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Children's Books you still love to read today.

Books I still love to read today:

At the top of the list is 'The Dark is Rising' sequence by Susan Cooper. The imagery is amazing and it is not only a great, classic story, but it is very well written. The vocabulary and use of language is very good.

I also revisit Ursula K LeGuin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' trilogy. Same kudos as 'The Dark is Rising'.

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern was a great series I got into as a teen, as I did Tolkien. I still reread Tolkien about once a year, McCaffrey a little less often.

Diana Wyss-Jones Dalemark quartet was very good. I also enjoyed Lloyd Alexander's 'Book of Three' series.

For animal stories, Jim Kjelgard was my go-to guy. He wrote awesome dog stories and his book about a beaver called 'Chip the dam Builder' was wonderful. I also really liked Walt Morey.

Being a girl, I loved the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley. Sadly, that has not dated so well. I also really enjoyed the 'Little House on the Prairie' series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I think kids still can get into today.

LM Montgomery's 'Anne of Green Gables' still is on my shelf, along with all of Lousia May Alcott's writings.

Classics like Swiss Family Robinson, Bambi and Black Beauty also have places of honor.

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Pippi Longstocking and the Boxcar Children are fondly remembered though I don't read them anymore.

Lang's Fairy books also have a place on my current bookshelf.

Is it just me or are there a lot of really crappy kids books out there today?
 
At the top of the list is 'The Dark is Rising' sequence by Susan Cooper. The imagery is amazing and it is not only a great, classic story, but it is very well written. The vocabulary and use of language is very good.

I also revisit Ursula K LeGuin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea' trilogy. Same kudos as 'The Dark is Rising'.

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern was a great series I got into as a teen, as I did Tolkien. I still reread Tolkien about once a year, McCaffrey a little less often.

Diana Wyss-Jones Dalemark quartet was very good. I also enjoyed Lloyd Alexander's 'Book of Three' series.

For animal stories, Jim Kjelgard was my go-to guy. He wrote awesome dog stories and his book about a beaver called 'Chip the dam Builder' was wonderful. I also really liked Walt Morey.

Being a girl, I loved the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley. Sadly, that has not dated so well. I also really enjoyed the 'Little House on the Prairie' series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which I think kids still can get into today.

LM Montgomery's 'Anne of Green Gables' still is on my shelf, along with all of Lousia May Alcott's writings.

Classics like Swiss Family Robinson, Bambi and Black Beauty also have places of honor.

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, Pippi Longstocking and the Boxcar Children are fondly remembered though I don't read them anymore.

Lang's Fairy books also have a place on my current bookshelf.

Is it just me or are there a lot of really crappy kids books out there today?

I think cruddy kid books have always been around. 19th century educator Charlotte Mason advocated giving children whole books instead of the 'twaddle' marketed to children in her day. Whenever I see threads like this one, I notice the titles that get mentioned most are books that I believe would meet Miss Mason's 'twaddle-free' test.
 
Ok so my child hood wasn't that long ago, but I was cleaning my book shelf and came across my old Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel. It's of pure awesomeness.
 
At the top of the list is 'The Dark is Rising' sequence by Susan Cooper. The imagery is amazing and it is not only a great, classic story, but it is very well written. The vocabulary and use of language is very good.

Yes! That is such a great series. One of my favorites.

For the little ones I also love the I Can Read Books, like Danny and the Dinosaur, Amelia Bedelia, Mouse Tales, Harry and the Lady Next Door, Frog and Toad are Friends, etc... They instantly take me back to my childhood.
 
Here are 3 books that i read in my Childhood

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

2. The Diary of Anne Frank

3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 
The Secret Garden and A Little Princess are my two favourites from when I was young. I still take them out to read every once in a while. I also loved The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton. I also loved Anne of Green Gables.
 
Under the Autumn Garden - Jan Mark
Children of the Oregon Trail - A. Rutgers van der Loeff
Pillars of Crystal - Allan Watkins
Where The Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
Anne of Green Gables books - Lucy Maud Montgomery

To name a few that I own and still take a wander through from time to time.
 
