What’s the first book you remember loving?

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

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.

It.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

The Black Cauldron Series.

By Lloyd Alexander? If so, those were great! I remember reading those to keep me busy at my older sister's girl scout meetings.

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

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.

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

Theres A Monster At the End of This Book

One of my earliest favorites too.

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

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

Before that, Zoobooks obviously

Fox in Socks, Dr Seuss.

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'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.
- 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.

Hatchet

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.

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

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.

The Magician's Nephew

wait, I know that name. what WAS that book? was that fucking Narnia?

The Paul Street Boys. I still remember it fondly!

Soup & Me

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

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

Cujo

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

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

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"

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

Watership Down

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

So you want to be a wizard by Diane Duane.

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.

The Green Odyssey by Phillip José Farmer

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

The first one I remember really being moved by was Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. But the first one I truly loved was Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny.