TOVE JANSSON lived on a tiny island on the lip of the Arctic Circle, so it's not surprising that she was pretty keen on summertime. Her characters - the Moomins - hibernate all winter. The stories she wrote about them are intoxicated with the thrill of summer, and with the joy of making the most of something that passes too quickly.

Jansson was a cartoonist and illustrated the Moomin books herself with a series of woodcuts full of mysterious shadows and bug-eyed details. Finn Family Moomintroll (Puffin, £4.99/offer £4.74) is probably the best place to start.

Reading is usually a solitary pleasure and these days the market tries to divide us into ever narrower categories (“Pre-teen Girls With Access to Ponies”/“Pubescent Goths with Broadband” etc). Kick against the demographic.

Don't stop reading to your children just because they can read for themselves. If you read them something funny, you get all the laughs and they think you are a comedy genius. Just William is the obvious choice, but the Nicholas stories are also brilliant. They are written by René Goscinny (Asterix) and illustrated by the sublime Sempé - a French cartoonist famous for his New Yorker covers. The sumptuous, beautiful English hardback editions published by Phaidon include Nicholas on Holiday (£12.95/£11.66).

If you do read aloud then you can nurse your children through something that might be hard for them to appreciate on their own. There are no funner books in the language than E. Nesbit's Bastable stories - The Story of the Treasure Seekers (Puffin, £4.99/£4.74) and The New Treasure Seekers (“the recipe said to wash the raisins - I sometimes think we did not get all the soap off”) but the antiquated language and long sentences can be offputting.

You could even try P.G.Wodehouse - the Blandings books (such as Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, Arrow, £7.99/£7.59) have pigs in them and pigs are funny no matter what age you are. If you have teenagers who resist the idea of being read to, then leave Gideon Defoe's hilarious The Pirates! books (the most recent is The Pirates! In An Adventure With Napoleon, Weidenfeld, £7.99/£7.59) lying around and they will end up sitting on the end of your bed, in the wee small hours, trying to read bits to you between fits of uncontrollable laughter.

Of course it doesn't have to be funny to be read aloud. If you want to feel like a proper storyteller, you can't beat Geraldine McCaughrean's retelling of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (OUP, £5.99/£5.69). She uses the Scheherazade story to give the tales an urgency and tension that gets lost in other versions.

And it doesn't have to be read aloud to be shared. Books that had people pounding on the bathroom door yelling: “I know you're reading!” in this house include Eva Ibbotson's hallucinogenically vivid Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan, £5.99/£5.69) and Elizabeth Laird's riveting Secrets of the Fearless (Macmillan, £5.99/£5.69).

But for me, the ultimate summer thriller has to be Philippa Pearce's Minnow on the Say (OUP, £5.99/£5.69). It's an adventure story about two boys using a canoe to search for a lost treasure on the canals and backwaters of their town. It's brilliantly plotted, surprisingly emotional, and held together by a verse puzzle that keeps you guessing to the very end.An epic of childhood freedoms - ad hoc picnics, tree climbing, and time-wasting.

From the Times Archive: 1977 review of Minnow on the Say by Philippa Pearce

The other book that captures that freedom is The Far Distant Oxus (republished by Fidra Books next month, £12/£10.80). It is set during a riding holiday on Exmoor, and my children loved not only the story but also the fact that it was written by two teenage girls - Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock - while they were on just such a holiday. It was published with the help of Arthur Ransome.

From the Times Archive: 1937 review of The Far Distant Oxus by Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock

The opposite of the adventure yarn is surely the Milly-Molly-Mandy story where the plot can be “Milly-Molly-

Mandy fried some onions” and the twist is “they tasted really nice”. These stories, collected in The Adventures of Milly-Molly-Mandy (Puffin, £6.99/

£6.64), have a reputation for being twee but in fact they're minimalist miracles, comforting and compelling.

As a writer I'm astonished time and again by how she manages to get so much out of so little. One of the greatest gifts that I gained from reading as a child was that it alerted me to those small, healing pleasures.

When I see a coffee pot on the table, I'm taken right back to the Moomin house. Hot buttered toast makes me think of Mr Toad in jail. That I can enjoy the panic and chaos of a family day out is partly thanks to The Family From One End Street.

In an age when excess is wrecking the planet without seeming to make anyone happier, stories celebrating life's smallest pleasures are not just comforting, but also timely and subversive.

Summer can be about fabulous adventures. But it can also be about spending time on ordinary things, and Milly-Molly-Mandy is the poet of hanging out the washing, or making a loaf. Bedtime reading for slow-living revolutionaries.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a Carnegie Medal-winning children's author and screenwriter. His latest book is Cosmic.

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