Open Thread: Favorite Children’s Book?
I Read Most Nights to My Daughter. Help Us Build Our TBR!
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, proved an ambitious reader from her childhood. Only five, she walked herself and her four-year-old brother to school every day to master the skill. “With the ability to read germinated the intense literary longing that was to be hers through life,” wrote her son, Charles Edward Stowe, in his biography of his mother.
Of course, it wasn’t always easy to find suitable books. “In those days but few books were specially prepared for children,” said Stowe. Harriet’s studious father stored castoff reading material in his attic library, and so, said Stowe, “at six years of age we find the little girl hungrily searching for mental food amid barrels of old sermons and pamphlets stored in a corner of the garret.”
Harriet scrounged in the barrels until she unearthed loose pages of Don Quixote and a complete copy of The Arabian Nights. Appropriate for kids? Sure. Why not? Her father was ambivalent about novels but made no protest. He even gave her a collection of Sir Walter Scott and insisted she read them. Harriet ran through Ivanhoe seven times in a single summer.
I recently thought about Stowe’s biography because my five-year-old daughter, Naomi, and I are working our way through various classics “specially prepared for children.” We’re halfway through Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and recently finished both L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
What should we read next?
We’ve been enjoying the Puffin Classics and are eyeing both Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. But maybe we should pick something else.
I’ve always read to my kids—all the usual suspects: The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, A Wrinkle in Time, James and the Giant Peach, The Indian in the Cupboard, Little House on the Prairie, Narnia, Harry Potter, The Mouse and the Motorcycle (which my mom read me), and countless others. There are so many options! But I know we’re missing some gems.
With years ahead of us and no clue where whim will take us, I’m hunting for suggestions. What books belong on Naomi’s Bedtime TBR? Leave your suggestions below and tell us what you love about them.
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Two newer series that we have really enjoyed are The Green Ember series by SD Smith and The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson. My kids have all listened to them multiple times. We also love Heidi, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Hobbit, and Trumpet of the Swan. We’ve also really enjoyed Little Pilgrim’s Progress illustrated by Joe Sutphin. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin is another favorite
Oh what a question to start the morning with! I was just saying to my twelve-year old yesterday that I miss reading together. He really loves the Narnia series (especially The Dawn Treader), which I assume you might alreay have read. We always used the Mensa Reading list for ideas:
Grade k-3 https://www.mensaforkids.org/achieve/excellence-in-reading/excellence-in-reading-k-3-list/
Grade 4-6 https://www.mensaforkids.org/achieve/excellence-in-reading/excellence-in-reading-4-6-list/.
Some of our favorites from there were Anne of Green Gables, The Borrowers, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Heidi. We also read any Roal Dahl and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking series) that we could get our hands on. How wonderful that Naomi gets to spend bedtime reading together with her dad!