2011

• Shadrach by: Meindert De Jong
• Sarah Plain and Tall by: Patricia MacLachlan
  
• Stories to Solve by: George Shannon
• Charlotte’s Web by: E.B. White
• My America: My Brother’s Keeper by: Mary Pope Osborne
• Little House on the Prairie by: Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Treasure Island by: Robert Louis Stevenson
• A Little Princess by: Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Wizard of Oz by: L. Frank Baum
• The Bronze Bow by: Elizabeth George Speare
• Hero Tales Volume 1 by: Dave Jackson and Neta Jackson
• These Are My People by: Mildred T. Howard
• The Silver Chair by: C.S. Lewis
• Into the Mummies Tomb by: Nicholas Reeves
• The Apple and the Arrow by: Conrad Buff
• Little House in the Big Woods by: Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Stuart Little by: E. B. White
• The Light Princess by: George MacDonald
• The Borrowers by: Mary Norton
• A Lion to Guard Us by: Clyde Robert Bulla
• The Borrowers by: Mary Norton
• Pinocchio by: Carlo Collodi (illustrated by: Quentin Greban)
• Pocahontas and the Strangers by: Clyde Robert Bulla
• The Princess and the Goblin by: George MacDonald
• The Magician’s Boy by: Susan Cooper
  While not brilliant literature, this short book was fun and is a good possibility for A– to read on her own (she’d read the first chapter before we began it together). Personally I think Serena Riglietti’s illustrations are the best part and give the book a life above what the story can attain alone.

2010

• Mary Poppins by: P.L. Travers
  In a book about good books for kids, I read that I had to read this instead of having our kids watch the movie; being of the persuasion that books are better than movies, I checked this one out of the library. What a disappointment. The first chapter and last chapter were kind of fun–those are where Mary Poppins flies away–but other than that, there was not a lot of successful whimsy here. We were particularly disappointed by Mary Poppins herself, a vain nanny who loves more than anything to see herself reflected in store windows.
• A Christmas Carol by: Charles Dickens
  I read this aloud at dinner and edited out long passages they wouldn’t appreciate or understand. They still enjoyed it well enough, and the older they get, the more of it we’ll read.
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by: C.S. Lewis (again)
• Understood Betsy by: Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  The girls loved this and it makes the read it again and own it list.
• Follow My Leader by: James B. Garfield
  Though not a brilliantly told story, this was a nice introduction for our children to what it is like to be blind.
• King of the Golden River by: John Ruskin
• Mountain Born by: Elizabeth Yates
• The Enchanted Castle by: Edith Nesbit
  I didn’t know if my kids would want to wait through all the details of this book, but when our six-year old laughed out loud at some of the funny parts without my explaining them, I realized how easily she follows these books nowadays.Yet in the end the book was just too long, and we put it aside a bit more than halfway through in favor of another book, and the girls never noticed.
  
