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Father Knows Best: Kids Books

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Either my wife or I have read childrenʼs books nearly every night for the past ten years. The last four or five years have been more interesting as weʼve gotten into the chapter books read over multiple nights and not just repeated readings of Dr. Seuss or Berenstein Bears.

We do not read to them because we are convinced it will make them smarter or anything like that. The kids just really enjoy it and it is a nice transition for them from the activity of everyday life to sleep.

This will focus primarily on books that are good for five-to-ten year old kids since that is what I have been reading the past few years. I am not saying this is great literature or worthy of any awards (although some of it is). They are just enjoyable childrenʼs books and some of them do have some things the kids can learn from them.

Anyway, here it goes. There will be spoilers in each review as you may want to know how they end to decide if it is appropriate for your child.

The Borrowers - This is the story of little people that live within the houses of humans. They “borrow” different household items from the humans - thimble for a pail, postage stamps as artwork, cigar case as mural, etc.

Overall, my kids really liked the book. I was a little surprised because I am guessing they didnʼt recognize a lot of the vocabulary as it was a British book written in the 1950ʼs. And it didnʼt help that I didnʼt know a lot of the words either.

I wouldnʼt say this is my favorite kidsʼ book but there is a reason that I am including the book here - I loved the ending. The book starts and ends with a woman telling her niece (or daughter, I canʼt remember) the story of the borrowers. The woman had never seen them but her brother claimed he had. The woman found the borrower girlʼs diary when she went to visit the house the borrowers had once occupied. The niece takes this as proof that the borrowers exist. Thatʼs when the aunt drops the bombshell - in the diary, the borrower girl made her eʼs with half moons...and so did the human boy. It is so rare that a childrenʼs book has an ending that can be left open to interpretation. Most are happy and a few are sad but it is rare that you get a little ambiguity. This led to a little discussion with the kids about the ending. Of course, the eight year old asked if there are any sequels to the story and then concluded that they must be real. Oh well. It was still a good discussion!

Because of Winn Dixie - One of my favorite books. I was a little embarrassed by how much I liked a book with a target audience of 8-10 year olds.

It is a story of a girl in the south living with her preacher father after her mother has abandoned them. They move to a small town where she doesnʼt know anyone. She adopts an ugly mutt of a dog that becomes her best friend.

The book isnʼt really about the relationship between the girl and the dog as much as you would think it would be. Itʼs really about how the dog helps her to open up to the people around her. There is a great cast of unusual characters that she gets to know. Itʼs a little like a southern version of Northern Exposure.

Eventually, the girl works up the courage to ask her emotionally-closed father about her mother leaving them. Itʼs an honest, emotional story. I really liked it.

Tales of Despereaux - This is another book by Kate DiCamillo (as is Because of Winn Dixie). I canʼt really say much about this book because I ended up only reading about half of it while my wife read the other half.

What I can say is that I really liked the parts that I read. DiCamillo just does a great job of writing stories that do not talk down to her target audience. Itʼs another book that I felt I could have read on my own and really enjoyed.

I should also mention that DiCamillo has lived in the Twin Cities for the past 17 years. I may have to get the kidsʼ books signed sometime. For the kids, of course.

Bridge to Terabithia - This is one of the few books that I read as a kid that just burned into my memory. Itʼs the story of a misfit boy growing up in a rural area that ends up friends with the new girl that moves in down the road. He and the girl make an imaginary world in the woods called Terabithia.

Most of the book is your typical kidsʼ book about kids making an imaginary land. Where it differs from other childrenʼs books is the ending. The girl went to play in the woods alone, hit her head on a rock, and drowned in the stream. It was the first book I had ever read that had a main character die and the first book I had ever read that didnʼt have a happy ending. I remember sitting in the 5th grade classroom with a lump in my throat fearful that someone would spot me tearing up. I reread the chapter a couple times to make sure I read it right. I kept thinking it must be a dream or something. I couldnʼt believe that they had made a childrenʼs book like that.

Curiously, my kids didnʼt react the same way. I think a classmate told one of them how it was going to end and I might have hinted that the ending would surprise them. Or maybe it just doesnʼt have the same impact when it is being read out loud to you. Iʼm not really sure.

I have really enjoyed these books to the kids. The books targeting this age group can be hit-and-miss but if you find some good ones, it can be fun for everyone. Weʼve started to use a list of the Newbery Award winners to select our books so hopefully Iʼll have more to add in the future.

