to ask what your favourite children's/adults books of all time are?

[SundayBea]

I am wanting some inspiration for myself and for the DC. Children's and adults books of any age and genre, fiction and non fiction. Basically what I am asking is if there are books that are great enough to be hands down your childhood favourites / your DC favourites / your own favourites then please pass on your recommendations. Thank you

[morningtoncrescent62]

As a young child, and when mine were little:
Gobbolino the Witch's Cat
My Naughty Little Sister
Teddy Robinson
Mrs Pepperpot
Flat Stanley
Ramona Quimby

Middle childhood (pre-teen):
Malory Towers, St Clares & Chalet School series
A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer)
Noel Streatfeild's Gemma series (and anything else by her)
A Traveller in Time (Alison Uttley)
The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Teenage:
Jean Plaidy - anything she's written (yes, really, I was hooked and so was DD2)
The Greengage Summer (Rumer Godden)
Annie On My Mind (Nancy Garden)
The Moon By Night (Madeleine L'Engle)
Time To Go Back (Mabel Esther Allan)
Noughts and Crosses series (Malorie Blackman)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Jeanette Winterton)
Maya Angelou's autobiographical series, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Adult:
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
Cry, The Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
The Siege (Helen Dunmore)


At least, those are the ones coming to mind right now. Ask me tomorrow and the list might be completely different!

[BikeRunSki]

Baby : Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear
Primary School age: Danny Champion of the World
Adult: Rebecca

[Witchend]

Lone Pine series by Malcolm Saville (ds cried when he found he's read them all)
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease
Anything by Monica Edwards, but particularly The White Riders
Antonia Forest's historical pair (Players Boy and The Players and the Rebels)
Power of Three by Diana Wynn Jones
Anything by Elizabeth Goudge especially Linnets and Valerians
Chalet School
Demon Island by (I think) Cecil Baldock
The Fred and I series (John Putney, I think. Very funny)

Adult.
To kill a Mockingbird
Anything by Josephine Tey

[goldenoriole]

It would be interesting to hear what you think of them afterwards.

[hownottofuckup]

Giant jam sandwich is one of the best children's books ever!

[SundayBea]

Thanks so much for all the replies, I've really enjoyed looking up all the book suggestions! Of all the ones I had not read already, almost all have made it onto my to read/buy list. Can't thank you enough, so many books that were recommended sound brilliant!

[hawaiibaby]

We love the giant jam sandwich! Also giraffes can't dance, stick man and how to catch a star.

Adult books: the book thief, room, and sister by Rosamund Lupton.

[PomBearWithAnOFRS]

"Green Sea" not See

[PomBearWithAnOFRS]

The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
Ludo and the Star Horse by Mary Stewart
The Wind on the Moon and The Pirates on the Deep Green See by Eric Linklater
I second the Beverley Nichols ones too - The Tree That Sat Down, The Stream That Stood Still, and The Mountain of Magic and then The Wickedest Witch in the World has Miss Smith from the trilogy in it too.
Podkayne of Mars and Have Space Suit Will Travel by Heinlein are good - if you do get into RAH though, make sure you get the "juveniles" for the DCs, some of his adult ones are pretty "unsuitable for children" so to speak

[Crabbitface]

My toddler's faves - The Giant Jam Sandwich.
What the Lady Bird Heard.

My 6 year old's - The Really Weird Removals Company
How to train your dragons series
The Person Controller by David Badiel
Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman
And he's developed a bit of an Enid Blyton thing

Mine- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
Anything by Kate Atkinson and Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing. Loved the Stieg Larsen books. Guilty pleasures are a bit of Marian Keyes and Dan Brown.

[pandarific]

The secret island, Enid Blyton. Everything good about her novels encapsulated in one.

Milkweed - a beautiful book about a little boy growing up in nazi Germany.

[goldenoriole]

Books that I've loved as an adult....
Patrick O'Brian's fantastic set of twenty novels that start with Master and Commander. Exciting, moving, enthralling, informative, with characters who live in your mind for ever. Definitely my choice for the desert island.

Elswyth Thane's Williamsburg series set in both the US and England. Very very readable....good flu books! The first one, Dawn's Early Light, is good but not quite as gripping as the later ones, IMO.

Time After Time by Jack Finney . Time travel in New York. Especially recommended if you visit NYC - it adds lots of layers - but a good holiday read anywhere.

The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay. One of the most idiosyncratic opening lines in English literature !

Period Piece by Gwen Raverat. Darwin's granddaughter's account of her childhood in Cambridge. Very funny. Delightful.

A London Child of the 1870s by Molly Hughes - warm and personal [there are sequels but out-of-print I think]
Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski [very moving ]
and almost everything else published by Persephone.

And lastly but not leastly, everything written by Elizabeth Von Arnim [aka The Author of Elizabeth and her German Garden ]. She was born in 1866 but writes with wry humour and a sardonic and feminist attitude so that her novels feel quite contemporary. Apparently one was featured in Downton Abbey when Molesley gives Anna a copy of Elizabeth's first novel !

