I read to our twins at breakfast, which has the advantage of the “Time for school!” hard out. (Bedtime is a boggy netherworld of “Just one more!” special pleading.) Now that the twins are nearly ten, we’re assaying “Johnny Tremaine,” by Esther Forbes—a book I loved as a kid. It’s even better than I remember: a meditative, often funny look at Boston in the years leading to the American Revolution. Johnny is a talented fourteen-year-old silversmith’s apprentice, a budding Paul Revere, until his hand is crippled in an accident brought on by his pride. Forced to grow up in a hurry, he learns to reject his rich but odious Tory family and to live by his wits as a messenger—even as carrying messages for the rebels goes from being a thrilling lark to a hanging crime.

Addison pounces on every bit of artistry: the green apple that Johnny’s childhood friend Cilla Lapham gives him—“Symbol of their love!”; a description of a sunrise—“Symbol of the new country!”; Johnny’s friend Rab’s love of his new musket—“He’s gonna die!” Walker just sits quietly in the window bay, dreaming about what it would have been like to be the boy who told Paul Revere, “The British are coming!”

—Tad Friend

My daughters are now eleven and eight. With the older one, once the roster of picture books was done, I ran through the gamut of bedtime reading remembered from my own childhood: “Charlotte’s Web,” “Heidi,” “The Secret Garden,” “Stuart Little,” “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and five and a half Laura Ingalls Wilder books, before “Harry Potter” took hold and Wilder’s detailed instructions on how to build a log house seemed somehow less thrilling.

With the younger one, after what felt like a thousand and one consecutive nights of Dr. Seuss’s Cold War parable “The Butter Battle Book,” with its ominous ending (“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see. We will see…”), followed by Jacqueline Woodson’s soft-spoken and heart-moving “The Other Side,” it was “Charlotte’s Web” again, “Ginger Pye,” “Pippi Longstocking,” “Matilda,” and every entry into the “Beezus and Ramona” and “Henry Huggins” series.

I think sadly of the number of books I started with both girls that they never let me finish, eager to continue what became their nightly routine of the older one reading all three thousand four hundred pages of “Harry Potter” to the younger one. (Sometime around the end of the first book of “Little Women,” they politely pointed out that the book was making more of an impression on me than it was on them, so I never did get to weep through Beth’s death or rewitness Jo’s encounters with Professor Bhaer.) Even sadder is the stack of books I hopefully bought for the oldest to read herself, books I read over and over at her age or so—Dodie Smith’s “I Capture the Castle,” Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga, Mary Renault’s “The Bull from the Sea,” Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons,” E. Nesbit’s “The Phoenix and the Carpet.” Those books sit as untouched by curiosity as did the three or four copies of H. Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines” that my father bought for me when I was her age, a novel that was no doubt very close to his heart. I still haven’t read it.

I try to make up for that failure, by setting my sights lower, and reading to the girls—on summer nights, when there’s no homework to do and bedtime is not so firm—from my old copy of “The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children” (known in my childhood home as “The Purple Book”), which my father read to me for years, indulging repeat requests for Matthew Arnold’s tear-jerker “The Forsaken Merman,” William Blake’s “The Tiger,” and Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies.” It’s a point of pride for me that, at five or six, my youngest would gleefully join in for an anonymous seventeenth-century Scottish verse, declaiming from the lower bunk with a healthy burr, “My hand is in my hussyfskap, / Goodman, as ye may see; / An’ it shou’dna be barr’d this hundred year, / It’s no be barr’d for me.”

—Deborah Treisman

My kid is just nine months old, so it’s less that I’m reading to him and more that I’m reading in his general direction. That said, he’s generally pretty attentive. He happily sits through the ones about the little blue truck, he tolerates the ones about the sneezing panda, and he’s none the wiser when I tuck an academic journal article I have to skim inside the covers of the one about Pedro Martinez and read that aloud instead. My favorite book is “Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type,” which achieves a perfect balance of plot, characterization, and funny sounds. It also explores one of my central problems with the children’s-book genre: if these animals are so smart, why don’t they organize themselves? This is essentially the plot of “Click, Clack, Moo.” It’s about a bunch of cows who teach themselves how to use a typewriter, which they use to issue demands for better treatment. Instead of taking their beef seriously, Farmer Brown spends much of the book trying to coax this tool of self-expression and self-empowerment out of their possession. I’m sure someday I’ll sympathize with Farmer Brown. For now, I’m content mooing and quacking, and then marvelling each time my son reaches across and turns a page.

—Hua Hsu

My daughter will be three years old in August, and she loves books that rhyme, maybe because of the ease of reciting memorized fragments of them to the assorted inanimate objects with whom she loves to chat. Her early rhyming life featured a lot of “Chicken Soup with Rice,” but the summer looks likely to be a carousel of the Christopher Myers illustrated version of Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky,” the Edward Gorey illustrated version of “The Jumblies,” and the Sophie Hannah translations of the Tove Jansson books “Who Will Comfort Toffle?” and “The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My.” We’re also looking forward to holding and reading the frosted cake beauty of Leanne Shapton’s “Toys Talking,” which is just out. Those toys are always listening so politely; we want to know what they have to say.

—Rivka Galchen

My oldest son, aged seven, fell in love with the D’Aulaires’ “Greek Myths,” which taught him the great themes of life, and Ron Roy’s A-to-Z mysteries, which taught him the virtues of being a completist. Having absorbed these two lessons, he naturally started in on “Harry Potter.” My wife and I read the series to him once, and then he read it through himself seven times. After finishing that slightly Biblical project—seven books, seven cycles—he declared himself ready to move on, but he also seemed perplexed about how to reënter the world of muggle literature. We had a brief, tense period where he sat in his purple reading chair, bored with Dumbledore and Snape but convinced that no other characters could be as interesting as Dumbledore and Snape. Half-finished books piled up on the floor, and even Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins were cast aside. Now, though, he’s found a new series called “Warriors,” written by Erin Hunter, and he’s about fourteen books in. Seven-year-olds (not unlike seventeen-year-olds, I’m told) prefer to keep independent worlds that their parents don’t know about, and so our son hasn’t entirely explained the plots of these works. As far as I can tell, they are about cats.