75 thoughts on “Father Knows Best: Kids Books”

  1. I've been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books to my boys (ages 6 and 9). I've also read the "Chronicles of Narnia" and the E.B. White books to them ("Charlotte's Web," "Stuart Little," and "The Trumpet of the Swan."). I did not read "Stuart Little" or "The Trumpet of the Swan." "Stuart Little" is definitely a strange one and I really didn't like the ending, which wasn't much of an ending as much as there just wasn't anymore book to read. I really don't know why that one is considered a children's classic.

    1. CER had the Little House books read to her when she was 5 or 6. (She turns 8 in a month.) We stopped a chapter into Silver Lake as the litany of mishaps that had befallen the family since the end of the previous book were too much. EAR and I were repressing our laughs at how ridiculous it was. CER has since re-read some of those books. Don't know if she's gotten to Silver Lake.

      Through homeschool, CER and HPR have had Trumpet of the Swan read to them, but I only caught a few chapters.

    2. We're actually in the middle of Narnia with our 8-year-old son (almost done with Magician's Nephew) and Little House with our 6 year old daughter. They love them both.

  2. Nice post, Algonad and timely too. I'm going to check out the Newbery list, but I know that my oldest daughter loves DiCamillo.

    I'm stuck with the oldest though. He's blown through the Wimpy Kid series, Magic Tree House and Harry Potter. He'll turn eight this summer, but I would love recommendations for pre-teen boys.

    2. Almost any of Heinlein's "young adult" sci-fi books would be great. Space Cadet, Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, Door into Summer, The Star Beast...all good ones. Or try this freebie, which I still love (and would make a great action movie in a modernized script)

      1. Starship Troopers??? Really? For kids??

        that one strikes me more as one for a Tweener boy. Maybe you meant Have Spacesuit, Will Travel???

        1. I'm flying blind when it comes to sci-fi, since I didn't get into it as a kid and haven't as a grown up. The boy definitely has his mom's taste in books. And the Boxcar Children has over 100 books! That'll keep him busy for a while. Thanks for the recs.

          1. the movie has a combined total of about 15 seconds in common with the book. repository:

            According to the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven never finished reading the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both "bored and depressed."

                  1. From what I've heard (I haven't seen it) a lot of the vitriol toward the movie comes from the fact that audiences were unable to understand that the humans weren't the good guys.

            2. Yeah, he dropped the jumpsuits (which could have been cool), an entire alien race of enemy allies (the Skinnies), and made a major character female instead of male and put her in bed with the male lead. Glad he waited until Heinlein was dead.

              1. On the positive side, they gave Joss Whedon a cheap armor for the Alliance soliders.

          2. And the book is tame compared to the movie.

            Well, it has that shower scene going for it. Plus, you know, Denise Richards.

  3. I wish the post I did at the old WGOM was still available; I listed all of the books I read to Runner daughter there. I was a bit selfish with my list -- my goal was to read something that I would like to [re]read as well, and hopefully to influence Runner daughter a little bit in her reading interests. I succeeded on both accounts. And when the early Harry Potter books came out, and my voice started going hoarse after long evening reading sessions, it was a sign that it was time for her to take over and read on her own.

  4. I tried reading to the Calf pre-bed time but after we pump him full of food he passes right out. In the rare times that he doesn't fall asleep while eating I have just read whatever I am reading out loud to him. Ms Buffalo doesn't think Joe Posnanski columns are appropriate bed times stories but I have a tough time believing he understands a darn thing from these kids books at 4.5 months old.

    So, anyway, I guess my question is, when should I start reading Children's books to the Calf rather than just reading at him?

    1. Pos sounds like a good start.

      I regularly read the same few Sandra Boynton books over and over to AJR (who's now 14 months), mostly because they've got nice rhymes and meter to them, good for going to bed. I think I'll start reading more for her once she gets interested in the stories.

      1. Boynton FTW. Our kids loved those books. Great pictures and, as you say, nice flow.

        1. Boynton is the bomb. Amazingly, blue hat, green hat, red hat, oops! never gets old.

            1. Our big one is The Going to Bed Book. Seeing as AJR is 14 months old, I've probably read it to her 400 times (plus about 100 to the other two). When AJR is in a mood to play with the book, that's okay because I have the story memorized. If it counts as a poem (and song lyrics do not), that gives me three poems memorized: The Going to Bed Book, Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat, and Frost's The End of the World, and Frost's Fire and Ice.