• Pollyanna (IC) by: Eleanor Porter
• Homer Price by: Robert McCloskey
  My kids were talking at dinner about there being a skunk outside our door, and I couldn’t think of where they got such an idea in their heads. It turns out they’d been reliving the adventures of Homer Price, which marks how much they enjoyed it.
• The Viking Adventure by: Clyde Robert Bulla
  This adventure book tied in to the girls’ study of Norway and became our dinner time reading after we finished Osborne’s Tales from the Odyssey. The girls liked it immensely and were captured by those little details of life that are different from ours.
• Prince Caspian by: C.S. Lewis (again)
• The Year of Miss Agnes by: Kirkpatrick Hill
  This was a quick read; when I came home the day they started it, they were a quarter of the way through it. Yet they were retelling it with gusto at the dinner table and urged Mommy to keep reading, which meant that it didn’t even make it though the entire week. Still, it was a good four days of reading.
• The Middle Moffat by: Eleanor Estes
  Our kids enjoyed the Moffats, but this one was even more enjoyable. Perhaps they liked it better for its attention to one character, or perhaps the collections of stories from Jane’s life caught more similarities to our girls’ interest and lives. Whatever the case, this was a pleasant winner for our family.
• Tales from the Odyssey by: Mary Pope Osborne
  This is six books, beginning with “The One-Eyed Giant” and moving through all the details until “The Final Battle.” I teach The Odyssey and am pretty familiar with portions of it, and I was pleased with Osborne’s retelling. She captures many of those wonderful little images and details and puts them together in a way to maintain children’s attention. I read a chapter a night at dinner and my kids were constantly asking for more. In one case we retold the story to Gramma so she’d be able to follow us, and A (4) retold details from part of the story we hadn’t read for months.
• The Winter of Red Snow by: Kristina Gregory
  This is a fictional diary of a young girl who lives in Valley Forge during the occupation by the Continental Army. I picked it up basically out of curiosity but was surprised at how interested the girls have been. The story didn’t catch them at first (though parts of it pick up a bit more halfway through it) but the details of life in colonial times is fascinating to them. I think it’s a great first exposure to the period.
• James and the Giant Peach by: Roald Dahl
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by: C.S. Lewis (again)
• The Secret Garden
  This was the second time the girls read this, and they read it because E found it on the book shelf and pointed out that we didn’t need to go to the library for our next book because we hadn’t read this one in a long time . . .
• The Moffats
  This was a nice little collection of cute adventures about the Moffat family. Some engaged the girls more than others, but it was overall fun.
• The Last Battle by: C.S. Lewis
• Stuart Little by: E.B. White
  Our oldest had heard this before, but this story seemed custom tailored for our middle, who recounted with glee the wild things Stuart did. The girl loves silly, and this provided it for her, though admittedly not as much as Pippy Longstocking did.
• The Bible Smuggler by: Louise A. Vernon
  Sometimes parents can make a mistake when choosing a book, which is what I did when I excitedly picked out this one. Our girls are almost six and almost four, and they were simply not ready for this book. At one point our eldest was retelling something that had happened and called the main character, a boy named Collin, Robin, which is the name of the main character in The Door in the Wall. Oh well. I think they’ll like it someday.
• The Door in the Wall by: Marguerite de Angeli
  This won a Newbury, but it does move slowly. Some books move slowly but pick up, and this one didn’t quite pick up the way we hoped. It was still good, just not great.
• The Singing Hill by: Meindert DeJong
  For our girls this one did not catch them like others, but when the horse entered into the picture, it got more interesting for them.
• The Courage of Sarah Noble by: Alice Dalgliesh
  This story is short and simple, and while the scenario is a bit of a stretch in an adult’s eyes–Dad takes his eight-year old to the wilderness to build a house and leaves her with a Native American family while he returns to get Mother and the other children–it is perfectly plausible for a child who does not realize that a real dad would have considered such a situation before ever leaving to build the house. The girls liked it when they were let in on the significance of Sarah’s cloak–how she wore it and clung to it for emotional security–and when I asked them how it finished, they let me know that Sarah had hung up her cloak and slept in her bed. I doubt this book will leave a lasting impression on them, but they did enjoy it.
• Looking for Home by: Arleta Richardson
  There’s not much conflict of interest in this one. While the topic of orphans in America is fascinating, this book was not, and we pushed to the end and chose not to pursue the further three books in the series.
• Pippi Longstocking by: Astrid Lindgren
  This was fun. Our kids did not really catch the humor behind Pippi’s tall tales, but they caught enough of the antics and action to be amused.
• The Prince and the Pauper (IC) by: Mark Twain
  I love Twain’s story, but the illustrated classic does not carry over Twain’s humor. This one had my wife and I wishing that the illustrated classics versions were abridged versions rather than paraphrased. Still, our oldest likes anything with a good plot, and she liked this.
• The Indian in the Cupboard by: Lynne Reid Banks
  This is one of my sentimental favorites. I loved it as a boy and got it from the library when our stack of books got to the bottom. Our eldest enjoyed it, but she didn’t talk about it at the dinner table with the same excitement she usually has. Perhaps she’d appreciate it more when older, and perhaps our little boy will be more excited about the idea of soldiers and fighters coming to life.
• Treasures of the Snow by: Patricia St. John
  There was a stretch in this one where the main character was being so selfish and awful my wife remarked that the reading time was not all that enjoyable and uplifting. By the end the character repents of such things, leaving us parents hoping that such books would allow our children to learn certain life lessons vicariously.
• The Wheel on the School by: Meindert DeJong
  This one is wonderful and we highly recommend it. The children in this book are good, but the grown-ups, a cast of the town’s castaways, prove to be the wonderful heart of it. They are drawn into this work of goodness the children are engaged in and along with those children we discover that all these strangers are beautiful too.

2009 and previous

• Miracles on Maple Hill
• The Princess and the Goblin by: George MacDonald
• The Princess and Curdie by: George MacDonald
• The Chronicles of Narnia by: C.S. Lewis
• The Apple and the Arrow
• In Gramma’s Attic
• 100 Dresses
• Robinson Crusoe (IC)
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nihm
• Heidi
• The Cricket in Times Square
• Trumpet of the Swan by: E.B. White
• Pilgrim’s Progress (for children) by: John Bunyan
• Sarah Plain and Tall
• Little House – Christmas stories
• Boxcar Children (entire series)
• Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
• The Secret Garden
• Mary on Horseback
• King Arthur (IC)
• Little House on the Prairie (just the first one, though) by: Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by: Rohld Dahl
• Stuart Little by: E.B. White
• Charlotte’s Web by: E.B. White

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.