The first novel you remember reading

Little Women stands out, and I periodically re-read it and Eight Cousins, but Heidi is probably the first full length novel I read. My Nana gave me my own copy for my 8th birthday, and I think it was the first book that I personaly owned - not shared custody with my siblings.

I'm not sure, but it probably would be White Fang by Jack London, when I was about 9. It is falling apart on my bookshelves (well loved and read paperback over 40 years old!) but I'm not throwing it out.

I also read the unabridged version of The Jungle Book at about the same age.

I received a copy of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew for my 7th or 8th birthday. Read it many times, and was proud to learn what a velocipede was.

Still wonder what "Phronsie" is short for...

In the book Phronsie Pepper, her calling card says "Miss Sophronia Pepper".

There are seven or eight more Pepper books, seeing all the children grown up and settled. I've read a few of them, but they don't have the charm of the original one. Especially as the girls get older, the stories tend to sink into melodrama.

Sophronia! Thanks. You answered a 55 year old question!!

Edited to correct the number of years. I forget how old I truly am sometimes

Probably Tom Swift and his airship or Tom Swift and his submarine boat ... these were old original hardbacks bought by my uncles when they were first published. Shortly later, I would have read A Princess of Mars for the first time. Now I am dreading what Disney will do to Barsoom .

I read a few Tom Swifts and remember them fondly.

I hate to see any classic good story distilled to the Disney formula. The music is always good, but the visuals and story spin congeal into one big glutinous glop.

(7) "...the visuals and story spin congeal into one big glutinous glop..."

Oh, I like that! Makes me think of "Augustus Gloop, Augustus Gloop!" :)

Jenny goes to sea by Esther Averill

The Witch of Blackbird Pond was given to me for my 9th Christmas present and I loved the daring and defiant heroine. It was my first novel. My first series was Cherry Ames, started about the same time.

I've never seen or heard of the Ester Averill books before. Do you love them?

Someone also mentioned The Bobbsey Twins, and those might actually be my first reads too. I still own The Bobbsey Twins At Home. I loved how Flossie, Freddie, Nan and Bert got to see the world.

(first post!)
The first (short) novel I remember reading is Sarah, Plain and Tall. I think the children's library had a poster or something recommending it. Little Women is such an old memory for me, though, I wonder if I was born with that story in my head. Considering my lineage, that's not impossible. Hi, MOM! :)

Hello dear, I'm glad you finally found your way here. tee-hee.

The first novel I read, when I was almost 7, was either The Boxcar Children or Little House on the Prairie. Both were recommended by a 3rd grade teacher friend of my mom's. I remember going into the library with the instructions she gave me and carefully finding the W shelf of books, and the rows and rows of matching covers from these series. Emily's Runaway Imagination and Ramona Quimby, Age 8 were soon to follow, and then at some point that year was Indian Captive by Lois Lenski, which was one of my favorite books ever.

(Around the same time, the kids at school introduced me to the Baby-sitters Club, but I preferred Baby-Sitters Little Sister books, since she was my age, and baby-sitting stories were boring.)

The Henry and Beezus books by Beverly Cleary. Th author grew up near my home town of Portland OR and the street Henry Huggins lived on - Klickatat Street -
actually is a street in Portland. I don't know if I was aware of that at the time or not.

#11, yes, I did love the Averill books. Jenny is a cat living in NYC. She has two "adopted" brothers, Edward and Checkers and a large group of friends called the Cat Club.

When I think back to the first chapter books I read, I remember the Narnia series, the Betsy-Tacy books, Carolyn Haywood's Betsy books, and the Green Smoke series by Rosemary Manning. But the more I try to remember what I read first, the more books pop into my mind. Sometimes I wonder how I ever had time to play, when I was so busy reading.

Although I can't pinpoint my first children's novel, I'm pretty sure the first grown-up novel I read was Sylvester by Georgette Heyer. I still have a soft spot for it, even though it is not one of my favourites now.

I read one of the Betsy-Tacy books, I think the one about them going downtown or something like that.

I read so much it's hard to say, but my first "chapter" book was a horse story by C.W Anderson. I'm not sure which one. I do remember reading The Hobbit when I was 8, but I'm sure there were many books in between.

I think the first chapter book I read was Blacky the Crow by Thornton W Burgess. It was a gift from an aunt and uncle, both teachers, who usually sent books for Christmas that were always just a little bit harder than what I was reading. I devoured all the Thornton W Burgess animal books.

