best children's books
Booktrust, “an independent charity set up in 1921 to encourage people of all ages to read,” has recently polled British readers and come up with a list of the fifty best children’s books. The top twenty:
1 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C S Lewis
2 The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
3 Famous Five series, Enid Blyton
4 Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
5 The BFG, Roald Dahl
6 Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J K Rowling
7 The Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
8 The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
9 Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
10 The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson
11 The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter
12 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
13 Matilda, Roald Dahl
14 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
15 The Cat in the Hat, Dr Suess
16 The Twits, Roald Dahl
17 Mr Men, Roger Hargreaves
18 A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
19 The Malory Towers Series, Enid Blyton
20 Peter Pan, J M Barrie
The best news, as far as I am concerned, is that there are six Roald Dahl books among the fifty. Good taste is not yet eradicated. And I am in absolute agreement with the list that The BFG is the best of them.
Further thoughts: first, books for younger readers shouldn’t be mixed with books for teenagers (The Very Hungry Caterpillar seems an outlier here, even though it really is great of its kind; Peter Rabbit too). Second, I wouldn’t have thought Enid Blyton would go so high: Ahead of Pooh? Ahead of Alice? Ahead of The Wind in the Willows? (I personally would have put Willows at the very top, but then, of all “children’s classics” it’s the one most loved by adults.) And third: I wonder what an equivalent American list would look like?
No Diana Wynne Jones?
— Freddie · Feb 22, 05:28 AM · #
Friends of ours came over the other day with a book for our son called Archy the Flying Dolphin. It’s quite a cute little story. I was surprised how much I liked it. Our son adores it. They even brought over a little dolphin for him and named him Archy.
Such a good book – give it a read it’s worth it!
http://archytheflyingdolphin.com/default.aspx
— Chrissy · Feb 22, 06:15 AM · #
Hmph. They left out Watership Down. It was one my boys asked for more than once back when they were young and I used to read to them every night. There was one condition I placed on their requests. They had to be something I enjoyed, too. This one met that criterion. (So did some others in that list, including the Chronicles of Narnia.)
— The Reticulator · Feb 22, 06:26 AM · #
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that ‘The Little Prince’ & HC Andersen are the only non-English books on the list, but then sometimes it gets a little insular when one is the center of the universe.
I grew up liking non-English classics like Erich Kastner books, ‘Heart’ by Edmondo de Amicis, or the Pal Street Boys.
Also, where’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’?
[I don’t have kids yet, so I don’t know how these books play out now]
— Danny · Feb 22, 08:31 AM · #
I know this makes me an oddity, but I can’t abide Dr. Seuss books. They’re clever and a bit endearing the first time through, ok the second, but after that, I start hiding them so I don’t have to read them again. And, no, I don’t want them with a fox in a box…
— Michael Simpson · Feb 22, 02:20 PM · #
Enid Blyton — how very Brit. I only ever saw her books, as a kid, in India, and I wonder if most Americans have even heard of her? Surely the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew would replace her in a US list.
How can this list not have Richard Scarry on it? I guess maybe it’s hard to pick out a single work from the oeuvre. And where’s Goodnight, Moon? Or David A. Carter?
And of course the list is populated by asking old farts like us. There’s still truly superior new kids fiction, and I certainly think for toddlers the works of Graeme Base — see The Water Hole in particular — are as good as anything. And there’s Falconer’s Olivia!
— Sanjay · Feb 22, 02:53 PM · #
Does no one read Lois Lowry in the UK? The Giver? Number the Stars? Come on, people.
— right · Feb 22, 04:15 PM · #
Have to butt in and say that the greatest work of Dr. Seuss is far and away a book called Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, which too few people are familiar with. Every page is brilliance.
And to my memory of being a 10-year-old, Dahl’s masterpiece was George’s Marvelous Medicine, in which a poor kid who has to take care of his nasty grandmother decides to substitute her medicine with random household chemicals.
— Chris Floyd · Feb 22, 05:12 PM · #
2/3 of the Enid Blyton entries are for series rather than individual books. I wonder how many people who gave the “Famous Five” series as their answer can name a specific book from the series. I must have read them all multiple times, and I can’t summon a single title from my memory. (Only the Comic Strip’s “Five Go Mad in Dorset.”)
— Gavin Weaire · Feb 22, 07:23 PM · #