Top five children's books of all time

[RosaLuxembourg]

I want to get in first!
So what are your five items of children's literature?
Mine are:
Rosa wanders off to ponder...

Mine are excluding Enid

Devils & Demons Ruth Manning Sanders
The House that Sailed away by Patricia someone
Bambi by Felix Saltern
Little Woman
James & the giant peach

These were favourite books read when I was 8 or so.

Right, now I've read other people's, and some responses:

"Gobin Market" is freakishly brilliant, a wormhole straight into the Victorian sexo-psyche. Magic

Wolves of Willoughby Chase, yeah yeah but how about Black Hearts in Battersea - genius and super-surreal

I am impressed by those of you looking beyond your own childhood reading and countenancing the contemporary. You lively young things you.

Go Bink Go Bink!!

If we're doing influential poetry, I, er, read a lot of Ted Hughes nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw-and-all-phallic-and-urgent-too-don't-you-know stuff.

Joan Aiken: Black Hearts in Battersea
Jean Merrill: The Pushcart War
Susan Cooper: The Dark is Rising (would prefer all that series but realise the Rules Exclude It)
Rosemary Sutcliff: The Eagle of the Ninth
Am pondering number five. God I love kids' books....

PS Bink, it's Trease. Got it somewhere. Unless my sodding sister's nicked it. Did you read the one he wrote before, the Lake of Varma, I think, where two young people get the manuscript of the play?

Ooh ooh ooh, John Verney - usuallly known as an illustrator - wrote a slightly odd series starting with Friday's Tunnel.

I forgot Mrs Pepperpot and Pippi Longstocking

Charmed Life / Diana Wynne Jones
White Boots / Noel Streatfeild
The Ready Made Family / Antonia Forest
The Pennington novels (can't choose one) / K.M. Peyton
The Treasure Seekers / E. Nesbit
oh bugger no more room for NorthernLightsandCarbonelandHolesandMillionsandTheOzbooksand aaaaaaaargh

5 is cruel, who thought of 5? we need 10

and mine will be

Northern Lights / Philip Pullman
Carbonel / Barbara Sleigh
Millions / Frank Cottrell Boyce
Ozma of Oz / Frank L. Baum
and Heaven Eyes / David Almond

oh bugger no room for the Bagthorpes, and Ruth Manning Sanders, and Melvin Burgess, and and and and

Now I really want to read Charlotte Sometimes. It sounds great. Another one for DD1's Christmas list.

I want Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge on my list too but I don't want to drop any of the others.

My top five reads as a child:

A Vicarage Childhood, Noel Streatfeild
Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff
Anne of Green Gables, L M Montgomery (I still remember the THRILL of finding it under my pillow when I returned from a monstrous school journey)
The King of the Copper Mountain, Paul Biegel
The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

Really hard to limit it to five

I'd add Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin, the Dark Materials Trilogy and The Butterfly Lion, by Michael Morpurgo to that list too

I had the Puffin Book of Children's Verse, bink, and later on the ridiculously funny Verse and Worse, compiled by Arnold Silcock. Sort of a forerunner to the mighty Rattle Bag

Argh, Charlotte Sometimes! and Marianne Dreams! and Carrie's War...and A Traveller in Time (I loved A Country Child too MaryAnn)

Oh alright then Franny, so I can have another four.
The Queen Elizabeth Story - Rosemary Sutcliff
White Boots - Noel Streatfeild
Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom - Louisa May Alcott
A wrinkle in time - Madeleine l'Engle (sp?)

Either KerryMum. I have some of each.

The Tiger who came to tea,
Goodnight mister Tom. love it, love it, love it.
Mrs pepperpot stories
The one with the cat called Gobellina or something
A little princess

Bink, I've found it and it's called the Hills of Varna but ABE only has it from Furrin Parts, pah.

I loved the naughty Little sister ones too.
Oooh and Topsy and Tim books.

ooh yes, Phantom Tollbooth, dd will love that when she's a bit older1

MI - NO I don't know that one! Am nervous about reading it, though, as I am about re-reading Crown of Violet - I re-read some Leon Garfield recently and was quite upset by how thin I found it.

I was wondering if I might be allowed to start a rival thread on the top 5 teenage books of all time? Just because there seems to be fewer really powerful teenage books, so the lists might be useful?

Oh have thought of another:
Carbonel (about a king of the cats).

And I had not spotted that we are now in a categorical cul-de-sac of Children's Fiction Specifically. I'm out-of-MN-date, aren't I?

I would love some pointers on teenage books - I don't know if there was much around in my day - I pretty much moved straight from children's books to adult fiction (via Agatha Christie) but our local library was not that good.

The Dark is Rising Series (I am taking the Omnibus Edition which only counts as one book...)
Little Women
Writing on the Hearth
Boy with the Bronze Axe
The Earthsea Series (another bumper edition)

I'd add Northern Lights, Harry Potter and the Abhorsen Trilogy, though I was all grown up when I read them...

I don't think I can stop at 8.
My Naughty Little Sister.
Ramona.
Cherry Ames and her amazing nursing adventures.
Sue Barton series.
all of the Oz books.
Roald Dahl.
Danny Fox.
Polly and the Wolf.

[Stops for breath and presses post before she can burble on any more.]