Thursday, May 13, 2010

best children's book ever

The best children's books ever? Always a difficult list to pull together, but the Guardian takes a stab at it. Here's the list for over 12s from the much-loved classic Tom Sawyer to the modern classic His Dark materials. For more info click here. This list was put together by Lucy Mangan, author of Hopscotch & Handbags and Imogen Russell Williams, director of the new fringe theatre company Have Your Cake Theatre


I Capture the Castle: Dodie Smith

2. His Dark Materials: Philip Pullman

3. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret: Judy Blume

4. A Little History of the World: EH Gombrich

5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: Mark Haddon

6. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: Mark Twain

7. Witch Child: Celia Rees

8. Exposure: Mal Peet

9. The Sterkarm Handshake/The Sterkarm Kiss: Susan Price

10. The White Darkness: Geraldine McCaughrean

Really? So have you read them all? What would you include? I'm going to have to think and post my own list but how can they not include the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix for example? Or the Book Thief by Marcus Zusac?

2 comments:

Morgan said...

Great post! These are all great, I used to really love the Captain Underpants books as well (probably because the pages were a flip book) lol.

La Coccinelle said...

I agree with #1. Definitely.

Out of the rest, I've only read the first two books of the His Dark Materials trilogy; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which is good... but I like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, too); and part of The Sterkarm Handshake (neat premise, but I just couldn't finish it). I can think of some other books that I would have put on this list instead... including Sabriel (yeah!).