Happy Mother’s Day to you, if it applies, and to your mother, because it’s fun to say “Your mother” and mean it in a nice way. My Mother’s Day started off with my going back to bed with a migraine (fucker) and then getting back up once I was firmly in the embrace of painkillers to enjoy having my children and husband make me breakfast and give me gifts.
One of my gifts, from Freebird: The Mommy Book, by Todd Parr: “Some mommies work at home. Some mommies work in big buildings. All mommies love to watch you sleep.” I love the Parr books, especially The Daddy Book, which we read all the time with Freebird. Baba O’Riley gave me a copy of The Family Book, which is terribly sweet and made me smile-cry with the pictures of families of different colors and sizes. My favorite part was the page about how some families look like each other, and some families look like their pets. If I look like our pets, we are so screwed. And hairy. Very very hairy.
Since my gifts were books – oh, how my family knows me! – I got to thinking, what are your favorite children’s books of the very-young-child variety? There are some that are incredibly old but stand up for repeated tellings even when they’re nearly 80. Ferdinand the Bull was published in 1936, and I remember having my own copy when I was a kid.
Other books that are mainstays of the home library are Goodnight Moon, Guess How Much I Love You (though thanks to The Sneeze I sometimes say, “little brown nut-hair,” which is awful and funny), and I Love You, Goodnight.
What about you, and your bookshelf? What books form the corners of your childhood memories? And what books do you pass along to children in your life?
Oh, I had forgotten Put Me in the Zoo! I remember reading that one to my little brother. And my 21-year-old son, who was reading this over my shoulder, insists that I second “anything by Maurice Sendak.” He always liked In the Night Kitchen best, he says now.
He also says we should chime in on The Monster at the End of This Book. It was among the kids’ favorites, but I wasn’t allowed to read it—only Grandpa could do the right Grover voice, so it came out when he visited (about once a year) and got read dozens of times while he was there. Same thing with How the Grinch Stole Christmas—if Grandpa was visiting for Christmas, out it came for multiple re-readings. If not, just watch the TV version, Mom.
I have to say that Love Your Forever is a weird one for me, too. It makes me get all weepy and sad, and I can’t say I find it “stalker-ish,” but I didn’t read it to my kids much. It was a gift from another couple when my middle daughter was born, and I think I read it once to her older siblings (then 8 and 5) when we first got it. But it never got to them the way it got to me.
The Velveteen Rabbit
The Sandra Boynton Books
Where the Wild Things Are
Nightmare in My Closet
Nightmare in My Attic ? is that it?
How Does a Dinosaur Say Goodnight
And just aboutting with pigs in it…. Olivia, fer example
BTW- that was “just about anything”
I have a fondness for Belinda’s Bouquet by Leslea Newman (she of Heather Has Two Mommies). BELINDA’S BOUQUET is for a child who may be overweight or small or otherwise teased about her size. The wise woman in the book tells her that the garden is full of flowers, each beautiful in their own way: the tall, skinny irises and the short, chubby pansies, and all the rest.
children58 is the word in the box below on Mother’s Day!
I have my original copy of Horton Hatches the Egg. My dad doesn’t need it anymore, as he still has it memorized.
Other books that come to mind that no one has mentioned:
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Millions of Cats
My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes
good night28…
As a kid I had a nicely illustrated set of Just So Stories by Kipling – those were my favorites especially the one about the Elephant’s Child.
I liked Richard Scarry and anything illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, and Dr. Seuss.
Now that I’m older I read a lot more picture books than I did as a child. I like a recent one called Thank you, Bear, and find Lois Ehlert’s books fun to read aloud.
Bear Snores On goes over *great* with my storytime folks. I love Thatcher Hurd’s Art Dog, Dav Pilkey’s Dogzilla and Kat Kong, a recent one by I forget who called “I would really like to eat a child” (about a crocodile who is a picky eater).
You guys have hit most of my favorites, especially Pat the Bunny. My mom favored darker children’s books, so I read Beastly Boys and Ghastly Girls by William Cole a lot to my younger sisters. All about rotten children meeting terrible fates, but very cleverly done. Couldn’t find a copy when my kids were of an age to need (er, appreciate) being threatened.
P.S. Thanks for changing the default setting for the notify box. Half the time I forget to un-check it.
Guess How Much I Love You is a tearjerker for me. I have to be honest and say I find Love You Forever kind of creepy. Also, I dislike *any* book that tries to manipulate your emotions too obviously, and I feel that book does.
