Classics for Beginners discussion

I thought I'd started a thread on those beloved children's classic.

Anyone have any favorites?

Not sure if they are all old enought but what springs to mind first are

Everything by Roald Dahl (is that old enought?)
Lion the Witch & The Wardrobe
Black Beauty
Winnie the Pooh
The Magical Faraway Tree series, and other Enid Blyton

I am sure there are lots more if I have a think

Alice in wonderland & through the looking glass

Grimm brothers fairy tales

Hans Andersen fairy tales

Winnie the pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne is on any list of children's classics that I make. The books not the Disney Movie.

And

Kipling Rudyard, anything by Him, particularly The Jungle Book, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

I love Children's classics! I think I've read more now as an adult than I did as a child..hehe.

Some that I consider classics that haven't been mentioned yet, would be:

A Wrinkle in Time
The Story of Doctor Dolittle
The Little House Collection
Ramona the Pest
The Witch Of Blackbird Pond

And my own personal classic, that I LOVED as a child, have read and owned since, and I will force my 3 children to read when they are able:
A Lion to Guard Us by Clyde Robert Bulla

Clyde Robert Bulla is definitely one of my all-time favorite children's authors.

Definatly Winnie-the-Pooh and Pinocchio.

I would definitely choose The Hobbit and The Complete Tales (Peter Rabbit)

Loved fairy tales a bunch.

I remember loving A Wrinkle in Time and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Melissa wrote: "I would definitely choose The Hobbit and The Complete Tales (Peter Rabbit)"

How could I forget those two?!

A Visit From St Nicholas by Clement C Moore (a/k/a/"Twas the Night Before Christmas")
My own copy is over 100 years old, as it belong to my "Aunt Fina" when she was a child and she gave it to me when I was born (61 years ago).

Little House in the Big Woods
Nancy Drew
Hardy Boys
Dr. Seuss

There are so many great Caldecott and Newbery Medal winners that could go on this list.

Laura wrote: "Little House in the Big Woods
Nancy Drew
Hardy Boys
Dr. Seuss

There are so many great Caldecott and Newbery Medal winners that could go on this list."

Oh, yes, laura...all of those.

The Secret Garden
The Velveteen Rabbit
The Chronicles of Narnia
Mandy
The Ghosts
Trixie Belden series
Caddie Woodlawn
A Gift of Magic
Island of the Blue Dolphins

These for me were my childhood classics:

The Chronicles of Narnia The first proper books I ever read in full as far as I remember. I would have been about six and seven and didn't understand it all. But I've reread them over and over since then.
The Little House Collection
Little Women
A Wrinkle in Time
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (yes I know The Lord of the Rings is hardly children's literature but I read it when I was in grade five or so)
Peter Pan
Winnie-the-Pooh
The Silver Sword
The Swiss Family RobinsonHeidi

Got to add as others mentioned the works of Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, a lot of Enid Blyton, Black Beauty, Doctor Doolitle, Stuart Little, the fairytale classics and then Alice in Wonderland. I read a lot of the classic children's literature as a child having a Gran who has a bookshelf of lots of children's classics and a mum who encouraged me to read classic kids books.

Black Beauty
Alice in Wonderland
Heidi
The Railway Children
The Secret Garden
The Little Princess
Charlotte's Web

I'm readingA Wrinkle in Time right now for the first time.

Heidi
The Swiss Family Robinson
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Everything by Beverly Cleary
A Wrinkle in Time
The Chronicles of Narnia
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
The Gruesome Green Witch
Are You There God, It's Me Margaret
Nothings Fair in Fifth Grade

Pippi Longstocking (I haven't read the book but I loved the movie)

Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day?
Alice in Wonderland
Nancy Drew Collection
Everything by Dr. Seuss
Complete Stories and Poems
The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales
The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales
Heidi
Everything by Judy Blume
Folktales and Legends from foreign lands(we had a really cool series in my elementary school library)
Everything by Raohl Dahl

I still love rereading these! :)

The Chronicles of Narnia, Horton Hears a Who!, The Jungle Book, Out of Place...

The Secret Garden
Black Beauty
Pippi Longstocking
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Here is a question:
Has Disney killed the classics?

Depends on what you mean by killed?

If you mean have they altered the fairytales for children worldwide then yes.

But the classic ideas of say the vampire was altered by many different people. The classic idea of the epic has also been altered across time by many different people. The classic idea of the tragedy has again been altered by different people. I don't think we can blame Disney for everything. But they have altered the idea of the fairytales certainly.

I think it's up to parents to make sure that their children's exposure to legendary tales and fairy tales doesn't end with Disney. I know that I was disappointed at the Disney version of more than one fairy tale, since I had grown up being read fairy tales by my mother.

I just mean that people refer to the Disney version as the real version these days and many children won't even know they are based on age old fairy tales which maybe aren't the same like the Grimms. I haven't read Grimms but want to and wonder if anyone can tell us of a fairytale which we all know and if it differs in this collection.

I read the Grimms' fairytales as a child and loved them. Many of the fairytales they and Hans Christian Anderson were altered by Disney. Take The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White and so on. I've been getting into the tv show Once Upon a Time recently because I like fairytales so much and it's been interesting to see that the writers took the Disney versions of characters (the Dwarves and Maleficent for example).

