Two events this week have set me thinking about what makes a great children’s book and what a canonical list might look like in the early years of the 21st century. On Monday, as part of a widely appreciated feature on the rereading of children’s books, SF Said asked seven writers for the ones they liked to reread. The results were as follows:
Philip Pullman:
The Magic Pudding. Anything by Arthur Ransome. Tove Jansson’s Moomins.
Neil Gaiman:
The Narnia books. The Mary Poppins books. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows.
Francesca Simon:
Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Half Magic by Edward Eager. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
Andrew Motion (former poet laureate and Man Booker prize jury chair):
Treasure Island and other books by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Erica Wagner (former Times literary editor and Man Booker prize judge):
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin. The Owl Service by Alan Garner. Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban. All of George and Martha by James Marshall. All of Maurice Sendak. Watership Down by Richard Adams.
Daniel Hahn (translator and chair of the Society of Authors):
Asterix.
Charlotte Higgins (Guardian chief culture writer)
The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley.
Two days later, Robert McCrum and the novelist Kate Mosse sat down for a Guardian Live session on McCrum’s long-running 100 best novels series.
Asked by an audience member which three books he would recommend to a family with two children aged eight and 11, McCrum suggested two novels which, “with a heavy heart” he had left off his list: EB White’s Charlotte’s Web and CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
His third recommendation was JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye which did make the list, now winding its way through the mid-1950s. It joins Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as the only five of the 74 novels included so far that would qualify in most people’s minds as literature for young readers.
McCrum argued that Alice in Wonderland wasn’t actually a children’s novel, while Mosse made the point that a dedicated children’s literature was a relatively recent phenomenon. Her own father “thought it was appropriate to read King Solomon’s Mines to me when I was five. It wasn’t appropriate – it’s all sex and violence – but what you have in that book is genuine excitement.”
So which of the more recent books and writers would make the cut? Mosse cited Philip Pullman, Anthony Horowitz and Suzanne Collins as exceptional. I would include Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and Louis Sachar’s Holes.
McCrum cast an eye backwards to the extraordinary popularity of Kipling and Dickens, writing at a time when English literature carried the standard for empire and the fate of Little Nell was a national news event. “We have no-one remotely like that today,” he said, “with the possible exception of JK Rowling.”
Let us know your thoughts below.
