What’s the first book you remember loving?

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

Edit: by Douglas Adams (yeah, like that addition was needed)

I felt personally offended when my teenage son was like yeah it's OK.
- So that's why you gave him up for adoption ;)
+1

Theres A Monster At the End of This Book

One of my earliest favorites too.

Redwall, by Brian Jacques I think. Basically medieval fantasy drama but with woodland animals if I remember properly. I loved the whole series, great books when I was a kid.

Oh my god I saw the post and immediately thought Redwall! Glad to see you, new friend!

The Eye of the World, the first book in the Wheel of Time series. There were other books I really liked prior to that, but I distinctly remember reading that one on a long road trip I was stuck on with my parents, and being just completely enthralled by it. Made a 14 hour car ride feel like nothing.

The series ultimately led to discovering Brandon Sanderson as an author (when he took over for the last 3 books in the series), which led to a lot more really memorable, beloved reads, so that's a nice added bonus.

I really enjoyed Eye of the World, and I faithfully read the next seven or eight books when they came out.
But I tried to read it again a few years ago and it didn't keep my interest.
The climax of the eye of the world was incredible, I've never continued on in the series, is it worth it?
- I only read it for the first time earlier this decade. The series goes through about four distinct phases. If you liked Eye, you'll almost certainly also like books 2 and 3, which are very similar in style. After that, it goes from being high fantasy adventure into more of a political intrigue. Then it expands into a much larger cast, fleshing out the world. Parts of this third phase are what's often referred to among fans as "the slog", because the pacing slows down a lot and it can really drag to read. Personally on my first read-through I didn't find this nearly as bad as I expected, but I did notice it a fair amount at times. Then the fourth phase happens after Robert Jordan dies and Brandon Sanderson takes over finishing the series takes it back to the feeling of phase 2, but wrapping up and pushing towards a dramatic climax and conclusion.
  I think it's reasonably likely that if you liked 1, you'll like the series as a whole. But it's possible that the shift from phase 1 to 2 could break the interest for you, if that's not a change that vibes with you.
- I'm a bit over halfway through the series right now, burning through them at a book every week or two.
  The series suffers from sprawl. There are 3-4 'a-plots' at any one time, which can be a bit frustrating. I'm loving them though.
- The next few books are great, but around the middle of the series it really drug for me. There's a huge number of characters to keep track of and a lot of simultaneous storylines going on, and while some of them are great, some of them are rather dry, and the dry ones always seem to get brought up right when the good ones are reaching a climax. Once you get past those few books, it gets good again, and Brandon Sanderson's books at the end are excellent.
  If you're in the mood for a fantasy epic (with all the baggage that entails), it's worth the read. There's also audio books of the whole series and the readers are excellent.

A Wrinkle in Time.

Picking just one book is really unfair as I fell in love with various books at different times of my life.

But to answer your question, the very first book I remember falling in love with as a little kid is... two books. Jules Verne 'Michel Strogoff', and Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World' which I read in French back then as 'Le monde perdu'.

But I insist, this is absolutely unfair to the many other books I've loved and still love to this very day :p

Everyone has always one favourite.. always :)
- Elfstones of Shannara

The cat was a bit of an asshole, but figured out how to fit in.

I really like the cover :) So so so cute :)
- Pickles, aka the fire cat, is born homelss and lives in a barrel before being adopted by a nice lady and then eventually joining the fire department and improving himself to become a better cat.
  Here is Pickles being an asshole by chasing a kitten up a tree, because that is something cats do.
  If I remember right Pickles wasn't able to get down either and had to be rescued by the firemen. It leads to his journey to learn how to be nicer to other cats and improve himself.

Hitchhikers Guide, my mom got me to read it really young. I was maybe 8.

Before that, Zoobooks obviously

Something by Brian Jacques when I was ten. Probably Long Patrol or Mossflower. turned me from a book hater into a book fiend. Like, literally pissed off my parents because I would read at night instead of sleeping.

Hatchet

Redwall by Brian Jacques. Introduced me to so many things like the fantasy genre, multi-book series, deep worldbuilding, archetypal races and probably way more. The food descriptions also stand out in my memory.

Haven't gone back to see how it stands up but I highly recommend it for kids whose reading level is improving and want to move up a tier in length/difficulty.

The first of the Dragonlance books. I loved that trilogy so much as a kid. With Raistlin and Caramon, Tika, and Riverwind, Goldmoon... Thirty years later I still remember it.

Richard Scarry’s "What do people do all day" is such a fun book that even now I wish I had again just to flip through the pages and see the intricacies of the drawings

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen hit me at the right time as a kid.

I got really stuck into the Artemis Foul books as a teen. I always thought they'd make a great TV series.

Redwall by Brian Jacques was probably the earliest one I remember loving.