The ones I still like to read now are:

The Magic Faraway Tree series.
A Little Princess
The Secret Garden
Harry Potter
The Chronicles of Narnia

I used to love the babysitters club series, sweet valley high, goosebumps and point horror but I don't have any of them to read. I used to get them from the library.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/b...thors-who-broke-the-rules.html?_r=1&ref=books

The stylistic eccentricities of Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Theodor Geisel, a k a Dr. Seuss, are so much a part of the childhood vernacular today that it’s hard to imagine their books were once considered by some to be wholly inappropriate for children.

Yet these three authors — who each have a new book coming out this month in what can only be described as a Seussian coincidence (“But, see! We are as good as you. Look! Now we have new books, too!”) — challenged the conception of what a children’s book should be. And children’s literature, happily, has never been the same.

Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.
...

Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”

Theirs were books that taught the wrong lessons and encouraged narcissistic misbehavior. In “Where the Wild Things Are” (1963), Sendak’s masterpiece, a child chases his dog with a fork and yells at his mother — only to be crowned king and served a hot dinner. “I developed characters who were like me as a child, like the children I knew growing up in Brooklyn — we were wild creatures,” Sendak said recently in a phone interview. “So to me, Max is a normal child, a little beast, just as we are all little beasts. But he upset a lot of people at the time.”

These were books that glorified absurdity and made children laugh at the wrong things. “There’s too many kids in this tub,” begins one Silverstein rhyme, “I just washed a behind / That I’m sure wasn’t mine / There’s too many kids in this tub.” Even the grammar is wrong.

Nor were these books especially childish. The Little Nemo-esque dream world Sendak concocted in “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) was inspired by the Holocaust of all ghoulish things. Its cheery bakers wear Hitler-esque mustaches and try to stuff a young boy named Mickey into an oven. Mickey, moreover, is brazenly naked, his genitalia accurately depicted alongside what some deemed “phallic” milk bottles and creamy baking ingredients. Was it a masturbatory fantasy sequence or an innocent dream about baked goods? The book predictably landed on the American Library Association’s list of the “most challenged books” of the 1990s.

But in 1970, Sendak became the first American to win the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for excellence in children’s book illustration. Still, his books didn’t sit easily in everyone’s idea of the nursery. His next big book, “Outside Over There” (1981), a not-so-cloaked parable of sibling rivalry, tells the story of a gang of goblins kidnapping a baby girl from under her sister’s watch. The book contains mysterious sexual overtones, with the older sister made rapturous by the proceedings.

“Can ‘Outside Over There’ really be a children’s book?” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt asked in The New York Times. “Is it appropriate for a children’s book to be raising such questions?” The book, he wrote in a largely laudatory review, had the “quality of nightmare,” and intimidated his “somewhat withered” inner child.

Shel Silverstein was similarly suspected of being child-unfriendly. In 1964, Silverstein had trouble finding someone to publish “The Giving Tree.” He had already sold one children’s book, “Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back,” but editors thought “The Giving Tree” fell into a nebulous and unpromising noncategory between children’s book and adult literature. “Look, Shel,” William Cole, an editor at Simon & Schuster, later recalled telling Silverstein, “the trouble with this ‘Giving Tree’ of yours is that . . . it’s not a kid’s book — too sad, and it isn’t for adults — too simple.” Another editor was even more dismissive: “That tree is sick! Neurotic!”

“Whimsical” was one word used to describe Silverstein. But it came with a B-side adjective: “weird.” This was a man who had drawn cartoons for Playboy, and who wrote the lyrics to Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue.”

Yet “The Giving Tree” went on to sell 8.5 million copies. It was embraced by Christians as a parable of selflessness and has been denounced by feminists as a patriarchal fantasy in morality-tale clothing. Ellen Handler Spitz, the author of the classic study “Inside Picture Books,” wrote that the story “perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists only to be used and the image of a male child who can offer no reciprocity, express no gratitude, feel no empathy — an insatiable creature who encounters no limits for his demands.”