Love Dr. Seuss, esp. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Also Little Bear, and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, which I’ve read nine nights running now to a certain four year old who can’t get enough…
Are You My Mother was the very first book I ever read on my own! I’d gotten tired of waiting for my mom to have time, so I did it myself. That’s also the reason I tied my shoes myself for the first time, and made my bed myself, and got dressed myself. Man, she was slow. 🙂
My siblings and I also tore through Dr. Seuss and Beatrix Potter.
I think our favourite for several years was Seuss’ Bartholomew and the Oobleck. We sure dug that green slime.
In Grade 2, my teacher read Johanna Spyri’s Heidi to us, a chapter a day, and I got all impatient and started reading ahead. I can still remember Heidi and her grandfather munching down on bread with cheese melted on a shovel by the fire. Mmmm.
I never got into Nancy Drew, but I LOVED Trixie Belden. And I read Laura Ingalls Wilder into tatters. (As an adult, I CANNOT STAND those Ingalls.)
In elementary school, I read a novel called Jancy, after the title character, a boy in Hungary prior to WWI, and its sequel The Singing Tree. I’ve been looking for those books ever since. They seem to be out of print and forgotten.
And Louisa May Alcott, who wrote a swack of books suitable for pre-teens.
Okay, stopping now…
volume54! Oh, I have WAY more than that!
The Littel Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and THE BIG HUNGRY BEAR by Don and Audrey Wood was one of my favorites, and my son loves it now, too. We still have my old copy from the 80s!
Also, I adore The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway. Such a fun book!
I could never stand Love You Forever as a kid. I’ve never read it as an adult, and can’t say I’ve ever been particularly inspired to do so.
I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living my baby you’ll be. That’s what came to mind as soon as I read your post and I see I’m not the only one. I gave that to my mom one year for Christmas long before I had kids of my own.
I was very fortunate to have a dad who worked in the publishing industry when I was a child so there were always tons of books around. Victoria’s Pocket, A House is a House for Me, The Snowy Day, Arthur’s Christmas Cookies, and so many others I can’t even think of. My dad’s been gone 15 years now, but I have a box of books he showed me when I was a teenager and said they were for my kids when I had them. I get all sniffly now when I’m able to take out a book and say Papa John gave you this.
I love the Sandra Boynton books. I’ll add Each Peach Pear Plum and The Hungry Caterpillar which I don’t think have been mentioned.
For older kids, Roald Dahl, Anne of Green Gables and Edith Nesbit.
People already named some of my favorites (Dr.Suess, Ronald Dahl, Shel Silverstein) but noticed a few missing:
Wayside Stories
The Bernstein Bears (I think I learned morality from those suckers)
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? (genius!)
Goosebumps (mostly my brother, but I read a few)
*Does anyone remember the girl with pig puppets, and she was going to sell them, and then she lvoed them so much she couldn’t? (I read a lot of books about pigs when I was younger)
*The series where you turn to page 17 if you think he went left, pg. 49 if she went right
then, of course, Judy Blume
And I agree. I Love You Forever was creepy.
Ok, got to find my old boxes of books this summer!
This is enough to draw me out of lurkdom. My kids are now in their early teens, but I just loved reading to them when they were small and now I love hearing all about their latest book find.
We read and reread all the usuals ( Seuss, Boynton, Milne). One author no one mentioned yet is Kevin Henkes. We loved Chrysanthemum and Owen even more than Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse.
He’s even written some novels for young readers that my daughter loved. In that vein, there’s also Andrew Clements, the author of The Report Card. I read it to my daughter when she was home sick from school and feeling rather low. I think that book totally changed my then 4th graders view of school and grades.
I’m lucky that I have very young nieces that I get to read to now
“Harold and the Purple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson
“The Animal Family” by Randall Jarrell
My father ruined me by giving me the “Charles Addams’ Mother Goose”. Normal was never to be my milieu.
These are the three that resonate most with my childhood. Since I don’t have kids of my own, I give these to friends’ children. Each of these books is out of the ordinary, celebrating the individual and each person’s quirks.
orangehands, you’re thinking of The Wonderful Pigs of Jillian Jiggs by Phoebe Gillman. I wanted one of those pigs so badly – I’m pretty sure I made one when I was small but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the ones in the book.
