The Little Prince
1943 · 96 pages
Crash-landed in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy from a tiny planet who worries about his rose. Saint-Exupéry writes for children and lands hardest on adults who have stopped looking properly.
★ 8.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
1865 · 171 pages
Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into a country where logic runs sideways, ruled by a queen who wants everyone beheaded. Carroll freed children's books from having to teach anything.
★ 8.5
Charlotte's Web
1952 · 184 pages
Wilbur is a runt pig bound for slaughter, saved by a barn spider writing words in her web. Eudora Welty called it just about perfect, and it is where children first meet death.
★ 7.8
The Hobbit
1937 · 300 pages
Thirteen dwarves turn up at a comfortable hobbit's door and talk him into helping them rob a dragon. The comedy is real, and the riddle game in the dark still frightens children.
★ 7.8
Aesop's Fables
560 BC · 87 pages
Talking animals carry the moral instruction the West grew up on: the tortoise outlasts the hare, the fox decides the grapes were sour. Aesop was a slave, and the lessons show it.
★ 7.1
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
The Complete First Edition
1812 · 568 pages
These are the tales before the Grimms softened them: mothers rather than stepmothers abandon their children, the violence goes unexplained, and the folk imagination of a whole culture stands intact.
★ 7.0
Anne of Green Gables
1908 · 287 pages
Two aging siblings send for an orphan boy to work their Prince Edward Island farm and receive a talkative red-haired girl. Anne Shirley imagines the world into something better and never stops talking.
★ 7.0
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1950 · 171 pages
Four children evacuated from wartime London find a wardrobe opening onto snow, a lamppost, and a land where a witch has made it always winter. Lewis buried the Christian story inside an adventure.
★ 6.9
Where the Wild Things Are
1963 · 48 pages
Sent to bed without supper, Max sails to an island of monsters, tames them by staring, and is crowned their king. Sendak gave children's books permission to take a child's rage seriously.
★ 6.9
The Secret Garden
1911 · 368 pages
Orphaned by cholera in India, a sour, unloved child arrives on the Yorkshire moors and finds the key to a walled garden that brings her and her bedridden cousin back to life.
★ 6.9
Fairy Tales
1837 · 200 pages
Andersen wrote his tales instead of collecting them, and put grief where the folk versions put magic. The mermaid pays for legs with her voice and every step feels like walking on knives.
★ 6.7
The Wind in the Willows
1908 · 224 pages
Mole abandons his spring cleaning for the river, and falls in with Rat, Badger, and the reckless Toad, who wrecks motorcar after motorcar. Grahame built the warmest world in English fiction.
★ 6.6
The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh
1927 · 344 pages
Pooh is a bear of very little brain, moving through the Hundred Acre Wood by way of honey, a heffalump trap, and Eeyore's lost tail. The goodbye at the end undoes adults.
★ 6.6
Jungle Book
1894 · 256 pages
Raised by wolves and schooled by a bear and a black panther, Mowgli lives hunted by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's Law of the Jungle went into English as a phrase everyone uses.
★ 6.4
The Cat in the Hat
1957 · 61 pages
A cat in a striped hat arrives where two children are stuck indoors, and takes the place apart. Seuss did it in 236 words and buried the Dick and Jane primer.
★ 6.4
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
1964 · 146 pages
Five golden tickets get five children inside Willy Wonka's factory, and only Charlie Bucket, half starved and poor, is neither glutton nor brat. Dahl trusted children to relish the punishments.
★ 6.4
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone
1997 · 326 pages
Letters arrive for the boy in the cupboard under the stairs: he is a wizard and Hogwarts wants him. Rowling built that school so completely that the series has sold 600 million copies.
★ 6.3
The BFG
1982 · 224 pages
The Big Friendly Giant speaks gloriously mangled English and blows dreams through a trumpet into children's bedrooms. Sophie, a sleepless orphan, is carried off to his country, where nine bigger giants eat children.
★ 5.3
Green Eggs and Ham
1960 · 62 pages
Sam-I-Am will not stop offering: not in a box, not with a fox, not on a train, not in the rain. Fifty words is all Seuss used, and the badgering turns into song.
