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I am torn about this. There are some books I'm really excited to read to my daughter, but I don't want to rush it. There are lots of wonderful picture books out there, too! I'm thinking we might start the little house series in kindergarten? I don't know. She will sit for picture-less stories from fairy tale anthologies now.

Not a parent, but my mom started reading me chapter books when I was 3 or 4. I grew up loving to read - it was always fascinating listening to her read to me (pictures and without).

We started last summer when DS was 4.5. The first was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He loved it and the language was easy for him to understand. We've just started reading Harry Potter and are about halfway through the 1st one. I'm honestly not sure what he understands and I'm not going to push the second one if he's not interested, but we read half chapters at a time and then have a mini discussion and he seems to be getting the gist of the story. But the language is already much more complex and detailed.

LO1 is almost 3.5, and i haven't tried chapter books. i know this is snarky of me, but i feel like the harry potter family was showing off a bit

@HappyBaker: thanks for posting that link!

@HappyBaker: my fathers dragon was my first- and favorite- chapter book! I cannot wait to read it to my LOs!

My lo is 3.5 and she LOVES the Magic Treehouse books. I was just thinking it might be fun to read the Harry Potter books with her. We do them as audio books and she gets a certain number of chapters a night.

@edelweiss: My bet would be that either they've got an older child and the 3yo was just along for the ride, or they did the audio books while the child was playing (we did the latter because I wanted to read them!).

We did Babe: The Gallant Pig; The Wind in the Willows; Winnie the Pooh; Charlotte's Web; The Cricket in Times Square; and The Hobbit early on, and we repeated several of them in fairly short succession. Anthropomorphized animals are my thing, evidently! There are illustrated versions (not pictures on every page, but on many) of all of those. The audio version of Cricket read by Tony Shalhoub is good, too. The Hobbit does have a lot of descriptive passages, but it also has a lot of action (we did this one at 4, I wouldn't start with it). We also read My Father's Dragon and a couple by George MacDonald--all of his stuff is good.

@Rainbow Sprinkles: I the Betsy-Tacy books!

ETA: Oh, and both before and after we read, I tried to mention how much I liked the book/chapter/character/whatever just happened. Enthusiasm is contagious!