The Hutchinson Book of Dog Tales and The Hutchinson Book of Cat Tales (Random House, £7.99 each) both contain classic stories from some excellent authors and illustrators. They vary in length and depth, and make pleasant bedtime reading for dog- and cat-lovers respectively. The full-colour illustrations are a joy.
Books aimed at those (especially boys) starting to read often ape the comics, with wacky cartoon illustrations, wacky plots and wacky characters. Pants on Fire by Victoria Lloyd (Roaring Good Reads, HarperCollins, £3.99) is one such. Tony Trebelli, a congenital liar, is cured by his magic underpants, which burn every time he tells a lie. Such books do, indeed, work - but there are others.
In The Legend of Spud Murphy (Puffin £7.99), our own Eoin Colfer reverts to the reality-based humour of his excellent first novel, Benny and Omar. Will and his brother Marty are forced by their parents to spend their holidays in the library. But the librarian is none other than Mrs "Spud" Murphy, a terror who restricts children to a patch of carpet in front of the (very few) children's books, and warns them not to move off it. In the duel between Marty and Spud, Will and his brother discover that they actually enjoy reading. This is a warm, amusing, well-written gem of a story.
Down with the Dirty Danes, by Gillian Cross (another of HarperCollins's Roaring Good Reads, £3.99), is as wildly funny as one would expect from this author. Berry, the "sun"of Egfrith, is writing to his "cusin" Wulfric about the trouble they're having with the Vikings - and how a stranger, who's been dragooned by his mum into minding Berry and the baby while she helps with the war effort, allows the cakes to burn. Berry's spelling is phonetic (as is Little Wolf's in Ian Whybrow's books) but, once you've got over this, the story, with its cliff-hanging chapter-endings and Asterix-like illustrations, is absolutely marvellous.
Billy and the Seagulls, by Paul May (Young Corgi, £3.99), has a gentler humour. Eddie has to cope with a new town, a new school, a new dad - and with his little brother Billy's terror of practically everything. How the problem of seagulls in the schoolyard is solved makes for a funny but realistic plot.
Fiddlesticks, by Alan Fraser (Random House, £4.99), is for slightly older readers. Charlie Parker is taught by his elderly (but still "with it") neighbour, Beryl, to play the drums, while his best mates, Stef and Anna, help a local conjuror with his show. Fraser has a nice line in suspense, despite which nothing even halfway dreadful happens. But we learn quite a bit about drumming and magic - and Beryl's beloved Toby jug is saved in the end.
And, for the pre-teens, there's Operation Wedding, by Margaret Ryan (Hodder, £4.99). This is the concluding volume of a trilogy featuring Abby and her family: feisty Grandma Aphrodite who runs a pets' shelter; her second husband, Handsome Harris; Abby's distant dad; various weird pets; and Abby's mother, a lawyer, forever trying to bring order to the chaos. This is "real life" on speed. It is warm and funny - and ends the trilogy with Abby finding her real dad, her mother marrying her boyfriend, David, and a new baby on the way.
In Dumb Creatures, by Jeanne Willis (Macmillan £7.99), Tom doesn't talk. He frequents the zoo (where animals, too, communicate without words) and meets a female gorilla who speaks the same sign language as himself. When Zanzi's baby is removed, he takes drastic action. This book falls, in reading age, between Anthony Browne's Gorilla and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but it lacks their integrity. It has inconsistencies: Tom is aged 11, yet he puts his baby sister in danger rather than communicate in writing; and the book's central message is undermined when Tom averts the final crisis solely by managing to speak. As a long-time fan of Winnie the Witch, I found it disappointing that Willis does not treat readers with the respect her hero craves.
I am almost tempted not to mention Sideways Stories from Wayside School, by Louis Sacher (Bloomsbury, £4.99), but how can you ignore the author of Holes? Thirty very short stories tell the tales of the 30 children whose classroom is on the 30th story of Sideways school (which was built the wrong way up): a promising beginning. The tales are gently funny, the yard teacher, Louis, is Sacher himself, and the moral is that "sideways" is often better than the "correct" way of doing things - a very Sacher way of seeing things. And yet, for me, they didn't really work.
All these books are all also suitable for reading aloud. (Just because you can read by yourself doesn't mean you have to stop having a story read to you!) What nicer way to end the day or fill a rainy half-hour, no matter how old your child?