One of life's great pleasures is to read or recommend a book you've loved to your child. In the early years, when they can't read to themselves, you hold all the cards - credit and library.

You can indulge yourself completely with those beautifully illustrated children's books, especially the soppy ones that bring tears to your eyes with their tales about how much the mommy rabbit loves the baby rabbit.

This doesn't last long, because at about two, your child develops a will of her own and, often, an obsessive streak. She will decide that there is but one book that she likes, and that you will read it 45 times a day. This is the main reason most women go back to full-time employment. If you're lucky, your two-year-old will at least pick something halfway bearable. If not, you might be reading Fascinating Facts about Camels for three months. No matter, you'll dread them all equally after a bit.

That phase passes, and reading to your child becomes a pleasure again. A few years on, they start to learn to read. Dan and Spot and Pip will be your new friends, as they hop and jump and skip. Dr Seuss is one of the few who can make all this monosyllabic activity entertaining.

Thereafter, your reading paths diverge. In primary school, children turn to magic kittens and unicorns and princesses. Or soccer stories and boy detectives and fart jokes. As they get a bit older, there will be mean girls and bullies, divorced parents.

There will be lots of tales of kids relocating to new towns where they are outsiders and no one likes them. There will be vampires and wizards and confusing plots involving parallel universes. Not to say some of these books aren't excellent, but they tend to leave parents rather cold. And no, nobody will be interested in reading The Secret Garden, or whatever your own childhood favourite was, so don't even try. You will find yourself saying, "At least she's reading ..." quite often. If you're lucky.

Then, joy of joys, your reading paths converge again. If you are fortunate, and your child hasn't had her brain reprogrammed by the BlackBerry, at about 14 she will start reading adult books. This has happened recently in my family. I gave my 14-year-old daughter The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

She loved the memoir of life with two non-conformist, creative and charismatic but deeply dysfunctional parents. Walls's parents' inability or unwillingness to play by the rules (as well as a worsening alcoholism) left their four children neglected and deprived, living in cars and shacks.

The author grew up smart and resourceful, though, and escaped her upbringing to carve a career as a journalist in New York. The book has many lessons for a young person, and has the additional benefit of making your own parenting look positively saintly by comparison.

Another winning recommendation was The Catcher in the Rye. It may not be the startlingly radical and controversial book it was in the 1950s, but Salinger's narrator, Holden Caulfield, remains a powerful portrait of adolescent angst.

And reading the book myself, as the mother of a teen, there was an added poignancy to Holden's loneliness and depression and his vulnerability in a harsh world. That it touched us both, 60 years after its publication, is testament to its power.