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The news about reading in general, and childhood reading in particular, is not good. Last year a National Literacy Trust survey of more than 100,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 18 discovered that the number of children who read for pleasure is the lowest since records of this sort began. Only about a third of children say they actively enjoy reading, and the number who report reading daily in their free time is has halved over the last two decades. It’s down to less than one in five.
Whether we blame this on screens, social media, or on a renewed enthusiasm for healthy outdoor activities, the facts are clear. Children are reading less, taking less pleasure in doing so, and there’s already talk of the dawning of a “post-literate age”. Yet books make available the best, wisest and most beautiful things that humankind has conceived, and children’s literature offers a host of classics, old and new, to be introduced to new generations of readers.
So which books will engage your children in this National Year of Reading? I consulted leading authors to come up with a list of books everyone should read (or have read to them) at least once – one for every year of life up to the age of 25. Not a regimen: a buffet. These are not books to chew dutifully through, but to relish – titles we hope will kindle or rekindle that vital pleasure in the word. And, of course, for every book that appears on this list there are many dozens more that could, or should, have been here.
One: Peepo! by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
The Ahlbergs produced so many wonderful early-years books (see also Each Peach Pear Plum and Burglar Bill) but Peepo! is squarely aimed at tinies and it’s a classic. It asks you to see through a baby’s eyes – and through the holes on the page – and there’s so much to look at in the illustrations. The nursery-rhyme rhythms are just right. And it’s interactive, scoring a delightful little hit on each page as the grownup reader repeats, to unfailing gurgles of delight: “Peepo!”
Two: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd
This apparently very simple story of a rabbit trying (sort of) to go to sleep is endlessly rereadable and strangely haunting. You see more in it, and it grows more mysterious and dreamlike each time you go through it. Figures appear and disappear. The clock advances. The pictures on the wall tell their own stories. The moon tracks up the sky. “Goodnight nobody,” says the adult reader, and shivers a little each time.
Three: Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss
Every one of Dr Seuss’s books has something to offer an under-five – the irresistible anarchy of The Cat in the Hat; the political satire of Yertle the Turtle; the gastronomic shaggy-dog story of Green Eggs and Ham – but Fox in Socks, for my money, caps them all as the purest in its linguistic exuberance. Those tongue-twisters! It’s a way of mainlining, for the very young, what energy and joy there is to be had in letting the sounds of words take the lead.
Four: The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Donaldson’s signature story has it all: a flawless structure, lilting verse, great jokes, a wonderful play of dramatic irony (not that its readers would call it that); a balance between comedy and what might be called “mild peril”; and exquisite illustrations by Axel Scheffler. There’s a reason this modern trickster fable – Donaldson has said she patterned it on a Chinese folktale – appears on every nursery bookshelf worth its salt. It is highly rereadable (for adults as well as children) and far more complex and riddling than it looks.
Five: Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel
This one comes recommended by the aforementioned Donaldson, who says: “My hero among children’s authors is Arnold Lobel, who created a wonderfully funny duo called Frog and Toad. There are four books of stories about them, all ideal for beginner readers. Frog and Toad Together contains my favourite story, The List, in which Toad makes a list of things to do and then refuses to do anything at all when the list blows away. (He can’t chase after it because that wasn’t on the list.) Arnold Lobel never seemed to run out of witty inventive ideas for stories; I wish I could be like that!”
Six: Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling’s fables, originally delivered as bedtime stories to his daughter Effie, are probably the works of his that have dated least. The sound effects, the comic asides, the bewitching surrealism, the lovely black-and-white illustrations: read aloud by a parent, these stories have the capacity to delight a child all these years on. Come, O best beloved, and join us by the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees …
Seven: Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
Pearce’s 1958 Carnegie winner is as beautifully turned and haunting a novel as you can find for a child to read to themselves. It tells the story of a boy who finds that in the small hours the yard of the house in which he’s staying with relatives magically transforms into a stately Victorian garden. Over successive visits, Tom befriends a little girl called Hatty; but even in this timeslip novel, time is passing. The ending emotionally poleaxes adults and children alike. As a bonus: Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce further recommends Pearce’s 1955 Minnow on the Say.