Streamsong, I read as many of those as I could find. I still have a reprint of the Burgess Animal Books For Children and I recently bought an original copy of The Burgess Flower Book for Children.

I've never read the animal books by Thornton W Burgess...

...I guess I was deprived, huh?

Shall I start reading them now?

Dunno -- I read a few to my children, and they hold up pretty well if you like heavily anthropomorphic animal stories with a fair amount of natural history.

Holdup on Bootjack Hill by Marion Garthwaite, except I didn't read it in book form but as a five-part serialization in JACK AND JILL MAGAZINE (Jul-Nov 1959). The J&J serialization was more a children's version, and Garthwaite subsequently expanded it into a middle-reader novelization in 1962, which I've only read in the past few years.

I've managed to track down the 1962 novel (that's my image on the book's page) as well as the five J&J issues. I keep the J&J issues in my safe deposit box because, though they didn't cost me that much on eBay and Abe, I have the only copies of some of the issues that have appeared in online sales.

I remember Jack and Jill Magazine.

25>> Back in the 30s, before she was married, my mother worked at Curtis Publishing, eventually becoming assistant to the Circulation Manager. (When she got married, she lost her job. Curtis was pretty conservative and expected the man of the house to support the little lady!)

The first children's book I remember reading and re-reading was Pünktchen und Anton by Erich Kästner. Still my favourite because the heroine is such a competent, no-nonsense girl. And my first grown-up novel was one I filched from my mother's shelves: East Wind, West Wind. I thought it was gloriously exotic...

That's a hard question! It was probably The lion, the witch and the wardrobe, Little house in the big woods or King of the wind, though I would have been reading shorter books before that as well. Once I got the hang of reading I just devoured everything in my path so it's hard to remember what came first. (I'm sure I'm not alone in that!)

I like that

"devoured everything in my path"

I remember the sensation of having the words unlock for me, and all of a sudden they were everywhere - signs, billboards, cereal boxes. It was quite exciting.

The very first "big" book I ever owned was The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I read it dozens of times.

My first encounter with "velocipede." And "receipt" instead of "recipe." And Phronsie.

Children's Treasury of Classics and Grimm's Fairy Tales (baby gifts) made it to my bedroom first, but I'm not sure that I read them first.

Heidi, Heidi Grows Up, and Wizard of Oz (Whitman Classics) came to me as a set when I was in grade school. They were probably the first that I read, but it's possible that the Little House on the Prairie series caught my attention even before that.

Non-kid novel or first non-picture book?

Non-picture book...have no idea, too many. First adult novel was either Papillion or Different Seasons which may not exactly count since it's 4 novellas, but those were my first adult books. I also got a hold of some crappy Readers Digest condensed books because I thought they looked fancy. Ugh. But I read them.

I was thinking The Good Master was the first novel I remember reading, until someone mentioned Carolyn Haywood. I loved her books and think one of them, possibly B is for Betsy might have been the first novel I read by myself.

I loved The good master and its sequel The singing tree

I read so much that I really can't remember the first novel I read; and it didn't take me long to go from picture books to novels. Whatever it was, it was probably focused on animals. So I will guess it might have been one of the Alfred Payson Terhune stories about collies. Then I read all the Black Stallion and Red Stallion books by Walter Farley, and quite a few fictionalized natural history books, the kind that follow an individual animal through his or her life. I seem to remember a Chip the Beaver in there somewhere. Later I branched out into mystery stories and historical novels, but animal stories (like animals) have a special place in my heart.

I loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which was read to me as a child, but the first novel that really made a deep impression on me was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read when I was 15 so many years ago.

orsolina, sounds like you and I did a lot of similar reading. I have read most of the Albert Payson Terhune books, as well as most written by Walter Farley, Marguerite Henry, Rudyard Kipling, Jean George, Jim Kjelgaard, CW Anderson, Sam Savitt and Glenn Balch.

BTW, Chip the Dam Builder was written by Jim Kjelgaard.

I was about 10 when I discovered Kazan in my home room's bookshelves, and the teacher let me keep it! The author, James Oliver Curwood wrote a bunch of north/wolf/wilderness stories, as did another author I loved, Jack O'Brien (go Silver Chief!). And let's not forget Joseph Wharton Lippincott and Thomas Hinkle.

If a book had an animal on the cover, I would read it. LOL.

