4.19 avg rating — 585,335 ratings

"If I could only pick one book for this list, it would have to be this one. I started reading a little before kindergarten, but before I actually could, I memorized most of this book (and improvised the rest)."

4.13 avg rating — 83,596 ratings

"I'm not sure what's so appealing about this book, but I always felt sad that he didn't get any strawberry shortcake. (Which is silly, since he got the other desserts when the others didn't.)"

4.25 avg rating — 1,060,765 ratings

"An early favorite, because the pages without words let me tell the story myself."

4.38 avg rating — 394,589 ratings

"It's kind of odd to include this since I haven't read more than a few pages, but there's an interesting story. My dad had some kind of frequent fueler card at a gas station, and you could earn points to buy random things, and this book was one of them. He got it for me, but it turned out that my reading level wasn't quite high enough for it. I had it for years, but by the time I tried reading it again, it didn't really interest me. Eventually!"

4.13 avg rating — 139,473 ratings

"Reading this in kindergarten lead to me reading (and owning) more books in this series than any other. When I finally sold them to a cousin for her daughter to read, I had nearly 50."

4.47 avg rating — 11,365,376 ratings

"I was already thoroughly hooked on books by the time I read this, but this series was the first fandom I ever considered myself a part of. I was 8 or 9 when I read it (all I know for sure is that GoF was the first book I bought on the release day)."

4.02 avg rating — 569,076 ratings

"I loved the idea of a "mysterious" author, and I actually did learn a lot of words from this series."

4.14 avg rating — 128,857 ratings

"One of the few series that my sister and I read at the same time (though I tired of it before she did)"

4.24 avg rating — 790,710 ratings

"Given to me by my GT teacher to read during the summer after fifth grade. I felt flattered that she thought I was mature enough to read it; it was the first book I'd ever felt self-conscious about reading around my parents. They've never restricted my reading, but I'm not sure they would have agreed with my teacher's decision to give it to me."

3.98 avg rating — 83,159 ratings

"I remember being obsessed with reading this entire series, but I'm not sure that I ever did. I read one or two of them during our first D.C. trip, and when I think about this book I remember more about where I was and what I was doing than the book itself."

4.05 avg rating — 40,183 ratings

"I loved trying to figure out the answers without reading them in the back (though I almost never did)."

4.28 avg rating — 706,078 ratings

"This is the first "real" series I read (I didn't think The Boxcar Children counted)."

3.97 avg rating — 89,546 ratings

"One of the first books I read that had been turned into a movie."

3.89 avg rating — 71,365 ratings

"I loved the idea of finding a vampire rabbit in a movie theater. Also, I was pretty much guaranteed to like books with talking animals."

3.97 avg rating — 1,281,916 ratings

"Possibly the only book I ever read because of someone's book report (in 4th grade)"

4.35 avg rating — 1,505,988 ratings

"The first book of poems I actually liked"

4.30 avg rating — 4,441,283 ratings

"First read in 6th grade, which to me kind of marks the time that I started broadening my taste in books."

4.12 avg rating — 2,797,621 ratings

"One of the first books that kept me thinking about its "message" after I finished it."

4.20 avg rating — 306,277 ratings

"Such fantastic wordplay!"

4.09 avg rating — 504,923 ratings

"I think of this as my first "sophisticated" talking animal book."

4.03 avg rating — 396,701 ratings

"The first book that made me WANT to read the annotated version."

4.22 avg rating — 2,010,125 ratings

"This was another first for me, but I'm not sure how to categorize it: science fiction, yes, but comedy, self-aware, cult favorite...? Whatever you call it, I hadn't read anything like it before."