I’ll postpone growing up another decade!
In the spirit of Peter Pan, I’ll remain an enthusiastic reader of children’s literature as long as it can give as much delight as it did this afternoon. My children and I spent wonderful hours going through this brick of a book, page for page, book for book. The initial task was to list five favourites and five books to read during the year, and to give each other suggestions.
It ended up being more than five books each, of course, and after hours of wild discussions whether the reading age suggestions were outrageously wrong or not (my children think they are!), we all had filled our papers, and ran back and forth to our spread out bookshelves to look for the books we thought the others HAD to read first. The result was a tremendous journey down memory lane for me, and an end to the never-ending complaints from my children that “they have nothing to read”.
As with all lists, this one has flaws for sure, but those are minor compared to the treasure chest of wondrous reading that is to be found inside. When it is -8°C outside, the snow keeps falling and it is pitch dark at three in the afternoon, there is nothing better than to cuddle up together and try to figure out which are the all time childhood favourites.
Here a compromise we came up with:
My daughter is forever in love with...
Anne of Green Gables
Nesthäkchen
The Little House on the Prairie
Matilda
Mary Poppins
And she wants to read...
Heidi
Robinson Crusoe
The Railway Children
Little Women
The Three Musketeers
My middle son loves...
Mio, my Mio
The Giver
Jim Knopf
Tintenherz
A Wrinkle In Time
And he wants to read...
Five Children and It
The Graveyard Book
The Machine Gunners
Krabat
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
My eldest son didn’t want to choose from the children’s book list, and insisted on listing…
1984,
David Copperfield,
The Children of the Alley (Mahfouz),
Germinal and
Things Fall Apart
… as all time favourites. I think they might be challenged by his to-reads in 2017:
Dostoyevsky’s Double and Karamazov,
Othello,
Great Expectations,
For Whom the Bell Tolls and
Catcher in the Rye.
When asked to choose some favourites from the children’s list, he said (yes, he is a teenager!) Thomas the Tank Engine, and that made us try to come up with “first” favourites.
Here our shared memories of reading time past...
Alfie Atkins (ALL of them, twenty times)
Elsa Beskow, all
Astrid Lindgren, all
Michael Ende, all
Otfried Preussler, all
Paul Maar, all (not on the list, to our horror!)
Sven Nordquist, Findus/Mamma Mu
Moomins, all
Pinocchio
Alice in Wonderland
Nils Holgersson
Peter Pan
Dr Doolittle
The Jungle Book
Winnie The Pooh
Paddington
Babar
Maria Gripe, all
And so on in eternity!
I found some classics I had not read as a child, so I will add my own books to read before I grow up before closing this documentary:
The Call of The Wild
The Hound Of The Baskervilles
Chocky
The Summer Book
This was just the drastically reduced list of books that cannot be left unmentioned. The long list is… well, … LONG!