Eight: Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
The sixth Moomins book is the darkest in Tove Jansson’s series – finding Moomintroll awake and alone while the rest of his tribe are in blissful hibernation. How will he survive in this sunless and snowy landscape where it’s cold all the time? Everyone should read this one, says Katherine Rundell, author of Impossible Creatures, “in order to be able to face, age eight, that we are both fundamentally alone in a harsh world and yet bound together by love”.
Nine: Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
The longtime children’s fiction critic Nicolette Jones says of this 2001 adventure story, already acknowledged as a modern classic: “I know people who have gone to Manaus, or aspire to, just because they read this. About a girl in 1910 who finds freedom and love and the joy of nature and of different cultures after she is sent to stay with narrow-minded guardians in Brazil, it has an air-punching ending, with my favourite line: “‘Children must lead big lives … if it is in them to do so.’”
Ten: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s tale of piracy, treasure-hunting, skullduggery and wild enthusiasm for cheese is fresh as a daisy, and just as exciting now as it was to its first audiences in 1883. Long John Silver’s villainy is deeply compelling, and – since everyone’s in it for the cash, goodies and baddies alike – the emphasis is on the thrill of the adventure, not teaching moralising lessons to its audience. As you follow the twists and turns of Jim Hawkins’s story – the Black Spot! The stockade! That business with the boat drifting off! – you can’t help but be enraptured.
Eleven: Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
The first instalment of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is already a modern classic. Its special virtue is the way that it puts across huge ideas about morality, spirituality and human flourishing in a ripsnorting steampunk adventure story – complete with armoured bears, balloonists, witches and magicians/scientists of all stripes. It’s a triumph of storytelling – and once a young reader is inducted into Pullman’s world, the remaining five books in the main series will expand the story’s themes and possibilities, book by book, to the brink of adulthood.
Twelve: The Owl Service by Alan Garner
Garner’s sublimely spooky story of sexual tension and supernatural shenanigans in a remote part of Wales, based on a story from the Mabinogion, is well suited to children just cresting the transition into the teenage years. It captures above all that sense of how powerful myth can be – and how it can be made to resonate with the furniture of modernity. Garner’s work, at its best, can give the reader a sort of vertigo at the vastness and ultimate indecipherability of the universe.
Thirteen: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, by Sue Townsend
I had thought to include The Catcher in the Rye as the great classic of adolescent angst, but Cottrell Boyce makes the case that Sue Townsend’s 1982 novel “is vastly more truthful and better written than Catcher. Also sadder, funnier, and a more intimate voice”. Certainly, the relationship between Adrian and Pandora is Tristan and Isolde (he wishes) for the early 80s. And Holden Caulfield never gets his nose stuck to an Airfix model plane.
Fourteen: Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman
Set in an alternate universe where dark-skinned peoples (crosses) had historically had the whip-hand over Caucasians (noughts), Blackman’s series tells an operatically entertaining story – part family saga, part thriller, part romance. But its race-switching conceit also, brilliantly and without preachiness, invites young readers to look with fresh eyes at the supposedly natural, and unquestioned, assumptions we make about race. It does what good SF does, which is to say, “What if it were like this?”, and to entice you to explore the question by telling you a whizz-bang story while you do. It’s named after a game that is, famously, impossible for either player to win.
Fifteen: A Hand Full of Stars, by Rafik Schami translated by Rika Lesser
This tale of a young Syrian boy pouring his frustrations with government oppression into his journal, before risking it all by starting an underground newspaper, is a window into the lives of young people living under repressive regimes. As the former children’s Laureate Michael Rosen puts it, teens should read this because it’s about how “a boy deals with the oncoming clampdown in Damascus – but it’s applicable anywhere”.
Sixteen: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
One of the great opening lines in modern fiction – “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York” – kicks off this work of chilly comedy and detached psychological horror. The great poet’s only novel finds a voice that’s very different from the “blood-jet” of her poetry, and it’s unforgettable. Jacqueline Wilson says it’s “vital to be read between 15 and 25. It’s about an intense, brilliant student having a turbulent mental breakdown, her story told in precise glittering prose. I can still quote passages by heart.”
