Falling on Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday, Children’s Book Day celebrates children’s books and encourages children to read. What do you read your kids, and do you remember your favourite book from your childhood?
Beat me to it. This was my favourite book and both my kids love it too. My kids are reading all sorts. Cornwall's Sharpe, wimpy kid, lots of fact books, Books on Churchill, lots of Morpurgo. They are 9 & 13. We spent a lot of time reading to them at bedtime and then listening to them read as they got older. Now they both read above their age and are very interested in a wide variety of subjects. I reckon the variety is down to the reading which would have opened up their imaginations. Being able to read and wanting to read is a real gift (and not an expensive hobby like campers !).
^^ I was like this as a kid - used to devour books (though mostly fiction). Used to love getting book tokens for birthday/Xmas so I could go and chose a new book (moosey says that's a boring present for a kid - I loved it!). Otherwise I was down to the library every week picking something new to read
I asked my 9 year old a while back if she would like a kindle as she reads so many books. She said no because she likes the 'feeling' of holding a book when she reads. Tablets apparently are only for games and Internet !
I still read some children's books. the "his Dark materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman is magnificent, probably my favourite novels full stop. Another good one is "the Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman which is about a small boy raised by dead people in a cemetery and is completely brilliant.
Love his dark materials still a bit sad they only made the first film. We are definitely a reading family. Children wise the boys currently love Asterix. Harry Potter. ant and bee. Enid Blyton. the secret garden and grimm fairy tales.
I was amazed they made even the first one given the fantastic, anti religion theme of the books and Hollywood being in the USA. If you like those then do try the graveyard book. Living in a graveyard amongst corpses comes across as a genuinely lovely way to grow up after you have read it.
I never thought His Dark Materials would work as a film - it's essentially a book(s) of ideas which work brilliantly on the page but in a film? Nope. The first book is the most filmable and that failed to get it across. In the book where they find the kid in the hut who has had his daemon severed it is heart breaking, in the film: meh!
I'm really pleased my 8 year old lad is into his reading, his favorites are the Beastquest series and Jeremy Strong books too. I used to wonder if he was just flicking through and not really taking it all in so I used to 'test' him on it and ask all sorts of questions.... he totally knew what was happening and would happily talk about them for ages. I didn't get into my books until I was probably a teenager, I remember loving the Lord of the rings and the like. I used to love my comics though and Shoot magazine.
My fave book was "Birds for all Seasons" by Hargreaves. 1973 but I was given it around 1978. A carton sketch book that had me in giggles. I can still remember some of the sketches now because I've kept the book. Falling to pieces but sooooo glad I kept it.
I think my fave would have been a complete set of Disney's Wonderful World of Knowledge - about 25 volumes IIRC (still have them at my parent's house)
I am also a fan of Stig of the Dump, but my favourites were Danny Champion of the World and James and the Giant Peach. I remember one about super intelligent rats....Rats of Nimh, or something similar.
I had a very dull book about America (it's still at my parent's house) which I loved despite it being extraordinarily dull - just lists of crop yields and demographics. I was given it by my grandfather when I was 7 and I read it over and over - it has my name in it from when I took it on school trips - at eight I could name every capital, the major crops and the populations of main cities in every state in the US. My parents eventually took it away from me - although I spent my ninth birthday money on a book about oceanography around Japan