I don't remember a time when I couldn't read, so I don't remember what my early books would have been. I got a new book every month from a children's book of the month club and books were a big part of birthday and Christmas gifts, something my sister-in-law doesn't understand at all. Once I was in grade school, when the Scholastic books order came in, there was a box with my books and another one for all the other folks who ordered books - the latter box was often the smaller box :-).

3rd grade, Peter Burnett Elementary School in Hawthorne California in 1961. I think the title was Max. it was about a bear, definitely not a story book and not a picture book. Orange library binding. I remember how much I loved that book.

Starting that year I saved my allowance and bought books from the Scholastic Book Service. I still have 2 of them.

Perhaps not the first novel I ever read, but certainly one of the earliest that I remember is The Racketty Street Gang. There was also a story about Sioux Indians and a longhorn cattle drive that I repeatedly borrowed form the school library but now can't remember the name of.

I don't know which came first, The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland, but I loved them both.

My sisters and I were also early readers (and read a lot) so it's hard to remember the earliest books. Little House in the Big Woods comes to mind as does The Boxcar Children.

I remember what my daughter cut her reading teeth on, and that was The Wizard of Oz. We had probably read it to her four times, and she used to look at it herself. One day we realized that she was reading it. (No Bob books for her.) The first book I remember her reading without prior exposure was The Boxcar Children.

I started with Grimm's Fairy Tales, but quickly went on to Enid Blyton. My boarding school library had such a treasure trove of all her books - Famous Five, Secret Seven, Malory Towers, The Five Find-outers and Dog, Twins at St Clare's, The Naughtiest Girl, The Magic Faraway Tree and many more. We were only allowed 1 book out a week, which was agonizing because I'd finish these in 2-3 days. So, I had to start bartering with other classmates who weren't big readers - they'd let me pick their 1 library book so I could feed my habit and, in return, I'd let them copy my homework. None of the teachers ever caught on for at least 2-3 years (after which, I graduated to bigger, lengthier books that did last me at least a week). Ha. Memories.

I don't remember what was the first novel I read. I do remember that The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Island of the Blue Dolphins were two of my favorites. Some of the "big" books I read in Jr. High and high school were more in the line of The Thorn Birds and Shogun. I didn't get introduced to the classics until after high school.

The first 'adult' novel may have been Freckles. But then I had been devouring books for years by then, so had certainly read several of the others mentioned above. It was certainly the first book I owned that was not a children's book. I was 9 at the time.

27>The first book I read through in German was Emil und die Detective. It took me forever, as I was travelling around Germany by train. (age 18 or so). I quickly learned that if I was in compartment with a family and pulled it out the kids would laugh. I could then slowly explain, 'Ich lerne Deutsch. Das kann ich verstehen...' Pretty soon I would be talking to the family and practicing my spoken German, and rarely actually got much reading done. Until the family got out and boring adults got in.

Edited to add: Gene Stratton-Porter and Erich Kästner are still very high on my favourites.

The first book I remember trying to read for myself was Little Bear went Fishing. (that one isn't in LT. But it's the same series. It had me in tears on the first page. B E A R should be pronounced the same as beer, right? But that didn't make sense. I must have been 4 at the time, and noone had actually taught me to read.

>45 MarthaJeanne: That sounds like a great conversation starter. Our Russian instructor at college swore by fairy tales as the best reading to familiarise yourself with a language. I suppose I should have taken her up on that.

One common mistake is to read a translation of something you know. The problem with this is that the language is never quite natural and the cultural bits don't match the language. Children's books include the culture, and have somewhat simplified language, but still natural.

OTOH I did enjoy Gute Nachricht soon afterwards - the German equivalent to Good News for Modern Man because I certainly did know the gospel stories very well, and I didn't have to check vocabulary. However, most Western cultures have a lot of Bible in them (although usually fairly hidden today), and Bible translations are a lot more carefully done than fiction translations.

>45 MarthaJeanne:,48
I think Emil - or maybe Das fliegende Klassenzimmer - must have been the first I read independently in German, but I would have been rather younger than you. In English I don't have any clear recollection of something coming first: I started reading quite early and I think I must have been another rapacious devourer of books. It would be nice to think that I started my reading career with a classic like The wind in the willows or an E. Nesbit, but it's just as likely to have been an Enid Blyton.

The Secret Garden. Before that, my mother read many novels to me. I remember her reading Shakespeare's plays and Mr. Popper's Penguins (what a combination) before I learned to read myself.