With “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1974) and “A Light in the Attic” (1981), Silverstein turned another commercial noncategory — verse for children — into a bonanza. Like “The Muppet Show,” both books were a hit among grown-ups and children alike; “A Light in the Attic” spent 182 weeks on the New York Times general nonfiction best-seller list, including 14 weeks at No. 1.

Sendak and Silverstein had roots in the counterculture, but a deeper forerunner is another contrarian children’s book author, Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss. The son of prosperous German immigrants, Geisel studied at Dartmouth and Oxford and had a successful career in advertising promoting insecticide and Standard Oil (don’t tell the Lorax!) before turning to cartooning and then children’s literature. His first effort, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), a story that describes the wild fabrications a boy plans to tell his father before he ultimately tells the truth, was rejected 27 times before finding a publisher. He went on to Bartholomew Cubbins, Horton and the Grinch.

But the full flowering of his subversive genius came with “The Cat in the Hat” (1957), inspired by lists of words children could be expected to read. “How they compile these lists is still a mystery to me,” Seuss complained in an essay in The New York Times Book Review. The books recommended for young children, he complained, were far beneath their intellectual capacity.

And so “The Cat in the Hat” used only 223 different words of near monastic simplicity, showing that one could achieve the sublime under absurd constraints. The Book Review, in a typically glowing response, called it “one of the most original and funniest of books for young readers,” adding, “Beginning readers and the parents who have been helping them through the dreary activities of Dick and Jane . . . are due for a happy surprise.”

Today, Sendak’s, Silverstein’s and Seuss’ books define what we’ve come to think of as children’s literature. Their new books are no exception. “Bumble-Ardy,” the first picture book Sendak has written and illustrated in 30 years (it is based on an animated segment that appeared on “Sesame Street” in 1971), tells the story of a rambunctious pig who has never had a birthday party. Naturally, the one he gives himself — absent caregiver! dirty stunts! guzzled brine! — devolves into a mess. “Every Thing on It,” the fourth volume of collected verse from Silverstein, who died in 1999, contains poems about snotty pasta (“Betty, Betty, / Sneezed in the spaghetti, / Made it icky and gooey and wetty”). And “The *Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories,” a collection of Dr. Seuss stories that appeared previously only in magazines, features the kinds of nonsense that blend right in with the Stinky Cheese Man and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Books by Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein are now the classics we reach to when building our children’s libraries. They exemplify the traditions we defend. As Sendak put it at the end of our conversation, “Thank God we have grown up.”
 
If truth be told, I didn't read as a child. Nothing. No Sendaks, Seusses or Poohs for me. My principal skills as a student were arriving at school with my hair combed and my teeth brushed.
Now somebody please continue the thread on topic, before someone else calls me a thread killer or hijacker -- probable unruly behavior from a miscreant childhood. :cool:
 
A childhood without Dr. Seuss?? May it never be! I can still recite lines from Hop On Pop and Green Eggs and Ham(with my eyes shut, which is very hard to do ;0) Sorry for mangling that last Seuss reference; but I Do so love I Can Read With my Eyes Shut... Even now is Mr. Abc has obviously had a bad day, I'll say, "Sad dad bad had. Dad is sad, very very sad. He had a bad day, what a day dad had." Ok, sometimes it's best if I only THINK it, but that's the power of those silly Seuss rhymes. They really stick in one's head.
 
A childhood without Dr. Seuss?? May it never be! I can still recite lines from Hop On Pop and Green Eggs and Ham(with my eyes shut, which is very hard to do ;0) Sorry for mangling that last Seuss reference; but I Do so love I Can Read With my Eyes Shut... Even now is Mr. Abc has obviously had a bad day, I'll say, "Sad dad bad had. Dad is sad, very very sad. He had a bad day, what a day dad had." Ok, sometimes it's best if I only THINK it, but that's the power of those silly Seuss rhymes. They really stick in one's head.

LOL I am afraid I have, not even to this day, read any Dr. Seuss, Winnie the Pooh or their siblings either. I grew up on Grimms Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Anderson, What Katy Did series and Jane Eyre. Oh, and of course The Wizard of Oz, and Robin Hood. :D
 
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