Today marks the start of Children’s Book Week – with special events and activities taking place in bookshops and libraries across the country, aimed at encouraging children to explore the joys of reading… and an excuse for us adults to think about our favourite childhood reads.

You can find out more about the celebrations on the BookTrust website which includes The Ultimate List: 100 Books to Read Before you’re 14 and a chance to vote for your favourites. A quick browse takes me down memory lane spotting the titles that I grew up with and still sit, worn and weathered, on my bookshelves at home. Using the list as a guide, my personal reading time-line would look like this:

Age 0 – 5: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are, The Cat and the Hat

Age 6-8: The Enchanted Wood, Asterix and the Gaul, The Story of Babar, The Worst Witch, Charlotte’s Web

Age 9-11:  None from the list! What was I reading at this point in my life?

Age 12 – 14: Watership Down (although I think I actually I read this when I was younger, and in my animal-stories phase…)

There are, of course, plenty of wonderful books that I would have added to the mix like The Animals of Farthing Wood or The Faraway Tree series (oh, the hours I spent reading and rereading these books!) and whilst unsurprisingly Michael Bond‘s A Bear called Paddington is featured, I was a bigger fan of his guinea pig and The Tales of Olga da Polga. I was also slightly surprised to see Michael Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as an age 12-14  read. It was a book I found interesting as an adult but unsure I would have enjoyed it as a young teen. And lastly, together with the ‘new classics’ like The Hunger Games, I think Rachel Caine’s Glass Houses (biased as I may be) should have made an appearance seeing as it was in fact voted the most popular book by kids in the UK this year.

What would your personal reading time-line look like? And what other titles would you have added to the list?

Chiara Priorelli, Publicity & Online Marketing Manager