Books can have a profound impact on a child, and a book discovered and loved in childhood will stay in your imagination for life. And although there has been an explosion of excellent new children's literature, there was a time when children read - and enjoyed - books written for adults, whether they were by Charles Dickens or Maurice Walsh or A J Cronin.

E&L asked eight top educators to pick a magic book from their childhood, as well as a book they had been forced to read. And if the selection proves anything, it is that children don't need to be overprotected when it comes to choosing books for them. The books that had the most impact on our educators were muscular and unsentimental.

Perhaps it's time to try out Dickens, or at least Patricia Lynch, on the Goosebumps generation.

Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford and Yeats biographer

`THE Grey Goose of Kilnevin by Patricia Lynch is a book which I found - and still find - magic. I first read it when I was about six or seven, and when I read it to my own children, they were transfixed by it.

"The story is about a child exploited by a boardinghouse keeper in a small Irish town who escapes and goes wandering with a collection of her friends, before returning to claim her inheritance. It's surreal, dark and frightening, and conjures up a wonderful atmosphere of rural Ireland in an age of innocence, in the days of wandering ballad singers.

"It's very unsentimental - it's about not having an identity, anywhere to belong, about insecurity, loneliness and fear.

"But one book I developed a resistance to is Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. Our mother read Dickens to us when I was about five or six, and while I enjoyed books like David Copperfield, when she told me later to read Our Mutual Friend, I couldn't. I still cannot get beyond the Veneerings' dinner party early on in the novel. I did try, and still try every few years. Although I love Dickens, I think it was subliminal resistance, a feeling that I wanted to choose my own book. "No, there's not a chance I'd read it to my own children. The only other book from my youth that I read to them was a strange story about children travelling across the Gobi desert in the 1920s, called Big Tiger and Christian."

Howard Gardner, Professor of Education at Harvard

`As a child I loved to read biographies, and I was particularly influenced by a collection called Landmark Books, that had dozens if not hundreds of biographies of successful or memorable individuals.

"I especially was interested in political figures, but also in athletes and inventors. My recent turn to biography in my own work is probably a related activity. Nowadays, however, we do not write heroic biographies and so the Landmark series seems anachronistic.

"I have to admit that I spent a lot of time reading encyclopaedias and books of baseball facts; I even subscribed to a television-rating series - young American boys love to collect numbers on topics that they find interesting.

"I don't have a lot of memory of textbooks, but nowadays when I write critically about textbooks I think about the `World History' text that we used in tenth grade. It had an orange cover and I believe that it was called Our Widening World. "The motivation for the book was praiseworthy and I learned a lot of facts about China, Japan and other remote regions. But essentially the book was senseless. It makes no sense to take naive 15-year-olds and pack them with an odd assortment of facts and maps about places that they have never heard of and cannot contextualise. It would have made so much sense to take one culture and probe it in some depth.

"And so, as a retort to that misguided text of my high-school years, I now call for deep studies of limited topics, rather than for quick passes through a hodge-podge of topics."

Danny O'Hare, outgoing president of DCU

`I was a great Mark Twain fan - in particular, of Huckleberry Finn. I can remember lying in bed on a summer's night in Dundalk where I grew up, reading it to my heart's content. "It was less of a story than virtual reality; it wound itself around you. It was more like real life, it almost seemed like you were on the raft, in the cave; it sucked you in. "I think Huckleberry Finn, like another book I loved, The Swiss Family Robinson - which focused on self-reliance - appealed to my sense of adventure. "I was never forced to read anything, but Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was a required text for State exams in secondary school, and it was a bit of a chore. I took study seriously and didn't resent it, but we were blessed in Dundalk CBS with a fabulous English teacher, Mr Morgan, who didn't just talk about texts but went beyond them. We also did Milton's Paradise Lost.

"It's a tribute to his real talents that I can say nothing was really boring, and proves the truth of the saying: `Great teaching makes learning easy.' If someone showed an interest in something, he'd lend them a book from home. He would have made a great university professor.

"CBS Dundalk at that time had great teachers, lay and religious, who were fairly progressive; although it had the strict regime of the time, there was none of the brutality you hear about in other schools.

"And in the 1950s, it was perfectly normal for children to read a large amount of stuff. It wasn't Danny O'Hare being a goody-goody; it was perfectly normal for all kids to make regular trips to the library, borrowing stuff like the Maigret books, Leslie Charteris, Conan Doyle, Biggles. We all read a humongous amount of books."

John Coolahan, Professor of Education at NUI Maynooth

`IT'S DIFFICULT to single out one book, because I read an awful lot as a child, encouraged by a marvellous English teacher, Miss McKenna, and an English scholar, Miss O'Brien, who lived in the north Kerry village of Tarbert where I grew up. "One book that I loved was Blackcock's Feathers by Maurice Walsh. The book was about Cromwell's campaign in 17th-century Ireland. Walsh, who came from nearby Listowel, was gifted in romantic fiction, very good at bravura scene-setting. I enjoyed the characters, and the book opened up historical fiction for me. "The fact that he was a local man added to it for me: I remember seeing Walsh in Listowel, dressed in tweeds, with a white beard. I went near him but never talked to him. Now he's commemorated in north Kerry, and there's a Maurice Walsh society.

"I was never forced to read a book I disliked, but a book I never came to grips with was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I never could read it as a young child, and when I came to it as an adult, I'd lost my child's imagination, I think, and never felt comfortable with it - though I studied Swift and his other work appeals to me."