Telegraph: 100 Books Every Child Should Read

[I'm Murrin]

100 Books Every Child Should Read
(Use the links at the top to see the three categories; there are multiple pages in all but the first.)

Found this from a link in a blog I read, and thought it was interesting. I remember reading (or having read--I'm sketchy on the details on a lot of them) quite a lot of the ones in the "Middle Years" list, but only a few each from "Early Years" and "Early Teens" (and the Teens ones I read before I was a teenager). And of course there are some that weren't around when I was those ages.

What do you think of the list? See things on it you read as a child? Books you would share (or have shared) with your own children? More interestingly, is there anything you would disagree with, or that they have missed out?

[Montresor]

Very glad to see the Brothers Grimm made the list. I know I wouldn't be half the man I was today, imagination-wise, without those stories.

[aliantha]

OMG, "Holes". MagickMaker was assigned that book something like three years running. Before *and* after the movie came out. She liked it the first time but was ready to rip the book to shreds by the third time she had to read it.

[sgt.null]

i have read a quarter of the books.

glad to see the Struwwelpeter and Watership Down.

but where is the Black Cauldron series?

[Lady Revel]

My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell
(Puffin, £5·99)

When the Durrell family takes a villa in Corfu one summer they do not imagine staying five years, but so they do. In that time Gerald, a boy of 10, discovers the joys of the local flora and fauna, and describes it with a delightful wit.

This book is one of the most wonderful books I have ever read. I still own a copy and reread it from time to time. Funny as all get out. And it makes me smile when I think of it.

If you haven't read it, it would be well worth your time to give it a try. This book is autobiographical. Gerald's older brother Lawrence Durrell was an author, (Gerald is more of a naturalist, I think he wrote to fund conservationism) and it is crack up funny to read about Lawrence's airs when talking to his literary friends. What a wonderful, wholesome and satisfying book!

From Wikipedia

Durrell's books, both fiction and non-fiction, have a wry, loose style that poked fun at himself as well as those around him. Perhaps his best-known work is My Family and Other Animals (1956), which tells of his idyllic, if oddball, childhood on Corfu. Later made into a TV series, it is delightfully deprecating about the whole family, especially elder brother Lawrence, who became a famous novelist. Despite Durrell's jokes at the expense of "brother Larry," the two were close friends all their lives.

Gerald Durrell always insisted that he wrote for royalties to help the cause of environmental stewardship, not out of an inherent love for writing. Gerald Durrell describes himself as a writer in comparison to his brother Lawrence:

The subtle difference between us is that he loves writing and I don't. To me it's simply a way to make money which enables me to do my animal work, nothing more.