All these posts making me smile broadly...I nabbed many of these and climbed up in my reading tree with many of them (a cherry tree with a v-branch the perfect size to accommodate one skinny third grader, one book, and one transistor radio).

When I graduated to grown-up novels--about sixth grade--my mom steered me to Jean Plaidy historicals. Her words still stick with me: "You can learn as much history from a well-researched novel as you can from a history book."

>50 gmathis: - My tree was a Golden apple tree. Mom tried and tried to tell me I would get a stomach ache eating green apples, but I never did. Second favorite was the roof of the chicken house/woodshed. There was a nifty little crevice that hid me from the view of everyone. I would hear them calling me and blithely ignore everyone until mom's voice had that certain "tone" then I would sneak down so they didn't know where I was and come running all breathless. Books made me evil.

It is really not a novel but a collection of fables, Aesop's Fables . I read the simplified versions for children, the book contains the best selection when I was a primary school student.

The first novel I had read was Jaws by Peter Benchley

These fables give many morals of living and these stories of "animals" behaved as humans to illustrate a different motto of the "animal" fairy tales.

Good reading for young, growing children to be a responsible person in a society and to themselves.

There are about 600 + fables in the complete version of the book.

www.aesopfables.com/aesop1.html

I guess it depends on what we want to call a novel. The first full length fiction book with more words than pictures which I can remember reading was Bartholomew and the Oobleck. The first book I can remember reading on my own which was mostly words and just a few illustrations would have been Lost Dog Jerry....after that the books came so thick and fast it was just a blizzard of words.

...rain and snow is not enough.
We need other, stronger stuff!...

(I had that on LP with Yertle the Turtle on the other side.)

I can remember my first non-picture book, Pippi Longstockings, however I'm not sure one would classify it as a novel. Among the earliest I remember are the Bobbsey Twins, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and Little Women. It is amazing to see us all here and the to know that books such as these (and there are many repeats) influenced so many young people into becoming avid readers.

Black Beauty for me, since other than reading, horseback riding is the first memory I have, training and reading Black Beauty, among other books like The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, lots of Roald Dahl (I especially loved Matilda )

>56 toast_and_tea: I didn't discover Anne until I was an adult, nor The Secret Garden, probably because I was too focused on reading books about animals. I even read an adult book, Rex, because it had a dog on the cover!

A Little Witch was the first chapter book I remember reading, at five or six. I also gamely plowed through The Andromeda Strain at six and a half because I'd seen the movie and been fascinated. I didn't understand half of it, but I read it anyway. :) Then I got sensible and read The Secret Garden and A Little Princess and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I just remember that I was at the library constantly. And my father saying he would buy anything I wanted to read that wasn't in the library. But I had to check the library first. Exception: Dr. Suess. We bought each new book as soon as he saw it somewhere. I also had the run of my parents' library and our church library. (To a certain extent the same thing. Dad put a lot of his personal books there for people to borrow.)

I do remember the thrill of getting a book for Christmas signed by the authors! And soon after their second book that they wrote a special note in for me, visiting in our home! Eskimo Island and Independence must be Won.

Oldest granddaughter (age 14) is finally reading Eight Cousins. Yay! Uncle Alec shocked and delighted her by climbing the trellis up to Rose's new bedroom. Livy has already gathered that Phoebe will be a good friend.

Pulling my own copy out to enjoy it along with her.

The fist proper chapter book I read was Island of the Blue Dolphins. My father stopped reading it for me for the night and I really wanted to know what happened next.

>61 alvaret: That's always been a reliable parenting trick. In fact I plan to use it soon on another granddaughter.

>62 2wonderY:, Yeah, he has admitted as much, and obviously it really worked or I wouldn't be hanging around on LT. Good luck with the granddaughter :)

The first novel I can remember reading was The Coral Island by R M Ballantyne. I vaguely remember that I read some of Swiss Family Robinson at about the same time and was unimpressed with it because for the Swiss family, the shipwreck supplied everything they wanted so that they could live in comparative luxury (I mean, a Westphalia ham??), but the boys had almost nothing, and had to forage their own food. I've never read Lord of the Flies, but I understand that it was a realistic re-imagining of The Coral Island.

The Wizard of Oz. That got me off and running - over the years I then read all the Frank L. Baum Oz books, and then the Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, and then some other continuations by authors like Jack Snow.