My third book recommendation of seven (a friend asked me to recommend some books a while ago) is a book that you'd hardly find on any university reading list, but which I read so many times as a child, that it's a wonder that my copy is still in one piece. 
Carol Carrick's "What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs", published some 32 years ago, is a beautifully illustrated children's book in which a young boy named Patrick is told by his older brother that all dinosaurs became extinct more than 60 million years ago, ...
... but instead of accepting this fact, he imagines a different past in which dinosaurs and humans were great friends, sharing this world and everything in it together.
I went through a massive dinosaur phase as a child, but this is one of only two dinosaur related books that I've kept from my childhood. Looking through it again, it's not hard to say why.
The illustrations are beautifully done, and the story in itself is both whimsical and fun. If you have children and you manage to get hold of a copy of this book, do buy it, and read it to them - I promise that they will love it.
