14 responses so far ↓

• 1 revgeorge // Feb 22, 2008 at 10:05 am

  Not too surprising. Lewis’s books were written as children’s books & stayed as children’s books. JKR’s books may have started off as children’s books but grew as the audience grew with them. So, no doubt Lewis’s books would be seen as more childreny, although there’s no such word, but hopefully you know what I mean.

  I’m surprised Winnie the Pooh wasn’t higher up than fourth. Also surprised that Wind in the Willows wasn’t as high. I’ve always found that to be a very complex & intriguing book.

  Couple of other thoughts. Only Lion, Witch & Wardrobe made it on the list as only did HBP. So, I don’t know if that’s a ringing endorsement of Lewis over Rowling, as The Telegraph headline tries to make out. Plus, this was a survey of parents & not children. And if anyone could be said to have kicked tail on this list it would be Roald Dahl who had six books in the top 50.

  Plus, this list is for the UK’s top 50. I’m sure America would come out a bit different.

• 2 LunaLouise // Feb 22, 2008 at 11:51 am

  Ah, thanks Revgeorge for doing the research. Because the first thing I thought was ‘no way that this poll is decided upon by kids’. No kid will choose HBP as the best Harry Potter book. If this is an adult centered poll I’m not surprised that Lewis ‘won’.

  I completely agree that the poll will be different for different countries, but please tell me why we let adults decide the best kids books ?? If it’s because adults know so much about educational value and child psychology, then why choose HBP ??

• 3 Mellie // Feb 22, 2008 at 2:41 pm

  Since this list represents books from different reading levels and eras, I think there need to be more precise categories. I can’t judge between The Very Hungry Caterpillar and A Christmas Carol because I see them as two very different genres even though they’re both literature.

  Peter Pan was my childhood hero, so I feel that his story was a bit underappreciated. (Personal bias, of course.)

• 4 revgeorge // Feb 22, 2008 at 9:36 pm

  From what I understood from the article, it was more a poll of what books parents remembered loving from their youth, which would be why more modern children’s works are underrepresented. Of course, it must mean that a lot of parents also read HBP lately.

• 5 reyhan // Feb 22, 2008 at 9:58 pm

  The headline could with equal accuracy have read: the Lion beats Pooh Bear, or Blyton beats Dahl, or Hungry Caterpillar beats Potter. But those comparisons don’t quite have the impact of Narnia beats Potter, do they?

  Newspaper stories need headlines that will grab the reader’s attention. Otherwise, they’d go unread. It’s a catchy headline, that’s all.

  Read the article and you come upon:

  “The poll was conducted among 4,000 parents - suggesting most believe in the superiority of the books they enjoyed as children over modern stories.”

  I think that’s what the poll is tapping - and the article echoing: that the stories read as a child are more treasured than stories read later. Fair enough. COnduct the poll twenty or thirty years from now and I’ll bet you Potter will leave them all in the dust.

  What people will do for a catchy headline.

• 6 korg20000bc // Feb 22, 2008 at 11:55 pm

  People will do all sorts of stuff to get a rhyme also.

• 7 reyhan // Feb 23, 2008 at 12:31 pm

  But that gives me an idea: we could conduct our own poll here: what stories did you (meaning us) love to read the most when you were a child? I think it would be more meaningful if we divided it into age groups, since what you like to read (or be read to) at 5 isn’t what you like at 9 isn’t what you like at 13. Or maybe divide it into books which were read to us and books which we read ourselves?

• 8 revgeorge // Feb 23, 2008 at 3:27 pm

  reyhan,

  That would be great, except I’m too old to remember all those details.

• 9 reyhan // Feb 23, 2008 at 7:46 pm

  So am I, revgeorge. So let’s keep it simple: what books did you love as a child?

  My list of first loves would include Anne of Green Gables (expanding to eventually encompass all of L M Montgomery’s books), Little Women and many other books by L M Alcott (I never got over the fact that Jo didn’t marry Laurie),the Swallows and Amazons series, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, Pippi Longstockings, Understood Betsy, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, Enid Blyton’s Adventure series, the Hardy Boys series, Tom Corbett Space Cadet, The Virginian, A Tale of Two Cities. I started reading these when I learned English, around age 8. Before then I had read mainly stories in magazines and the comic strips in newspapers - to this day I turn to the comic strips first in the morning. I do remember my father reading to us: Aesop’s Fables, and Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days), Mark Twain’s stories, and Mr. Popper’s Penguins. I think that Mr. Popper’s Penguins is the first book I can remember being read to me as a child. I have forgotten everything about it except that the penguins were kept in the icebox.

