When our kid was in daycare, my wife used to read ten picture books out loud every single night before bed. You know how it is with picture books — it's more pictures than text. She read them every single day, in her own voice, loud enough that I could hear it clearly from the living room, with real emotion in it.
One day I got curious about which books our kid kept picking, so I looked through them. There wasn't really a pattern in the content. But thinking it over, the pattern wasn't in the story at all. It was whichever books Mom had read with real feeling, really enjoying it. Those were the ones that always got picked.
For a kid, story time isn't really about the plot. It's the feeling that Mom's voice is close by, the reassurance of being the center of someone's attention. That's the real substance. Read the exact same book with excitement, and to the kid it means "Mom's having fun with me right now." Read it exhausted, and what comes through is "she wants this to be over." A kid can't read words yet, but they read that warmth perfectly.
I'm not saying you have to read ten books a night, grand as that sounds. Just one thing. Of whatever books get picked tonight, read the first three with genuine enthusiasm. The three you read while you've still got the energy. Those end up being the kid's favorites anyway.
What a kid remembers isn't the title of the book — it's the warmth of the voice that read it to them.