I gotta say, my son LOVES the Mo Willems books (Pigeon, Edwina, Piggy, and Gerald are particular favs), Jane Yolen’s How Do Dinosaurs…? books, and Kevin Henke’s Kitten’s First Full Moon. Oh, and of course The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.
I love kid books!
My favorite book when I was little was totally, hands down, Under the Moon – NOT to be confused with Goodnight Moon, because Under the Moon was (astonishingly, I know) a million times better. It was about these two mice – a mother and her child – as they were finding their way home, and the mother kept on asking, “Is this where we live?” and the child would respond with all these amazing descriptors and eventually say, “No, this is not where we live, we live under the moon!” or something like that (it’s been a while, okay?) – and I just loved it, because everything was so real and the illustrations were gorgeous.
The Velveteen Rabbit still makes me cry when I read it. I get so sad when the bunny is sad and so happy when he is happy. I also loved The Last Little Puppy and a book called Marshmallow that was about a white bunny. It wasn’t until after I got real pet bunnies a few years ago that I did like a lot of rabbit books when I was a kid. Funny, that.
Don’t have kids, not sure we ever will. All my favorite books and toys were animal related, never dolls or people. I think that’s also relevant to who I am today. Hmmm….
One of my favorite books is The Paper Bag Princess by Munch! I’m so envious that you have a signed edition. I also adore Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney and The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.
The Monster at the End of This Book (starring Lovable Furry Old Grover!) is my favorite book I read as a kid, and my favorite book to read to a kid. You can have a lot of fun getting the kids to “turn the page really hard” to overcome all the obstacles Grover puts up, and in the end when he’s so sheepish they always burst out in giggles.
When I went away to college, I made a tape of myself reading that book for my little brother back home.
Oddly enough, I remember having a version as a kid that was a little bit longer than the Golden Books version they have out now, with more obstacles (at one point he paints the page blue and hides in it). I’ve been looking for years for the copy I remember, but no luck.
And I love Tommy dePaola and William Steig and Richard Scarry – the illustrations are great. My very favorite book when I was little was the Disney version of Peter Pan. I had it memorized by age 3. I also really liked this book called something like “Over the rolling sea” that was a song. I remember part of it “Rolling over, rolling under, while the captain roared like thunder, ‘stand at attention like a soldier’, counting one-two-three.” Something about the illustrations, lions and other animals as pirates, captivated me. And I was facinated by the classic children’s book People by Peter Speir.
I bought the Boy Who Loved Words for a friend recently. The pop-up book Tails is a good one too.
Sheesh. I could talk about children’s books all day! When I have a house I’m going fill it floor to ceiling with children’s books. (Don’t tell my husband!)
My favorite for older children (late elementary-middle school) are:
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (NOT the same as the horrid movie of the same name with Steve Martin)
The Dark is Rising Sequence: Over Sea Under Sky, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper (Also NOT the horrid movie looooosely based on the Dark is Rising.)
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
Juniper and Wise Child by Monica Furlong
Matilda by Roald Dahl
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
Peter Pan by Sir J. M. Barrie
A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (NOT the same as the horrid movie of the same name with Steve Martin)
I thought I was the only one in the world who had read that book! The tone was so different from the movie (I’m thinking of the movie from the 1950s; never seen the more recent version). As in many cases with books made into movies, I thought the book was far better.
I thought of another book my daughter loved as a toddler: Tell Me Something Happy Before I Go to Sleep. The illustrations were fantastic and I was quite sad when my kid killed that book one day (she loves “experiments”).
Thank you, Bitches, thank you!
I have two girls aged 3 and 1 and am always desperate for new books to borrow to read to them. This list will keep me going for MONTHS!
My personal experience is obviously in the very young bracket … Annika’s favourite book of all time is Koala Lou, by Australian author, Mem Fox. “I love you, Annika Lou” is our nighttime signoff, in fact.
Next favourites are any and all of the Hairy McClary books (NZ author Lynley Dodd) and a very old favourite my husband had as a boy, The Quangle Wangle’s Hat by Edward Lear.
And The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Guess How Much I Love You. Owl Babies. Down in the Jungle. Farmyard Hullabaloo …
The little one has just in the last month or so really got into books and is currently most taken with anything with real photos. The Bright Baby books “farm”, “puppies”, “bunnies” actually leave her in gales of laughter!
My kids love Sendak, Silverstein, and Seuss. They’ve also got a couple of Disney collections.
