batman

As a teenager ....

Doyle
Charteris
Creasey
Fleming
Salinger
Alain-Fournier
Kerouac
JT Edson
Pavese

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

Brigger

The first one I can really remember enjoying was Stig of the Dump, it was the first one I chose when my big sis. introduced me to the pleasures of the public library, I`m eternally grateful to her for that. Crikey I`m getting a bit emotional here typing this as it`s stirring up some evocative memories of going to the library on horrible winter nights, then coming home to a lovely warm house & settling down with my latest choices; feeling all safe & snug. Sorry folks, but does anyone else get like this when they think of some seemingly inconsequential time or moment from their past.

John Llewellyn Moxey

Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, Swallows And Amazons, and We Did Not Mean To Go To Sea.

Maybe strange choices in todays world; but I remember them well.

John

narabdela

Anyone remember "The Bobsey Twins"?

penfold

All of The Famous Five in Junior School, Tolkien in secondary, complete works of Austen, Chaucer, Shakespeare in the 6th form (Yes,at least partly for pleasure); since then mostly film history but complete works of Hardy and Terry Pratchett since. I've always been a completist....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

apricot

The William books, inherited from my older brothers, Grimms fairy tales, the Tinderbox and the Little Match Girl used to make me cry, but my favourite was the What Katy Did books. When I got older I really got in to Edgar Allen Poe, H. P Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley and I think I had the whole collection of the Pan book of horrors.

Fellwanderer

As a child - the William books, Biggles, all the Swallows and Amazons, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Railway Children, The Snow Goose and The Little Miracle. Read some Famous Five but soon tired of them.

My absolute favourites were the Swallows and Amazon series but I'm just so pleased that I enjoyed TRC enough to watch the 1968 BBC serial otherwise I might have missed out on the lady herself.

Also read, unbelievably, The Canterbury Tales at school when 9 - but it was most definitely an expurgated version!

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

billy bentley

Beano and Dandy (bothiin the same week)., then Sparky, then Hotspur, then Shoot and then the Richard Allen "skinhead" series. Luckily circa the mid 70's I picked up the pace a bit and now I'm a reading fool.

Harleybloke

William, Jennings, Bunter, Biggles, read most if not all in the series.

The Silver Sword, 100,000,000 Francs, The Diary of Anne Frank, Pippy Longstocking, Dr,Doolittle, loadsa comics, most as per Bats list plus Valiant.

Tried to give our kids the reading bug but Playstation came along..........

.....You couldn't hear it, if they were shooting at me with howitzers!

billy bentley

Harleybloke, When it comes to video games you just have to ration the time. My two herbets would have spent the last decade playing from dawn to dusk if I'd let them. My 16 year old now reads very serious stuff - "Another Country" at the moment, our kid can pretty much read what he likes and I go out of my way to get stuff he likes, but it's 20 pages a day, no if's, buts or maybes. In importance I'd put reading a very close second to manners.

batman

The Silver Sword is a classic ... I'd forgotten about book .... also one that I won at Sunday School .... Johnny Next Door, I loved that book.

We haven't introduced the boy to PC games yet as we don't play them .... he likes the CBeebies website though but still loves his bedtime story.

"Boom boom a baby .... Banham Zoo .... Banana pants! Hahahaha"

wadsy

The Otterbury Incident by Cecil Day-Lewis is a great childrens book!

smudge

Anything and everything! As a child, I was a voracious reader - the result of having a husband and wife pair of Professors as next door neighbours, and living directly across the road from the local library. I was reading from the age of 3 and a half (those halves were rather important back then!)

I started with Beatrix Potter, graduated to Enid Blyton (it is to society's damnation that you can no longer pick up The Three Golliwogs and read it in all innocence!) and by 5 I had read RLS' Kidnapped. The assistant who sold it to my mum didn't believe that it was for me, so we went back the next week and I gave the amazed lady a complete precis...

Paddington was a great early favourite and like others here I have agreat fondness for Treasure Island and Stig of the Dump. Another stand out from the early years was Emil and the Detectives.

Film and TV waylaid me very early on, so a lot of my reading moved to the pattern it has now - star biogs and film references books - many of us must remember those early furtive peeks at the 'Continental' sections of F. Maurice Speed's Film Review, for the ladies who seemed (from those stills at least) to spend most of the film in a state of undress...

Thanks to TV I discovered Wallace and Charteris, as well as the various pseudonyms of John Creasey.

Study years brought on books such as Silas Marner and a great English teacher who encouraged us in our love for language (take a bow, A.G. Parker!). Withering Depths (as we affectionately referred to the Bronte classic) was another fave, despite the fact that it wasn't on the syllabus and we thus 'wasted' a whole term upon it. I also enjoyed some Dirty Hardbacks (that's D.H. as in Lawrence, to the uninitiated) which is something that Mrs. Smudge doesn't understand even to this day - she can't stand the man...

And that's enough of my rambling - for now...

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

suzepulcheria

Anything and everything for me too. By the age of 9 I had read everything in my parents' library, including Dickens, Jane Austen, Trollope and War and Peace! The reason was not brilliance or precociousness but the fact that I was an only child with slightly older and rather reserved parents. I was bored out of my skull and there were no DVDs to entertain in those days. Just the Sunday afternoon BBC black and white Britmovie, longed for all week.

"I've come a long way you know!" "Equally long way to go back..."

hankoler

I remember reading the famous five books ,but the one outstanding book was THE OTTERBURY INCIDENT. I would love to read it again. This is a brilliant book.