When I was very young, 10 or under, there was a book I read that I remember almost nothing about, just that there was a kid who found or built a bunch of robots to do various things. The only robot I really remember is the one made to row a boat, named (appropriately) Row-bot. It had a bell built in that would ring every time it made a stroke. At the end of the book all the robots have to leave the boy, and the last scene is him watching them rowing away and hearing the bell fade into the mist. That I even remember any of the book tells me I really liked it.

Besides that, I was gifted a copy of Ender's Game for my 15th or 16th birthday. I really loved it and it was the first time I can remember being really blown away by a plot twist.

Edit: The first book may be Andy Buckram's Tin Men.

The Black Cauldron Series.

I hadn't thought about it, but those may have been the first books I absolutely adored.
After that, I got into Perry Rhodan, a German science fiction serial that has been published weekly since 1961 (yes, they are past issue #3,300 now).
They translated about 140 into English, and I had every one, hunting through used book shope to complete my collection.
I have gone back to read some, and at least the early ones really were abysmal in writing, plotting and early 1960s prejudices. At the time, the scope of the space opera -- and the fact that there were so many of them -- thrilled me.
By Lloyd Alexander? If so, those were great! I remember reading those to keep me busy at my older sister's girl scout meetings.

Jurassic Park

Almost any Golden Book (Pokey Little Puppy) or

My Side of the Mountain (Jean Craighead George),

Paddington Bear books.

Along with titles others have mentioned (Scarry, etc.). These are firsts

It was a lithuanian children's book. As far as I know it's not been translated to other languages, it was called "stebuklingas portfelis" by Vytautas Račickas

Can you tell us the story?
- It's a slice of life type of book, that tells the life of a kid living in a small village :3.. it's been ages since I read it, so I only remember bits of pieces of various acts, but it goes over various parts of life, like making friends, death of family, encounters with animals and others through the eyes and imagination of a kid.
  The name of the book translates to magic briefcase, which comes from the main character lying to his class that his briefcase is magic after they make fun of him cause it's old-fashioned to go to school with one :3

The first book I really enjoyed and got into after high school (as in it wasn't a required reading) was The Hunger Games.

If you enjoyed The Hunger Games, check out the author’s other series “The Underland Chronicles”. It’s a slightly younger audience than The Hunger Games, but it also tackles heavy themes. I love both.

Honestly I can't remember. I've been reading books since 2nd grade and there's been numerous I loved

Not even one above all? Or the last one you read 😀

The Magician's Nephew

wait, I know that name. what WAS that book? was that fucking Narnia?
- Yes, it was a prequel to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe

Cujo

The one that really struck me was "Starstreak: Stories from space!" It was a collection of short sci-fi stories including The Haunted Spacesuit and Who Goes There.

Turned me into a lifelong SF reader.

Probably a Hardy Boys book, I used to devour those as a pre-teen.

half magic.

don't remember it at all, just that i was obsessed.

The other books in that series were also great.

When I was a kid I remember reading a Dragonfall 5 science fiction novel and enjoying it.

A few year's later I read To Kill A Mocking Bird for a school assignment and being impressed by Harper Lee's writing style and finding the story and topics really interesting. Around that time I also fell in love with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Damn it was good. Opened up the world of Star Wars and reading to me.

Since Disnep declared them null and void I refuse to read anything from the new canon.

The Mysterious Benedict Society was my childhood. I swear I read the whole series like 8 times. Got me into mystery novels and I've loved them ever since.

I never read a book outside of school (which was all fiction books, which I never got into), and then I was gifted Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences and loved it and realized non-fiction is a thing

Fox in Socks, Dr Seuss.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

For anyone passing through, this is book one in Percy Jackson and the Olympians young adult books. Basically the Greek gods are real and still exist in the modern world, and the demigods have to go on quests to save the world.
There are multiple spin offs and they are fantastic. These ones are basically direct sequels to the Percy Jackson books:
Heroes of Olympus
Trials of Apollo
Percy Jackson and the Olympians (6&7). More books are coming out for these ones that continue the story, but now where Percy is in college. Books 1-5 written in the early 2000s are him as a kid/high schooler.
I’ve only read these spin offs so far, and they are also great:
The Kane Chronicles (Egyptian gods)
Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard (Norse gods)
There are other series he writes too, along with an imprint called Rick Riordan Presents where other starting authors can get imprinted and exposure - books that span many inclusive themes which is fantastic for diversity and inclusion.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, if I remember correctly is the first novel I remember reading. When we were kids, our parents bought us kid-friendly versions of the novels. I don't really remember anymore if they were condensed versions, or just the same length but with a couple of pictures added per chapter.

House of the Scorpion. Pleasantly surprised to look it up and see it has pretty good ratings

The Planet of Adventure series (it came as a single book) by Jack Vance.
It was more of an adventure book than sci-fi. Light on the science but amazingly descriptive with the details of its world building. It was the first time I could read a book and really experience it like I was there. I dug it out of my dad’s sci-fi collection when I was about 11 I think. It was a Dutch translation and came with a separate map. I loved that map so much, you could follow the journey and fantasize about all those other parts that weren’t mentioned in the book.

