I was an avid reader as a child/Youth and read all the Enid Blyton stuff and I read the Hobbit at age 14 which made a big impression but the books that really stuck with me were Kes, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mocking Bird...........all books we studied at Secondary school.
Surpassing even those though were the truly brilliant Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn......... Absolute classic reading for a young teenager.

I was a bit of a mixed bag as a child. On the one hand I was incredibly active and loved sport and anything in the outdoors. On the other hand, if I was indoors, I was either building something with my Meccano set or I had my head buried in a book. Lots of books were influential for me - Jack London's novels stimulated my love for the outdoors, the frozen north, huskies and social justice; Richmal Crompton's "Just William" novels helped develop my sense of humour and lack of respect for "authority"; John Wyndham's science fiction novels opened up the scary world of the unknown. Probably the most influential of all however, was an old set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica which my parents picked up for next to nothing from a jumble sale - I would spend hour upon hour browsing random topics and learning, second hand, about our amazing world. Those old encyclopaedias were like a treasure trove of knowledge - something I have never tired of.

As a Child in the late forties my reading was the Dandy and the Beano, could not afford the Eagle

But also the books about Biggles which as a 7 year old went to the Library to read.