Ask Lemmy

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

"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.

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

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

The Hobbit.

First "real" book I read at like 10 or 11 and I just went straight the the whole series after.

Theres A Monster At the End of This Book

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.

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.

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

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

A Wrinkle in Time.

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.

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

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.

Hatchet

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 Magician's Nephew
this was my first introduction to the concept of multiple realities and it blew my little 7 year old mind

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

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.

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

The Black Cauldron Series.

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

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

Jurassic Park

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

Cujo

The Magician's Nephew

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

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.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

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

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.

Fox in Socks, Dr Seuss.

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.

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 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.