★ 5.2
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
1901 · 80 pages
Peter's father went into Mr. McGregor's garden and came out as a pie. Peter goes anyway. Potter sized her book to a child's hands and painted every radish and watering can herself.
★ 5.0
Where the Sidewalk Ends
1974 · 176 pages
The garbage of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout piles past the ceiling. Silverstein drew as well as he rhymed, and American children have been raised on his nonsense and sudden tenderness since 1974.
★ 4.9
Bridge to Terabithia
1977 · 144 pages
Jess can outrun everyone in fifth grade until Leslie moves in next door. They swing over a creek into Terabithia, the kingdom they rule together, and Paterson refuses to protect them from grief.
★ 4.8
Pippi Longstocking
1945 · 160 pages
Pippi is nine, lives alone with a monkey and a horse she can lift with one arm, and answers to no adult. Lindgren handed children a heroine no grown-up can manage.
★ 4.8
Matilda
1988 · 240 pages
Matilda finished Great Expectations at four, which her parents treat as an insult. Her headmistress at school throws children by the pigtails, and Matilda discovers she can move objects with her eyes.
★ 4.8
The Lorax
1971 · 70 pages
Seuss's Once-ler chops down the Truffula trees to knit Thneeds nobody needs, and a mustachioed creature rises to speak for the trees. Loggers hated it enough to commission a rebuttal picture book.
★ 4.7
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
1969 · 26 pages
One apple on Monday, two pears on Tuesday, and holes punched through the pages for small fingers to follow. Carle's caterpillar has eaten its way through fifty million copies and sixty languages.
★ 4.6
The Eye of the Wolf
1984 · 128 pages
A boy called Africa stares into the wolf's cage and will not leave. The one-eyed wolf gives in, and each reads a whole life in the other's eye: Alaska's snow, then the deserts.
★ 4.5
The Velveteen Rabbit
1922 · 33 pages
A toy becomes Real only when a child has loved it for years, by which time its fur is rubbed off and its eyes are gone. Williams's stuffed rabbit is loved that hard.
★ 4.5
James and the Giant Peach
1961 · 146 pages
A rhinoceros escapes London Zoo and eats James's parents. Handed to two dreadful aunts, he crawls inside a house-sized peach and crosses the Atlantic with a crew of insects who become his family.
★ 4.5
The Story of Ferdinand
1936 · 32 pages
A young bull who would rather smell flowers than fight is hauled to the Madrid ring, where he sits down. Franco banned the book in Spain and the Nazis burned it in Germany.
★ 4.5
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
1990 · 48 pages
You leave town in a yellow suit and hit the Lurch, the Slump, and the Waiting Place, where nothing happens. Seuss made the standard graduation gift out of a warning about failure.
★ 4.5
Corduroy
1968 · 32 pages
A department store bear hunts the dark for the button missing from his overalls. Lisa buys him with money she saved herself, a Black girl in a 1968 picture book, drawn without comment.
★ 4.4
The Giving Tree
1964 · 57 pages
A tree loves a boy. She gives him her apples, then her branches, then her trunk, until she is a stump he sits on. Readers still cannot agree whether that is love.
★ 4.4
Goodnight Moon
1947 · 34 pages
In the great green room a rabbit says goodnight to the moon and the quiet old lady whispering hush, while the pictures darken page by page until the child hearing it is asleep.
★ 4.4
Love You Forever
1986 · 32 pages
A mother sings the same four lines to her son at every age, and the years turn the song around. Munsch made it up after two stillborn children.
★ 4.4
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
1985 · 32 pages
Give the mouse a cookie and he wants milk, then a straw, then a mirror to check his milk mustache. Numeroff taught four decades of children how one small yes becomes an afternoon.
★ 4.4
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets
1930 · 141 pages
Hergé sent his boy reporter into a Soviet Union he had never visited, cribbed from one anti-Bolshevik tract of rigged elections and staged factories. Crude work, and the series it opened conquered Europe.
★ 4.4