What was your favorite book(s)/Author..if you know...to read as a kid?

I read voraciously when I was young. We never bought any books, but I used the school library and public library, and books from the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and the classics, were some of my favorites. That's probably what helped me win the spelling bee in fourth grade. When we came from Greece to the US when I was 4 1/2, I didn't speak any English, and my first day in kindergarten, I didn't understand what the teacher was saying. I've come a long way since then! I think reading is one of the best things a young child's mind can do to learn about the language, world, cultures, etc. I encouraged my son when he was young to read books and visits to the library and bookstores were plentiful. He grew up reading as voraciously as I did.
 

After joining USAF @ 18, I found I had a lot of idle time. Money was tight, got a library card in Okinawa, then Germany. Read all the classics I could get. So many, the list would take forever. Paperbacks were prime trading material. Then had to read tech books for my career and pleasure reading was put on the back burner. Don't read at all now, wife makes up for it though.
 
Have always loved books. When I was very little read Enid Blyton, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen. Many French writers enthralled me, some favorites being Emilie Zola and George Sand. the Bronte sisters and so many others and then. I graduated to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I was mesmerised.

I fell in love with Russia, its history and its literature. Many years ago on a trip to that country, visited the home of Dostoevsky ( now a museum) and Yasnaya Polyana home of Tolstoy. I was captivated, enchanted and more in love than ever.
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Thanks for the Post Jace,

I had to go to Remedial Reading class in 2nd grade. I am so thankful for the teachers who held my feet to the fire...
It worked, and I became a voracious reader. I still am to a good extent.

I remember several and then I remembered some more.... I will be rereading a good many of these this next year

My Side of The Mountain - this was one of the first, if not the first book I read all the way thru once I got to where I could read.

Then I just started reading all the time when we was not playing football or baseball or hunting or fishing or shooting - or working after school.

The Swiss Family Robinson
The story of Albert Schweitzer
Instant Reply by Jerry Kramer
Marine - story of Chesty Puller
WW1, WW2 stories and the Civil War stories - due to all the relatives and near every man having served in the wars.
Reading years and years worth of Readers Digest at my Grandparents Farm
Tom Sawyer
The Red Badge of Courage
Guadalcanal Diary
The Biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Two Years Before The Mast
Stacks and stacks of Outdoor Life, Field and Stream and The American Hunter
The Sherlock Holmes stories
Diary of Anne Frank
To Kill A Mocking Bird
365 Days
Johnny Got His Gun
All Quiet On The Western Front
History of the Marine Corps
To Hell and Back
Forgotten Soldier
Storm of Steel
Blood Red Snow
Several on Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett
Run Silent Run Deep
Twenty Thousand Leauges Under The Sea
Around the World in 80 Days
Journey To The Center of The Earth
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Biography on Annie Oakley
Legionnaire - 5 Years In The French Foreign Legion - just reread this one afew month ago
The Old Man And The Sea
The Grapes of Wrath
Lord Jim
The Call Of The Wild
White Fang
The Sea Wolf
Captains Courageous
Treasure Island
A Texas Cowboy - Or Fifteen Years on The Deck of A Hurricane Deck of A Spanish Pony
Death In The Long Grass
Crocodile Fever - A True Story of Adventure
Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson
Patton biography
Stories and accounts of Civil War Battles
Fast and Fancy Revolver Shooting by Ed McGivern
For Whom The Bell Tolls

So many more !
ETA - I read all of these multiple times before I turned 18 and went to work full-time in the Oilpatch for the next 43 year. Now that I think on it - I really did not read that much for pleasure all them years as I was working all the time and busy with ms gamboolgal and the kids. I read tons of technical stuff for work... just the way it was.

One Book I started as a young man in the mid 1990's and I have not been able to finish is "The Federalist Papers". For some reason I have a hard time with this one? Maybe because I have to reread it over and over to let it sink in....I reckon I will find it and make it a effort to read completely now.
 
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I guess I'm in the minority with this topic, like with most things :( . After I outgrew children's material- Little Golden Books etc.,- in early elementary school, I moved on to adult-level material and never read any of the books that were written for the preteen age group. Maybe I missed a lot of "neat stuff."
 
I used to love books about WWII. Guadalcanal Diary, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and a book about the Marines by Robert Leckie called Strong Men Armed. Before I could read, I used to make my sisters read me the story "Rikki-Tiki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling. When I could read, I loved his story "The Drums of the Fore and Aft" (which would make a great film). I liked stories by Jack London, Bret Harte, O. Henry and Mark Twain as well. There used to be lots of short story anthologies with stories like "The Lady or the Tiger" and "The Most Dangerous Game."

There used to be a series of books called Landmark Books, which were based on American history. I loved them but I can't remember whether they were historical novels or just histories.

Liked the Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, so many others as well.
 
Charlotte's Web- E.B. White
Anne of Green Gables- Lucy Maud Montgomery
Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
Winnie the Pooh- A.A. Milne
The Secret Garden- Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz- L. Frank Baum
Stuart Little- E.B. White
 
In my younger years, I enjoyed reading books written by Earnest Hemingway (Old Man and the Sea), and John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath). As I grew older, I found myself too busy to do much reading....it's probably been decades since I read a Novel, etc.
 
I pretty much lived at our local library when I was a kid. I read everything by Beverly Cleary,the Oz books,Little House On the Prairie series.
My aunt gifted me a Nancy Drew book for Christmas when I was 8 and I was hooked.Read that entire series.

In high school,although I still loved to read and always had a book going,I HATED to read assigned books. I wanted to choose my own books lol. Years later,we had an employee who was also a voracious reader. He would recommend books for me to read and I would tell him when I read a good one. But one day he told me that he had a hard time reading something when someone told him "You just HAVE to read this book!" Said it sounded too much like a school assignment and he just couldn`t make himself do it. I laughed-and agreed 100%!

RIP Mark Ramirez.
 
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