WASHINGTON — Children love the Harry Potter books, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling’s books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites by Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton and Harper Lee as the most read.
Books by those U.S. authors drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning website to take quizzes on books they read last year.
Overall, Dr. Seuss’ madly rhyming “Green Eggs and Ham” was the most popular first-grade book. Other favorites:
• Second-graders: Laura Numeroff’s “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
• Third-graders: White’s “Charlotte’s Web.”
• Fourth-graders: Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”
• Fifth-graders: Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia.”
• Sixth-graders: Gary Paul sen’s “Hatchet.”
The most read book among seventh- and eighth-graders was “The Outsiders,” a story of rival gangs in Tucson published in 1967 when its author, Hinton, was 18 years old.
