Picture a chubby eight-year-old girl tucked up reading in the corner of a sturdy, comfortable sofa in a living room in Southport Connecticut in the later 40s and early 50s. That would be me. Reading was my hobby, my sport and my activity of choice. It was the prime pleasure of my days, an unfailing escape from whatever realities were distressing me, and the only source of pride I knew, other vanities lying beyond my grasp. I couldn't do anything else well, but I could do words.
Not that I wrote. I never thought of writing. All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired. Stories made sense. I read any stories that came my way, in any form--Sunday School mimeo sheeted Bible stories, folk and fairy tales, myths, Mrs. Piggy-Winkle, Brenda Starr and Mary Worth, Honey Bunch Morton--but never newspapers and magazines. Those weren't stories and, being real, were often scary, and things were scary enough for me already.
What I didn't realize at the time was how sparse was my supply of books, especially books for grade school readers, who could only wait to be old enough to be allowed to borrow books (vetted by mother and librarian, of course) chosen from the adult shelves. When, in the late 60s, I found myself the English teacher of second and fifth grade classes, I needed to return to the reading of books for children. Those were the days when English meant reading and writing and grammar and an introduction to the accumulated and varied cultural heritage of a citizen of the Western World, and I wanted to be more familiar than I was with what books were available to my students. So I went to the library and found there--to my amazement and delight--shelf after shelf filled with stories for kids, many of them excellently well done.
I started with "A." Picture an eager teacher, in the early years of her career, reaching up into the first of those shelves.
The books, in pretty much chronological order:
Cynthia Voigt is the author of the new book Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things.
Great Books To Read With Kids
"The Little Engine that Could" (Watty Piper edition)(01 of09)
Open Image ModalThis story seems to have had a profound and lasting effect on my sense of how I want to be in the world, especially (with those engines that wouldn’t even try) how I don’t want to be.
"Hansel and Gretel" by the Brothers Grimm(02 of09)
Open Image ModalSomething about those children, trying to find their way back to a home where they were unwelcome, and Hansel's courage matched with Gretel’s boldness in shoving that witch into her own oven... the story has always seemed to me to contain an essence of childhood.
The Nancy Drew books, any and all of them by Carolyn Keene(03 of09)
Open Image ModalNancy Drew had a dead mother and a tame father, she drove around in a red roadster solving mysteries and having adventures—she was my hero.
"A Dog of Flanders" by Ouida(04 of09)
Open Image ModalGoogling has told me this was a whole book, and by a writer I thought I’d never read (books can always surprise me). What I remember, and vividly, is how I wept over the end, hauntingly sad as it is, which I’d never done before and have only rarely done since.
"The Light Princess" by George Macdonald(05 of09)
Open Image ModalThe first of many and many romances I’ve imbibed, and I notice, with hindsight, that I identified not with the princess but with the true-hearted prince.
"The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett(06 of09)
Open Image ModalThis is the first book I discovered all by myself, that I came upon with no forewarning in what I have since called the library experience. found it on the bottom shelf of the white wooden bookcases in my grandmother’s long, sunny back hallway.
"The Black Stallion" by Walter Farley(07 of09)
Open Image ModalGirls and horses. I not only couldn’t ride but was afraid to, but that book owned my dreams.
"Augustus Caesar’s World" by Genevieve Foster(08 of09)
Open Image ModalThis book is still in print, and with the same cover I remember from when I received it in seventh grade. It was my first non-fiction book and gave me a taste for good non-fiction, which can inform, open my mind, broaden my horizons and make me think.
"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare(09 of09)
Open Image ModalI met "Hamlet" in ninth grade and the language of it, how much it could say and how elegantly it spoke, not to mention the querying intelligence of it, seduced me. It is probably no surprise that that’s the same year I began to read poetry, and decided I wanted to be a writer.
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