly that I became totally oblivious to the world. This was made obvious because I was reading it in 2nd grade during "parent visiting day" in the classroom. During reading time, most of the class would do "free reading" at their desks while smaller individual reading groups were called up to the front of the class to work on passages together. (This helped to sort students out into level of present ability so that the teaching could be more closely tailored.) So as it turns out my mother was present to observe me completely ignoring the call for my reading group -- even when the teacher called me by name -- because I'd been sucked away into another world. I got to hear about that a lot, which was annoying, even if it was meant in a sort of boastful-teasing way.

But that book, in common with a lot of the books that really hit me as a beginning reader, was about the feeling of being an alien in a strange society but of having at least the faint possibility of finding your way "home" again. It took me a very long time to reconcile the feeling of being an abandoned alien child from another planet with deeply loving and knowing I was loved by my parents.

It was either Eleanor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet or Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel, the King of the Cats. In both cases, what got me was the strong sense of a rich, strange, numinous reality behind homely, everyday things.

P.

Black Beauty, when I was six. I struggled some with the Victorian language, but loved the book.

Time and Timothy Grenville. My first anti hero, my first realisation that I adored science fiction, my first step to becoming not just a bookivore, but a spec fic bookivore. I still read anything, but I know where my heart lays

Heinlein, Space Cadet. A librarian turned me on to sf and fantasy in fifth grade and I've never looked back. Sure wish I could recall her name; I owe her a debt that can never be repaid.