One of the greatest pleasures of parenthood is reading to our children

I enjoy finding out what people read and in particular what they enjoyed reading as a child. I have a suspicion that what we read is helpfully formative but there is really no evidence to support that assumption. Consequently, I fall back on anecdotal accounts. A harmless hobby.

Megan McArdle is an economics commenter and writer whose work I very much appreciate. She has a facebook post identifying those childhood books which "have stayed with me . . . from childhood."

1) The Wizard of Oz series
2) The Phantom Tollbooth
3) And Then There Were None, and basically everything else that Agatha Christie wrote, except for the Poirot books, which I came to like later.
4) The Little House books
5) The Anne of Green Gables books
6) The All of a Kind Family series
7) The Mary Poppins series
8) The Betsy Tacy books
9) The Narnia books
10) The Chronicles of Prydain

She then mentions the Robert Heinlein juveniles.

Her father notes "And why did you leave off the Richard Scarry books, the Nancy Drews, Goodnight Moon,and all the others that were read out loud over and over again?"

I think one of the greatest pleasures of parenthood is reading to our children, including those instances where we read the same story again and again. But what we read to them and what they read themselves and remember remain something of a mystery.