I've been trying to put my finger on why I love Shirley Hughes's Alfie books so much. Why should the everyday tales of a four-year-old boy and his toddler sister Annie Rose so lift my spirits - as well as those of my two young children - at the end of a dog-tiring day?

Poor Jenny, bright as a penny, is a little black cat simply too timid to have fun, but capable of extraordinary bravado when she thinks no one is looking. This scaredy-kitten is at the centre of Esther Averill's deliciously appealing books about climbing up to confidence, paw by nervous paw.

Penguin, £6.99, ages 12 plus

The first book I remember adoring was Enid Blyton's The Enchanted Wood. My mother and I went out one Saturday to spend £3 for my birthday - I must have been eight or nine. I recall buying a Monopoly set and this beautiful green hardback book with cream paper and rich black prin

There is a great deal of night in the book, but it is a protecting, welcoming, transforming darkness, where the bold are rewarded.

I make no claims for Paddington as literature. I doubt that anyone would. It is basically a utopian fantasy

The stories are far darker than any books with words such as "bunny" and "flopsy" in their titles have a right to be. Potter's animals may be anthropomorphic to the point where they smoke pipes, but nature's savagery is never far away

Fairytales,
by Hans Christian Andersen,
Penguin Classics, £20

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
published by Collins, £5.99.
Ages 5+

I have come across Emil three times in my life. The first was when my primary school teacher read it to us and we were gripped by this tale of a fallible boy being robbed of his money on the train to Berlin; meeting up with a bunch of kids; setting up a robber-busting gang and winning out in the end. The next time was when I read it to my son, then aged nine, on a holiday in Devon. Each night, Isaac would shout "Emil!" as my instruction to read a chapter. It had to be a chapter a night, but there are 18 and we only had 13 nights, so to his immense delight, I had to double up towards the end.

The Secret of the Ancient Oak is a book etched in my childhood memory. It is a print and picture book, which, judging by the handwriting on the "This book belongs to..." sticker, I started reading at around the age of six. The story concerns a great oak tree, home to numerous animals, that comes under assault from a rapacious beaver.

Swallowdale is quite an achievement. It's a book where nothing, really, happens - and yet even young readers learn to be caught and held by the richness of its sensual detail. Here are children building a camp, walking up a hill, watching a hunt, fishing for trout, eating breakfast. Where is the plot? Where is the struggle? Ransome is the child's precursor to Proust and Woolf; he suggests the intense pleasures of plotlessness.

The book itself was different from the Puffin Club paperbacks on my shelf. A faded blue, cloth-bound austere volume, just 6in by 4in, with leaves as thin as tissue paper, my copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales was awarded to my mother as a school prize for "general excellence" in 1946. It looked and felt like a bit like a bible, and I, at eight, approached it with a kind of awe. The language inside was pleasingly high-flown, with lots of "cleaving unto" and "alas, alack"s, but it was the archaic oddity, the downright weirdness of stories with titles such as The Waggish Musician and The Youth Who Wanted to Learn How to Shiver that appealed to me.

This book lodged in my imagination from the first childhood reading; returning to it now, when my adult working method is still mostly based on procrastination and mooch, I find it oddly inspiring.

Odd details from the book stuck in my mind for years: monkeys forming a bridge over a ravine; swallows with strings in their beaks pulling a ship along; the dog, Jip, picking up smells from hundreds of miles away; and the shy creature with two heads, the pushme-pullyou. But the copy given to me in childhood was later chucked out, and I had more or less forgotten about Doctor Dolittle when I spotted him (top-hatted, carrying a walking-stick and with a lion at his heels) in a Florida bookshop.

There must have been substance abuse in the small village where I lived when I was eight. It was in Lanarkshire, so there must have been a pub, and the main employer was a borstal, so I assume the staff were medicating themselves, if the inmates were not. Considering I once got into trouble with a friend for smashing green bottles from a vast pile tipped near the school, the teachers may have been rewiring their heads, too. But my parents didn't drink, and my friends didn't smoke or sniff, and I never saw it.

I am in my six-year-old's bedroom, on all fours, looking through shelves of dog-eared books. "Do you want to play with my knights and castle?" says a hopeful voice. "Later, darling. Do you know where Dogger is?" We find my favourite bedtime story - and I am relieved. Dogger is my most loved children's story book. It has remained intact through three children's bedtime reading years and is still the one I produce when told, "You can choose tonight."

Growing up in the sticks in the 1960s wasn't a whole lot of fun for a boy if you had no interest in cows, horses or bracing walks. The only relief was a fortnightly trip to the County Ground in Swindon to watch Don Rogers jink past a few sub-standard third-division defences.