[LazySusan11]

I loved Enid Blyton, favourites were Pip the pixie, Faraway Tree series Famous Five and the Cherry Tree/Willow Farm series. I'd love to read them all again!

[goldenoriole]

So many books I love already mentioned... will add a few that haven't been so far.
Children first......
Ask Me No Questions - Ann Schlee. Set during the1848 cholera epidemic, thoughtful and sad [age 11 +].

The Moon in the Cloud - Rosemary Harris(+ 2 sequels). Noah's Ark, talking cats, the royal courts of Egypt- I couldn't stop reading this, at the age of 45! [for age 9/10 upwards].

The Mantlemass series by Barbara Willard. I love love love these books which again I read as an adult. Seven main books plus two outliers [Miller's Boy much simpler, Keys of Mm fill-in short stories]. Start with The Lark and the Laurel in 1485 and go through to the mid 1600s with interconnected familes in the Ashdown Forest. Beautifully written and haunting. For young teens upwards.

Mail-Order Wings by Beatrice Gormley. Nine-year old Andrea orders wings from a magazine and they work! Great fun. 8 / 9up
The Dancing Bear by Peter Dickinson. ' A Greek slave, his dancing bear, and an old holy man journey from Byzantium to rescue the slave's young mistress from the Huns.' 10 up?

My daughter loved Topsy and Tim, the Drina ballet books by Jean Estoril, Snowfall by KM Peyton [Victorian girl climber], and Kiss The Dust by Elizabet Laird [Kurdish children escaping persecution].
My son loved Willard Price, Jennings, Antonia Forest, and My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett, which surprise surprise is all about my father's dragon who has to be rescued from some very nasty wild animals by my father. [ 5-8 ].

[Bunnyjo]

My favourite for young children: Each Peach Pear Plum - Janet and Allan Ahlberg.
DS (4yo): Oi Frog - Kes Gray.
My favourite children's books: Anything by Roald Dahl.
DD (8yo): Anything by David Walliams.
My favourite for older children: Diary of Anne Frank.
My favourite adult novel: Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernières. The book ending is very different to the Hollywood film ending.

[hownottofuckup]

Postit yes someone does get caught in a mangle!

[puppydogmummy]

The hungry caterpillar!

[MiffleTheIntrovert]

Has anyone said The Chalet School books yet?

Grumpy I bought my bookworm DD a kindle for her (I think) 12th birthday but she didn't "take" to it. She prefers books, and saves her pocket money for hardbacks of favourites. I however have been using the kindle since the New Year and love it. I was one of those people previously who would have said I preferred physical books and disliked the idea of e-readers, but the ease of downloading and having a new book instantly has converted me. Plus DH works shifts so I can read without the lamp on. I still think that physical books are best though, especially for young DC. There's something about a collection of physical books as possessions which I love.

[SistersOfPercy]

I would also say the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, I reread them recently and they are still utterly wonderful books.

An obscure one I'll throw out there is 'the raging quiet' by Sherryl Jordan. I picked it up from a charity shop near a beach one day (beaches bore me but kids wanted to go) and I read the lot in the one afternoon. Brilliant book set in medieval times, I'd say aimed at young adults.

[GrumpyMcGrumpyFace]

and Z for Zachariah

[GrumpyMcGrumpyFace]

A question - do you buy your kids books or do you down load them on to a kindle and at what age do kids start preferring an ereader?

When DD was little she just loved looking at the pictures and turning the pages. Now we're on chapter books and I wonder if she would prefer to read on the kindle.

Personally I love books, especially children's books. I love the smell of a new book and the touch, I think they are so tactile. I don't mind reading adult novels on the kindle but there are certain books that I think deserve to be printed and read on paper. Maybe it's an age thing.

I would also add to the kids books Which Witch and Lemony Snickets.

[PestilentialCat]

*Ingolls - bloody autocorrect

[PestilentialCat]

as a child: The Family From One End Street - about a working class urban family - so different to my rural upbringing & I loved it, The Viking sagas by Henry Treece, the Laura Ingots Wilder series

as a teen - To Kill A Mockingbird - set book for O-level but didn't put me off, The Thornbirds, most of the John Wyndham stuff, Lord of The Rings & a dreadful bodice ripper called Forever Amber

as an adult - Rebecca, Jamaica Inn & The House On The Strand - Daphne Du Maurier, the original Dracula story, Harry Potter series, still like LOTR

[TamzinGrey]

Anything by E Nesbit. You can download her complete works for free on Amazon Kindle. These include The Railway Children, Five Children and It, Phoenix and the Carpet, The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, and loads loads more.

[swampytiggaa]

Stalky and Co by Rudyard Kipling.
A town like Alice by Neville Shute.
The vicarage children by Noel streatfield
The Zom-B series by Darren Shan