"Here is Peter. Here is Jane. Here is Pat the dog. Peter likes Pat. Pat likes Peter". It was with repetitive phrases like these from the Ladybird Peter and Jane book series that I learnt to read.
When I was a little boy, I had a toy panda. I loved that panda more than anything (except once when it turned bad in a dream).
I was a goody two shoes as a little boy, so when reading the Tufty Fluffytail series of illustrated road safety books, I always related to the main character, the red squirrel Tufty, who always behaved well.
On a recent holiday to the Isle of Wight, I spotted a tattered Rupert the Bear annual in an antique shop. It was not a little disconcerting to realise that the things I enjoyed as a child are now considered antique, not just old or out of date but...
Julian, Dick, Anne, George and their dog Timmy stumble into smugglers, kidnappers and hidden treasure across a string of very English adventures.
A group of children discover a magical tree at the heart of an enchanted wood, home to a cast of eccentric characters and a rotating cast of strange lands that appear at its top.
Dennis the Menace terrorises Walter the Softy, Minnie the Minx runs riot, and the Bash Street Kids cause chaos for their long-suffering teacher, all in glorious black-and-white (and later colour) weekly instalments.
Roy Race was shot by a hooded gunman at one point in this legendary British comic strip and still made it back for the Cup Final - the football was gloriously implausible, and that was rather the point.
I originally had this down as The Railway Children, but on reflection it's actually Helen Forrester's memoir of her own childhood that I remember.
I cannot remember much about this one, but it was one of the scariest books I read as a child. I think it might have been set by the coast somewhere, about a group of kids who discover a wicked evil force or monster.
Unlike almost every other family I knew, my parents decided against getting a television. So rather than sitting around the 'box' for entertainment, we would all gather together on the sitting room settee and listen to the radio.
For many years, I erroneously believed that Alfred Hitchcock wrote this series of children's books, and was in awe of him having mastered two domains.
My dad gave me this legendary book by English novelist George Orwell to read when I was eight or nine years old. I did not get the allegorical references of course but just read it as a tale of farmland animals tormented by evil pigs.
Welcome to my interactive timeline chronicling the books that have shaped my life - and the slightly mad walking habit that made it possible.
Another John Wyndham book I did not read but which was read to me, in this case by my dad. We did not have a TV back then and therefore got our entertainment from radio dramatisations or from my father reading to us.
The residents of the Irish village of Puckoon are thrown into farcical chaos when the newly drawn Irish border is found to run straight through the middle of the town.
My dad must have had a strange sense of humour because when I was nine, and my youngest sister was just five, he decided to read to the entire family Alien by Alan Dean Foster.
Pocket-sized, black-and-white war comics that were a staple of British newsagents for decades, packed with square-jawed heroes, Spitfires, and last stands against overwhelming odds.
This was my first read of British writer Douglas Adams's legendary science fiction soap opera, and to be honest I didn't really get it.
If anyone wants to know my great fear, it would be needles inserted slowly into my ears - a fear George Orwell's 1984 plays on rather effectively by the end.
Earl Dumarest wanders a sprawling galaxy searching for his lost homeworld, Earth - a planet that has slipped out of galactic memory entirely.
The last remnants of humanity are enslaved by an alien race called the Psychlos, until one man leads a desperate rebellion to reclaim the Earth.
Tic-tac-toe, lunar landers, and dozens more - a classic collection of simple BASIC programs that introduced a generation of home computer owners to programming by typing the listings straight in themselves.
A galactic empire in slow, inevitable decline, and the small band of scientists trying to shorten the coming dark age using the predictive power of "psychohistory" - Isaac Asimov's foundational work of science fiction.
A yacht is chartered to smuggle a fortune in Mussolini's gold out of Italy, buried since the war by a dying partisan who's finally revealed where it's hidden.
A genetically engineered fungus escapes a laboratory and begins turning the population of London into shambling, spore-spreading monsters.
Asimov's fledgling galactic civilisation is threatened by a wildcard neither psychohistory nor the Foundation's planners saw coming: a mutant conqueror known as the Mule, whose powers make a mockery of statistical prediction.
A cargo plane crashes in the Sahara, and the handful of survivors - already at each other's throats before the crash - have to decide whether to trust an eccentric aircraft designer's plan to build a flyable plane out of the wreckage.
Most of humanity is blinded by a meteor shower and left at the mercy of the triffids - mobile, poisonous, faintly ambulatory plants that were being farmed for their oil before civilisation collapsed.
Keill Randor, the last survivor of a warrior culture wiped out by a galactic tyrant, wages a guerrilla campaign of revenge across the stars.
A burial ground has the power to bring the dead back - not quite as they were - in what has a fair claim to being one of Stephen King's bleakest, most despairing books.
Why are so many patients slipping into unexplained comas during routine operations at a Boston hospital? A young doctor grows suspicious in Robin Cook's breakout medical thriller.
A young doctor investigates a spate of patients left brain-dead after routine surgery, uncovering a conspiracy at the heart of the hospital where she works.
A vast, silent cylinder called Rama passes through our solar system, explored but never fully explained - humanity's first encounter with an alien artefact.
If this is actually the book I am thinking of, this is one of the horriblest novels I have ever read, featuring horrible people who will go to any length - killing people without a thought, for example - to achieve their horrible egotistical aims.
Benevolent alien overseers usher in an age of peace and prosperity for a peacefully subjugated humanity - a prelude to something far stranger for the species' final generation.
I often get this novel by Northern Irish author Bob Shaw confused with Arthur C Clarke's much better known Rendezvous with Rama. They both involve humanity discovering alien technology in space.
Two adventurers - one seasoned, one green - are sent into 1935 Abyssinia on a gunrunning mission, arriving just as Mussolini's army invades and the country they've been smuggling weapons into collapses into war around them.
I never really got on with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels but this thrilling story of flawed people being bumped off one by one on a remote island gripped me from start to finish.
The unnamed second wife of Maxim de Winter finds herself haunted - quite literally, in the housekeeper Mrs Danvers' devotion - by the memory of his first wife, Rebecca.
I can only clearly remember one story from this short-form collection by Northern Irish science fiction writer Bob Shaw.
The Mantrap Effect - a piece of speculative physics - anchors this story of political intrigue and dangerous discovery from Bob Shaw.
One story from this collection by sci fi stalwart Robert Heinlein has stayed with me. It's called Goldfish Bowl.
An artificial ring-shaped structure encircling a distant star, built by a long-vanished civilisation on an almost unimaginable scale - a crew of explorers sets out to investigate.
A shape-shifting evil terrorises a group of children in the sewers of their hometown - and returns, decades later, to finish the job when they've grown into damaged adults.
A comet strikes the Earth, and civilisation has to decide, in the aftermath, whether it wants to rebuild as something better or collapse into barbarism.
A modern-day science fiction writer dies and finds himself descending through a Hell that's been updated for the twentieth century, in Niven and Pournelle's loose science-fictional retelling of Dante's Inferno.
A species of intelligent, herd-minded elephants crash-lands on Earth and sets about trying to subjugate humanity - not realising quite what they've taken on - in this second disaster epic from Niven and Pournelle.
The mercenary Falkenberg's Legion fights its way through a galaxy in slow political collapse, mixing military science fiction with genuine strategic detail.
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That now-famous opening line drops you straight into the first volume of King's Dark Tower series - a strange, spare book, more western than horror, with a mythic, sun-bleached...