I also remember being very fond of "Frog and Toad" books. I don't know if those are still around. One of my favorite picture books from when I was a little bit older was "Rat's Magic." It was a very funky, dark book, but I still have it. The artwork was fantastic. I remember lying on my bed and staring at the pictures, just enthralled. eta: It's still around. Check out the artwork HERE.
The Frog and Toad books are absolutely still around and very popular. Does anyone remember The Babysitters Club? I loved those books.
I don't recall how many were actual favorites but I had a series of " golden books " one was about a tug boat who ended up swept out to sea...If I recall I had another called " the pokey little puppy...I had the charlie brown encyclopedia series...I do recall one that made me laugh, " Mr Pine's mixed up signs " somehow as soon as I got my library card in 3rd grade I went straight from those books into the occult and sci-fi, so I kinda skipped over the " young adult " section
Having a 3 year old means I've got tons of children's books in the house. So, it's a mix of stuff that I loved as a kid, Mrs. Alpinemaps loved as a kid, and new stuff that we both want Little Miss Alpinemaps to read. Some of our favorites include the Very Hungry Caterpillar, plenty of the Little Golden Books, Maisy, and Max & Ruby. Our favorite series, though, is Knuffle Bunny. There are three books in the series. It's a great series, very funny. I love the style that the illustrations are done in - the characters are drawn, but the backgrounds are 'real'.
The Famous Five books are a series of adventure/mystery books by Enid Blyton featuring five friends - Julian, Anne, Dick and George and their dog whose name I can't remember (Timmy?) - until I started writing that sentence I wouldn't have said I could remember any of their names! My favourite children's books are the Mr Men by Roger Hargreaves. It was made into a TV series voiced by Arthur Lowe which was just fantastic. There's a new cartoon series now, but I haven't seen that. I read the stories to my kids now and I have the original series on DVD so my kids get to watch that Mr Quiet still makes me well up a little.
That was one of the books I learnt to read with, so has a special place in my heart. The Richard Scarry/Busytown books were another fave, and I liked Narnia, Babar, Mr Men and Asimov too, though I suppose the last are more universal books than a children's books as such. Actually, in much the same vein, I remain impressed to this day by the Asterix comics. They are so brilliantly written (or perhaps I should say, re-written, during thier English translation), with a wonderful array of jokes and allusions to appeal to just about any educational and maturity level. Just occasionally, even now if I re-read them, I get a subtle joke that I never did before. They are that intelligent. The translators (Anthea Bell & Derek Hockridge) are/were remarkably well-read and witty (I'm willing to bet they had Oxbridge educations, based on the nature of the jokes), in some ways much more so than the original writer (I've read a couple of the comics in the original French), and introduced a lot more layers to the humour.
As a child I really loved the books by Joe Kaufman. They were very informative, written in a simple but exhaustive language and they taught me a lot. Here's one: I also had a general knowledge encyclopedia called "The Big Book of Knowledge" which I loved, and by the same publisher "The Big Book of Animals". The list includes various "Manuals" or "Guides" like the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (of which I had several volumes, I think from the first to the sixth) and a Guide for young detectives and spies.
I'm a pretty big Knuffle Bunny fan, too, and I'm enjoying the Elephant and Piggie books. Have you seen any of the "Don't Let the Pigeon..." books?
We were introduced to Astérix in secondary school Latin, if only for an added appreciation of the Latin in-jokes in the Bell & Hockridge translation, and also reading special versions translated entirely into Latin. I remembered reading somewhere about how they would try and fit in jokes as close to the spirit of the French original as possible, admitting that in in some cases the English version's humour worked better than the French, while in a select few other cases the translation lost a little of the humour. I still read the albums today.