R eading a favourite book from your childhood together with the children in your life can be a lovely experience for adults and children alike. In addition to cozy bonding time, classic children’s books can help broaden children’s horizons and vocabulary, and provide an opportunity to discuss history and how attitudes have changed.
“I find it odd that people don’t realise how revolutionary this book is…It was the first book that gave consciousness and personality to an animal, which is the horse, Black Beauty. It is narrated in the first person and is supposedly his autobiography. Black Beauty starts off life with a loving mother and great happiness and a good owner. Then he gets sold from one person to another and it is a terrible tragic story of the erosion of happiness and health, until finally, when broken-down and near death from ill-treatment, he is rescued. So it is a story of paradise lost, and regained.” Read more...
Books that Changed the World
Amanda Craig ,
Journalist
“This is the very first book I fell in love with. I just adored The Wind in the Willows . It was first read to me and then I read it and took it into school to be read. I really loved the cosy chapters in particular. There are two sides to The Wind in the Willows . There are the Toad chapters where he is out having adventures. But there is also a big theme in the book which is about home” Read more...
Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
Melvin Burgess ,
Children's Author
“I read this book when I was about 10 or 11. I love the idea of a secret place — of having a key to a place where nobody else can go. Of all the books that have had an impact on my consciousness, this has had the biggest — although I didn’t realise it at the time. When I first read it, I read it on a superficial level — a recently orphaned girl is sent to stay with distant relatives, there is a mystery, there is a cool kid who knows about gardening and there is a sick kid. But it has stayed in my head in a way that other books haven’t. The redemptive power of the natural world and gardening was something that struck a chord with me, because it was absent from my life — I didn’t garden.” Read more...
The Best Nature Books for Kids
M G Leonard ,
Children's Author
“It’s about, of course, a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a strange world populated by strange creatures. You’d have to be a zombie to miss the humour in it – it’s hilarious. Although the book is ancient the humour feels modern.” Read more...
The best books on Comic Writing
Larry Doyle ,
Comedians & Humorist
“This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could see the details up close, at human scale. The Hobbit is both mythic and relatable at the same time – The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik called it ‘an arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and The Wind in the Willows’, and I think that’s entirely fair. Though I would give more credit to the bass register of Tolkien’s imagination, its abyssal depths. Mole never delved as deep as the Mines of Moria.” Read more...
The best books on Fantasy
Lev Grossman ,
Novelist
“Howl’s Moving Castle made such an impression on me when I read it for the first time, because I realised: This is what fantasy can be! This was in the 1980s and 1990s, when all the fantasy covers were big buff men holding swords, or wizards with lasers shooting out of their hands, and then you have Howl’s Moving Castle . It’s absolutely tremendous.” Read more...
The Best Cozy Fantasy Books
T.J. Klune ,
Novelist
“Everyone knows Lewis’s Narnia books are a foundational work of the modern fantastic. But I don’t think Lewis gets enough credit for his craft as a writer. Those books are deceptively simple. Look at the way he constructed the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . He puts the shadows of the war in the background, the excitement of a new house in the country in the foreground. Look at how he carefully sketches all the relationships between all four of the Pevensie children. And when he sends Lucy through the wardrobe (it’s on page five – he doesn’t waste time), it’s like nothing else in fiction up to that point. There are no sparkles, no wondrous rhetoric, just one precisely observed sensory detail after another” Read more...
The best books on Fantasy
Lev Grossman ,
Novelist
“Nina Bawden is a classic 1970s British author. Carrie’s War was a bit of an exception for her, because it was a fictionalised version of her own experience of being evacuated from London in World War Two. I think she’s brilliant. It’s a lovely book. It’s very moving. It’s been reprinted countless times, I think partly because it’s set in World War Two, and so many historical fiction books are published every year set in World War Two and World War One. Too many, perhaps, but I do love Carrie’s War .” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction for 8-12 Year Olds
Catherine Johnson ,
Children's Author
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