Seventeen: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Here’s a boarding-school story quite unlike Molesworth or Harry Potter. Ishiguro’s is a style of hints and feints. Deep poignancy emerges from the restrained surface of his work, and the big questions sneak up on you. Never Let Me Go uses a quietly chilling science-fictional premise – a world, the reader very gradually apprehends, in which everything is okey-dokey for all the most horrifying reasons – to explore something universal: what it means to grow up, what it means to love, and what it means to die. Nobody who reads Never Let Me go will soon forget it.
Eighteen: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer prize winner tells the wrenching story of a formerly enslaved woman in the aftermath of the American civil war. It’s based on the true story of Margaret Garner, who attempted to kill her children to prevent them being returned to slavery. “Beloved is my vote for the truest Great American Novel,” says Katherine Rundell. “It has such power, strangeness and profound humanity. To read it as a teen is to catch it when your imagination is most fervent and most ready to meet its passion and furious clarity.”
Nineteen: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Vonnegut’s phantasmagorical science-fictional reworking of his experiences as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden is like nothing else, and it manages to be deeply wise and moving at the same time as being, amazingly, riotously funny. It’s a lesson – probably quite handy for self-serious late teens – in the way that suffering, even the most horrific suffering, can be transformed by art. As the birds in the book say: “Poo-tee-weet?” What else is there to say?
Twenty: The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet, translated by Christopher Moncrieff
Rosen recommends the French novelist Raymond Radiguet’s 1923 Le Diable au corps, translated into English as The Devil in the Flesh. The story of a married woman’s affair with a teenage boy, here’s one for younger older readers. “An illicit romance during the first world war,” says Rosen, “wrapped in intrigue as to whether it’s a roman à clef for the author. Probably. Which makes it all the more intriguing.”
Twenty-one: Four Quartets by TS Eliot
The crystalline perfection of Eliot’s linked sequence of long poems, along with their endlessly quotable lines, makes them a lifelong companion. Read and reread them; the effort pays off. Here is a theory of history, of spirituality, of life, ageing and death, wrapped in the most exquisite language, full of drama and grandeur, and shot through with feeling for the beauty and sadness of human existence. It might be handy to keep Hugh Kenner’s lucid explication in The Invisible Poet on hand as a guide.
Twenty-two: Emma by Jane Austen
Among Austen’s many virtues is that you can read her with pleasure from your early teens and reread in later life to see things you didn’t the first time round. But Emma, with its fantastically subtle way of leading the reader up the garden path, and its flawed and crosspatch heroine – Austen said that she wanted to write a character nobody but herself would much like – is a novel that comes into its own in early adulthood. Emma’s moment of mortification on Box Hill – “It was badly done, indeed!” – is a moment of moving from childish conceit and self-absorption to adult consciousness of shame.
Twenty-three: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s 1985 novel about the cruelty of a Christian fundamentalist patriarchy has become ever more essential over time. This story imagines a world in which a military theocracy abolishes women’s rights to own property, read or write, and removes their reproductive autonomy altogether. It’s tense and exciting – and it teaches a moral lesson that shouldn’t any more be needed, but apparently is.
Twenty-four: White Noise by Don DeLillo
This is so much fun, I couldn’t resist including it. And it is, sort of, prophetic – of the absurdities of a culture of media saturation and simulation overtaking reality. Its special sauce is the way it combines its madcap comedy of ideas with a real tenderness – usually rather deeper in the mix with DeLillo – about family life and relationships.
Twenty-five: Middlemarch by George Eliot
You’re a grown-up. Time to read probably the most grown-up novel in the language, and certainly one of the best. It’s slow – you need to settle into it – but it is so rich and artful and wise and forgiving and beady and funny and moving. The inhabitants of that small town will live with their readers lifelong, and the effects of their being will be, like Eliot said, incalculably diffusive. George Eliot shows you (or, if you’ve been punctilious about reading a great book every single year, reminds you) what the novel can do.
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