I didn’t know much about kid’s books until after my first baby. My grandmother was of the opinion that reading was a waste of time and any time spent reading was pure self-indulgent laziness. Didn’t matter what sort of book it was either, novel or text book was all the same to her. I think, knowing my self as I do, that it’s part of the reason I often enjoyed reading so much as a child. A bit of rebellion, but mostly just my plain contrary nature. In some ways, I guess I can’t really blame her. Her mother was so uptight that she pulled her out of school after one day of class because the teacher was a man. That one day was all the schooling she ever had so she never did see much use in educating women. Though I do think there was a part of her that envied us our education and opportunities because she was never given the choice. There were no kids books or bedtime stories around my house. When I had my son I decided that he was going to have all that. That I was going to encourage my children to love reading as much as their father and I do. I got my son on of those leap pads when he was still too young for it, but he loved it right off and was reading by the age of 2. He’s 9 now and he just loves to read. His heathen younger brother can’t sit still long enough to read more than 10 pages in one go and so he finds reading to be boring and take too long. Figures!
In addition to all the classics listed above, here are some of my family’s favorites:
My children really loved Curious George – we have two large hardback books with most (if not all) of those stories.
Beatrix Potter – my late MIL gave us a collection of tiny hard back editions. These are wonderful because there is a wonderful range in age – some are very short and simple and others are longer and more complex. The Tale of a Fierce Bad Rabbit is a favorite of my son’s.
Frances the badger by Russel Hoban – Bread and Jam for Frances, Bedtime for Frances, Best Friends for Frances, etc.
I cannot read Love You Forever – it makes me cry. But I also find it manipulative. I deliberately made it creepy in my head so I could get through it. It got “lost” when we moved…
Oh! Forgot to add a more modern favorite: Julia Donaldson. My kids love The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo’s Child, Monkey Puzzle, Room on the Broom, and The Snail and the Whale. I like them because I like reading in verse 🙂
Okay, I had to chime in.
Anything by Ezra Keats but especially A Snowy Day
Anything by Don and Audrey Woods: A Napping House, King Begood’s Bath, the “Bear” story as it’s called around here.
We Girls hold up the World by Jada Pinkett Smith. I usually don’t like celebrity books but this has a great message.
Don’t forget Patricia Palacco who makes me cry and think every time I read one of her books
Also pretty much anything by Martin Waddell. I think my favourite was ‘Rosie’s Babies’ where a little girl is talking to her mum about her babies – stuffed toys – and what she does with them. Really she’s trying to keep her mum’s attention from their baby. He has that quality of being nice to read aloud, and saying a lot with the words he chooses.
And Jill Murphy – books like ‘Five Minutes Peace’ where the mummy elephant is trying, against all the odds, to have a quiet moment.
I agree about the Ahlberg books – we reread those endlessly – books like ‘Peepo’ and ‘The Baby’s Catalogue’ and, at a slightly later stage, Burglar Bill and the Happy Families series.
Also – really unsuitable for babies, but they love it – the ‘Most Amazing Hide-and-Seek Alphabet Book’ by Robert Crowther. We had two copies, neither of which survived unscathed, but every child I ever read it to loved it. The letters are in large black font about three to the page, and then animals pop out from each letter. It’s lovely.
And the Spot books, of course.
No kids yet, but my favourite books as a child were;
the Grug books (possibly only in Australia)
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Moo, Baa, lalala
Dr Seuss, especially Green Eggs and Ham, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Where the Wild Things are
Possum Magic by Mem Fox
and Enid Blyton and Dianna Wynne Jones as I got older.
Unfortunatly we gave alot of our kids books away when we moved a few years ago… I still haven’t completely forgiven Mum for that…
->I loved Shel Silverstine (specifically his poem about breaking dishes)
-> My ma and da read me lots of poetry, some of my favs were Anabelle Lee by Poe(LOVED THAT ONE BEYOND BELIEF), The Children’s Hour, and The Highway Man, and the Smuggle’s Song by Kipling(i think)
-> I loved when they would read me from Genisus, they had different translations that they would read and so I got to hear the same stuff but in diffrent words, love it
-> Blinda, or the cat who wore a pot on her head (not sure about who wrote it)
-> The Gorilla Did it by Barbara Shook Hazen
->My Mama Says There Aren’t Any Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, Demons, Monsters, Fiend by Judith Voist
->
Oh, there was on that I loved the illustrations – It was about looking for some majecikal rabbit, and at the end of the book the authors said that they had actually hidden a jeweled rabbit that the book was a treasure map for. I would love to get a copy of the book cause the illustrations were so excellent, but neither ma nor I can remember the actual name or author.