So yea, it’s the book that opened a whole realm of imagination for me.

As a small child: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

As a teen: Lightning by Dean R. Koontz

As a high-schooler: Island by Aldous Huxley

The Book Thief

"Nor Crystal Tears": by Alan Dean Foster

One of the first novel length books I ever sat down to read when I was young.

The first series that I fell in love with was: "The Belgariad" by David Eddings

Say what you want about Eddings, the guy was not a nice guy, but "The Belgariad" was a great series and I leaped from it to LOTR.

Where the Red Fern Grows

I was a very sad child and that book gave me lots of excuses to be crying all the time xD

I think mine would probably have to be the Darren Shan saga, starting with Cirque du Freak. I think I was 10 when I picked up the first book in the series at a random bookstore in Seoul, and I can't have been older than 12 when I finished the last one. I think that ending was the first time I cried at a piece of media.

So you want to be a wizard by Diane Duane.

Star wars bane books and Kevin Mitnik's ghost in the wires. I couldn't put them down.

Can't remember which came first, but it was either The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley or The Castle of Llyr by Lloyd Alexander.

I read most of Dan Brown's books as a child and I really liked The Digital Fortress, Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, but the one that marked me the most in my prepubescent years was probably Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho.

Maniac Magee. I read it again recently and it really holds up well.

It’s basically a book about racism. This orphan kid doesn’t understand why this town is segregated, so he keeps going on the black side of town even though he’s white. He makes friends with all the kids and eventually the adults start to understand they’re not so different. The ending isn’t unrealistic, like the town immediately desegregating or something, but it’s very charming. It’s the little impact that one kid can have on the town that leaves a lasting impression.

I legitimately cried as an adult at one point in the book, because it has a way of getting you so invested in the characters, and I won’t spoil it but something happens to one of the characters. It hits hard.

It.

Schott's Original Miscellany. I was a strange third grader, and I'm happy to report that I have grown stranger since.

Something by Robert Munsch

The 1982 version of "The Amazing Adventures of Hercules". They re-released it in I think 2004, but butchered it.

The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O Shea. Pure Irish fantasy set in real locations I know in Ireland.

Old Man and the Sea, the first reading assignment I actually enjoyed. Sure it took 5 years after being weaned off of picture books to seriously get into reading, but hey I'm thankful because there's no adventure quite like the kind that comes from a good book.

The King, by Dick Bruna. I can still recite it by heart 53 years later.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (because it was read to me)

Pirate's Promise (first full book I read on my own)

The wizard of the Emerald City by Alexander Volkov

As a kid, the first book that really got me hooked was Ender's Game.

Another one around the same time was Raptor Red.

Nothing too crazy, I was a kid after all.

It's a toss up between Crispin and House of the Scorpion.. I read them back to back and they defined everything I liked going forward

Chicken Soup for the Soul

An English book of short stories.

Inkheart was the book that got me to love reading.And the ironic part is, the audio book book is not available anymore (think its because each chapter starts with an experpt from another book, so rights issues come into play) so now Im searching everywhere for real life Inkheart similar to the characters looking for fictional Inkheart.

I see many of my favorites, so I’ll throw down the first book I really remember loving as a kid because it is so touching:

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

My earliest remembered favorite is The Little Red Car by Bernice Orawski. Cute little kids book with lovely illustrations about a car having the worst day of its life.

Soup & Me

Kingdom of Shadow by R.A. Knaak.

I played lots of Diablo 2 back then and a friend once went into this small nook with books in a local games shop and showed me they have Diablo books. I wasn't much of a reader. I read some books that I enjoyed, but moat of them I was made to read.

I wanted to know more about the world of Diablo so I bought it. I mever expected it to grab me as it did. When I came home, I was like "let me read a chapter and go to actually play after". The boom jumped right into action with the first sentence and the PC was not turned on for 3 days (unheard of until then) as I used every free moment to read the book.

I bought other books in the series right after and then started to branch out to other fantasy series. This is the book that made me a reader. And I can thank a videogame for that.

There was one early teen book series that my school library has where it was a town with weird things happening and kids investigate. Twice aliens came to get help from the kids. I can't remember the name of the series though.

The Green Odyssey by Phillip José Farmer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Odyssey

Hmm... I think it will be my next book to read 😀

Idk about "loved," but I'll put "I can fly" since I remember reading it a lot.

In case others don't know it, it goes a little something like this (each line is a page):

"I can fly

Up, up, up

Down, down, down

Up, up, up

Down, down, down

Up, up, up

Down, down, down

I can fly"

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I was 11 when the book came out, so I was the perfect demographic for it. That book played such a pivotal role in my life at that age. I remember being excited for the next books and waiting for their releases.

I’m 41 now and I still will pick up any book by Pullman and read it. He is my very first favorite author.

Watership Down