• 10 Dave the Longwinded // Feb 24, 2008 at 12:14 pm

  I need to think more about this in order to remember more of what I read. I had some odd reading habits as a kid…and still do!!!

  I read Where the Wild Things Are, the Hardy Boys series, a series that virtually no one else remembers — The Three Detectives. Winnie the Pooh was in there, too (that title is so rhythmic, it’s impossible not to rhyme it with something!). In all honesty, those are the only major pieces of fiction I recall from my childhood until I was around 13 or so. Then, I started reading Tom Clancy novels and military history.

  Before that, my reading habits encompassed anything I could get my hands on regarding sharks and sea monsters. I desparately wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid, but I was born one of the most landlocked areas of the US. When I was in high school, we had to dissect a spiny dogfish, something I looked forward to for the entire school year — I identified much of its morphology in class from memory.

  Big nerd…

• 11 Urghiggi // Mar 4, 2008 at 10:40 pm

  I loved all the Narnia books. Loved, loved, loved. I was born in 1957 and they were fairly current at the time I read them. My Macmillan hardcover set still bears the stains of cocoa and Cheetos as I was a compulsive reader/eater

  Did not get to Tolkien, any of it, till high school, and I read the Hobbit LAST. (which is good, because i much preferred LOTR and probably would’ve found the hobbit too silly coming to it at that age.)

  And I only read wind in the willows last year, when I was pushing 50. I have since read it aloud to my kids. The language in which it’s written makes it pretty much read-aloud material at this point unless you have an unusually literate kid.

  I found it to be quite a profound little book actually — there is a lot to chew on there, on many levels — from the philia-love among the main characters to Rat and Mole’s mystical encounter with the god Pan.

  Julie H, chicago

• 12 reyhan // Mar 5, 2008 at 1:08 am

  I too first read the Wind in the Willows as an adult. I agree that it fulfills L’Engle’s demand that a book have something “underneath”. At one level it appears to be a child’s dream of life as an endless summer vacation. Then there is what Wikipedia calls “camaraderie” and what we would nowadays call male-bonding - what happened to all the girls? Here is a quote:

  ‘The Wind in the Willows reflected the author’s unhappiness with the real world; - his idyllic riverbank woods and fields were “clean of the clash of sex,” as he said to Theodore Roosevelt.’

  And there is the encounter with Pan which seems to provide the spiritual backstory which brings it into the realm of “high fantasy” - although I’ve seen that decried as the only false note in an otherwise lyrical narrative. I’ve also read that Mr. Mole was based on Grahame’s son Alastair, who was born blind in one eye. And what are we to make of Mr. Toad’s reckless, near-suicidal obsession with cars? Alastair again?

  It’s amazing, actually, how much of the author is in the book, and how it can be read at different levels.

• 13 Beth // Mar 13, 2008 at 8:07 pm

  I loved everything by Alcott, but especially Little Women (read it tatters for years). I also loved Narnia, which I think I began reading at about 10, and everything L’Engle, beginning with a Wrinkle in Time at the age of 11. I tried some of her adult work at the age of 15, gave it up, and then re-discovered it three years later and devoured fiction and non-fiction. Other childhood loves included Trixie Belden, Cherry Ames (my mom was a nurse). I also loved some of the “older” children’s classics that my folks kept on the shelf: Five Little Peppers, Black Beauty. I didn’t come to Tolkien until fairly late — I read the Hobbit for the first time in high school, and ate up LOTR for the first time the summer after my freshman year of college. Oh! I loved Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeld, the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace. When I was younger, I especially enjoyed Beatrix Potter, Arnold Lobel, and *A Child’s Garden of Verses* by Robert Louis Stevenson. I know I’m forgetting favorites, but these are what come to mind. It’s always fascinating to hear what stories left impressions on people’s minds and hearts when they were children.

• 14 Travis Prinzi // Mar 13, 2008 at 9:13 pm

  I still haven’t commented on this thread, so here’s a quick history of my childhood reading. It’s not very long.

  Narnia, of course, but only LWW and maybe half of Prince Caspian. Pilgrim’s Progress - I know it’s not a children’s book, but I read it (in the original, not a modernized version) in fourth grade, and it stood out as my favorite book for a long time. (I’ve since come to not think quite so highly of that kind of allegory, though the work itself is still brilliant).

  I don’t think this one’s been mentioned yet, but my other favorite, which I read a few times as a kid, was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O’Brien. I loved that story so much that when I did an oral book report on it in 6th grade, I went over my time limit and didn’t care, because I had to tell as much of the story as possible.

  But right around that time, it became very uncool to read, and I quit reading on a regular basis until my senior year of high school, when I got into Shakespeare and Chaucer.

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