It had very little text, but I remember just staring at the illustrations for hours and hours and hours and sometimes trying to reproduce them, which given that I have absolutely NO artistic talent, never turned out well. Well, also as an adult looking back, I think trying to reproduce what must have been oil paintings or something equally cool in crayon and marker might have contributed some to the awfulness of my attempted reproductions.
Its funny, but I never tried to reproduce any other art from any other book, so that one must have hit SOMEWHERE special.
The Pokey Little Puppy and In a People House. Still have them, gonna give them to my step-son’s kids someday, I hope.
I’m not sure why they stuck with me, but those two I IMMEDIATELY thought of as kid’s books.
For YA, I got my neice Robin McKinley’s Blue Sword duo, LOVE those stories. Also, The Black Arrow, which I read several times, even though it’s not the most kid-friendly writing.
I’m glad you asked! I could go on for days. I was raised on a steady diet of classics—Goodnight Moon, A.A. Milne poems, Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Margaret Wise Brown, and Rumer Godden.
However, the single most important book of all time is Carl Sandburg’s The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was In It, which my father used to read to me when I was three, and which my parents tracked down for me last Christmas, twenty years later.
In the front of the book there’s a picture of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle on a swing together, and I don’t care what my mother says, I want that image on my wedding invitations.
My kids liked Fredrick and A Color of His Own by Leo Leoni as well as most all of Eric Carle’s books.
My favorites as a kid were Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches and a book about a little ghost called Georgie. Can’t recall who wrote that one.
My favorites are Mo Willems’ Pigeon books, anything by William Steig, and the Frances books (especially the one where Frances gets cheated out of the money she saved to buy a tea set. Best line “Do you want to be friends or do you want to be careful?”) I also love Velveteen Rabbit, Make Way for Ducklings, and books by Peggy Rathmann.
My current favorite is Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyer and Marla Frazee. I love books that Marla illustrates.
I must agree with those who find Love You Forever creepy. He’s a grown man and she’s sneaking into his house to rock him to sleep? Where’s his wife when all this is going on? And The Giving Tree makes me angry. I always substitute “tree” for “girl/woman”, and the way he treats her makes me hate the story.
My mom read WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS and ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS to me and my brother when we were little. Those two books still leave me an emotional wreck. So good.
My daughter loves GOODNIGHT, DINOSAURS and THE MOUSERY. Also WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.
Anyone mentioned Cynthia Voight’s HOMECOMING?
We (and the kiddos both) love Mommy Hugs, and the companion book Daddy Kisses. The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear are always a hit too. If you don’t mind books being destroyed we’re on our third copy of The Wheels on the Bus papercraft book. And the littler one loves the touch & feel books (animals, shapes, etc.)
If you want a real book, that’s a bit longer, Pooh is a great one. Alice in Wonderland is for a bit older kids.
These are all books that I can still read for the 1000th time without wanting to kill myself. Unlike, for example, The Big Red Barn, which makes me want to rip my hair out (although the kids love it).
For later, I still fondly recall Swallows and Amazons, Dr. Dolittle, and too many others to list.
I blogged about a couple of my favorites (and my kids’) here: Some Classic Children’s Books – the Flip series, by Wesley Dennis (hmm, probably why my 6 y.o. is starting riding lessons this summer), and “A Fish Out of Water”, by Helen Palmer & P.D. Eastman.
And no one’s mentioned Virginia Lee Burton (I still can’t get through “The Little House” without choking up, and how environmentally prescient was she?), or “I Am a Bunny” (Ole Rissom & Richard Scarry), or “The Golden Egg Book” (Patricia Scarry) or “Go Dog, Go” (also P.D. Eastman), which my daughter just realized she could read all by herself – “Do you like my hat?” “I do not.” and then finally, “I do. I do like that party hat!” 🙂
For Suze: It was the Good Master by Kate Seredy about Janzy and Cousin Kate. I found it on Alibris.
I loved the original Cheaper by the Dozen and also I Remember Mama.
All of Mo Williams, but maybe the Knuffle Bunny and it’s sequel are my favorites.
Also, if any of you bloggers are interested in classics for older kids, check out The Newbery Project. I swear I had flashbacks reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Hero and the Crown, A Wrinkle in Time, and Julie of the Wolves.