I liked Once Upon a Time for the same reason, Jonathan.

So are the Dwarves only a disney creation?

I love modern and old fairytales. Still have to see the finale.

No they exist in the main fairytale but Disney gave them names and personalities.

Oh right. So they weren't called things like sneezy, sleepy, happy etc.

Nope but I like that part of what Disney did.
I actually kind of like what they did to the little mermaid too. The original story turns into a tragedy... Some of the other fairytales are debatable.

I like the little mermaid. Funny thing I had the disney version of many of these books and I didn't even think they weren't original.

The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander would definitely be up there on my list... and anything by E.Nesbitt!

I think what got me hooked on reading was Jules Verne, especially:
The Mysterious Island
From the Earth to the Moon
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Mathias Sandorf
Captain Grant's Children

Shortly afterwards, Kipling's "The Jungle Book" became my favorite.

And I don't know about Grimm's tales. I mean... I am reading them to a 8 year old now - my GF's kid - and he loves them.

It started with him playing around with my Kindle and stumbling upon my copy. He has since been asking for me to read them. Eventually, I got him a copy and he re-reads them on his own. He's a smart kid and he seems to 'get them'. But I wonder... would the Disney versions be better for a kid? I mean, I grew up with the Disney 'goody-goody' fairy-tales. Only later on did I read the originals, when I was already an adult. And it somehow felt right. I would not have got them for him yet, but it just kind of worked out that way.

Don't get me wrong. I hate the fact that we are sugar-coating and stupid-proofing life for kids (well, adults too, to some extent). But fairy-tales... should be fairy. Good. Idealistic. No boiling people, cannibalism, incest, and all that other fun stuff the Grimm's like. It's great now. But for kids... just not sure. I'd stick to Bambi.

If you think the Grimm's stories are bad then you should read the originals. The Grimm's paraphrased and altered the stories to remove a heap of violent aspects. In the original Red Riding Hood I've heard that the wolf eats her. A kind of warning about fraternising with strangers.

Jonathan wrote: "If you think the Grimm's stories are bad then you should read the originals. The Grimm's paraphrased and altered the stories to remove a heap of violent aspects. In the original Red Riding Hood I'v..."

I did not know that they had already 'sanitized' the stories. But I can assure you, they retain at least some of the violence. In Grimm's Red Riding Hood, the wolf does eat her and the granny. The hunter cuts him open with scissors (while the wolf is sleeping... pretty gruesome death, frankly) and then he notices the little red hood sticking out of the belly!

I grew up in Germany and to tell you the truth: My parents read the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales to me. I never really encountered the Disney versions until living in the USA for a while. I don't really like the Disney versions, I mean they are okay to watch sometimes but I think one should know the "classic" versions like Grimm/ Andersen too.
Kind of random fact: My parents took me to a lot of castles on the weekends. One of them was the "Sababurg" (close to where I live), even today it is still called "Dornröschen-Schloss" the sleeping-beauty castle :)

Veljko wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "If you think the Grimm's stories are bad then you should read the originals. The Grimm's paraphrased and altered the stories to remove a heap of violent aspects. In the original Re..."

Yes I remember that from my childhood. But then compared to some books I found it all comic as these fairytales almost always ended up with the characters surviving and so on even if they did get eaten like that.

The Daily Telegraph (a conservative UK broadsheet) published a list of 100 children's classics. It's broader than I might have expected:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

Note that the numbering isn't a ranking, because the selections are in categories.

Janice wrote: "I grew up in Germany and to tell you the truth: My parents read the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales to me. I never really encountered the Disney versions until living in the USA for a while. I don't..."

Would love to see that castle!
Does it have a crooked, crumbling tower?

I will be reading Oliver Twist and A Little Princess soon. I have never read the books, but always watched the movies as a kid.

I couldn't finish Oliver Twist myself. I just felt so bored whilst reading it.

Nicolle wrote: "Here is a question:
Has Disney killed the classics?"

This is interesting. When reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame I looked at the last few chapters...

[spoilers]
Book X
III The Marriage of Captain Phoebus
IV (Last Chapter) The Marriage of Quasimodo

and I though... ahh, happy ending... as I was reading the last few chapters that preceeded these it grew darker and darker and I kept thinking "How is Hugo going to turn this around?"

Lets just say, it was NOT a Disney ending! Brilliant, I couldn't put the book down as I neared the end and remember finishing at about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning!
[/spoilers]

It's funny, because many of the books considered Classics that we love to read as adults are located in the YA section at the library and listed on jr. high and high school reading lists. Many of them cannot really be enjoyed as thoroughly at that age as can be understood and enjoyed as an adult.

Some examples: Alexander Dumas' novels, Sir Walter Scott's novels, etc.

This being said, many classics that were clearly aimed for children are still my favorite. The Cat in the Hat, Charlotte's Web, Winnie-the-Pooh, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Pyewacket, Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, and many, many more.

I just read Peter Pan and thought it was quite violent for children yet clearly aimed at them with the element of magic. Also the writing style was at times childish (the aimed at children thing again) but then there were words throughout which I had to look up as I didn't know what they meant as they were huge or else latin.

That's a good one.

Pamela(AllHoney) wrote: "I thought I'd started a thread on those beloved children's classic.

Anyone have any favorites?"

Little women!!!