              Recent gifts have brought But Not the Hippopotamus, Night-night Little Pookie, and Perfect Piggies into our house. Perfect Piggies pales in comparison to the others I've read. AJR gets a kick when I'm reading Pookie or putting her to bed that I kiss her as Pookie's mom kisses him.

    2. The benefit of reading to a 4.5 month old comes from holding and talking to them - the content is immaterial. Soon enough they'll be trying to rip it out of your hands anyway and that's not a lot of fun.

      I think we started reading to my daughter regularly when she started grabbing books and bringing them to us - around a year? And now reading and going to the library are a huge part of our routine. Now the boy (3 months) likes to listen sometimes, but mostly because he thinks his sister is the greatest thing in the world.

      1. I can't think of any reason NOT to encourage reading to/by kids. It instills a love for books, helps in learning and comprehension. And a great appreciation for the library.

        1. And it's a two-way street. Our library usage has increased exponentially in the past year or two - largely due to my daughter.

          (I'm not saying don't read to babies, I'm saying it doesn't matter what you read to babies. At least little bitty ones.)

          1. I believe my mom used reading as an effective potty training tool, as well.

          2. No, I was agreeing with you completely. Other things that come to mind is reading can improve your child's concentration/patience, and also a great stimulus for getting to bed when it's bedtime (or even earlier)

            1. Oh good. We have a very strict 3-book, 2-song bedtime routine (with a chance for bonus 3rd song for good behavior). I do look forward to starting some longer books in the next year or so.

  5. Last summer, I read Misty of Chincoteague to CER and HPR. It gave them inspiration to be more industrious: asking for jobs to do for money. I liked that.

    This summer, with our new house even closer to the Mississippi River, I'm reading Minn of the Mississippi, by Holling Clancy Holling. I probably read it when I was ten. I get them up on my bed so they can get good looks at the illustrations in the margins. I also have Paddle-to-the-Sea, which I've never read, waiting on a shelf.

  6. The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major was a favorite of mine growing up. That would be a good one for the 8-10 year old set. It's sort of an Indiana classic.

  7. I have lost all memory of what I actually read to the kids at bedtime. It has been ~10 years, after all, and I have trouble remembering what instructions I've given my staff 5 minutes after a meeting.

    We had a full set of Pooh books, a full set of Oz books (good lord!), lots of board books, etc. I remember reading Richard Scarry with the kids, for sure (Best Word Book Ever was a fav). Oh, and Poppleton.

    Among my personal favorites was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

    Don't forget the Caldecott Medal winners.

    Ah, that list brings back good memories. Drummer Hoff, The Snowy Day, Make Way For Ducklings, Where the Wild Things Are, Officer Buckle and Gloria, Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, etc. etc.

    1. My favorite Scarry was Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. In fact, we use fight over it in elementary school.

    2. Seconding Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, to which I'd add The Little House and Katy and the Big Snow. Absolute classics. And bS, if you haven't heard Werner Herzog read Mike Mulligan, then you've got to check this out.

      I know Where the Wild Things Are gets a lot of hipster cred, but if you ask me In the Night Kitchen was the better book. Hopefully public libraries still stock the many books of Bill Peet, who was my little sister's favorite author when she started reading on her own.

      My favorite books as a little shaver were Harold and the Purple Crayon, the Little Golden Book version of "The Owl and the Pussycat," and The World of Pooh. Once I got to chapter books I went rapidly from The Boxcar Children to Encyclopedia Brown, a few of the Matt Christopher sports books (Catcher with a Glass Arm, The Kid Who Only Hit Homers, and Miracle at the Plate are the ones that I remember), and then to books that are still favorites: The Indian in the Cupboard books, How to Eat Fried Worms, and, perhaps best of all, the Brains Benton mysteries.

      1. thanks for the Werner Herzog link, CH. and, oh yea, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Great pull.

        1. As a kid, Harold and the Purple Crayon was my favorite. It seemed so magical.

          I loved Dr. Seuss, too, and still do, though reading his late work is an exercise in patience.

            1. all right, who deleted a comment?

              EDIT: nevermind, fixed it. apparently CH's comment was recognized as spam.

              1. I was wondering where the Harold mention came from.

                To another of CH's points, Beau mentioned to me that he attempted to read a Matt Christopher book recently to see if it held up, and it was awful. Kind of a shame...I loved those at the time too, though I suppose as a kid, the fact that it was about baseball was always going to be good enough for me.

                1. I had a similar reaction to re-reading the Narnia books recently. Aw. Full. No wonder Tolkien made fun of Lewis.

                  1. I felt that way upon reading them for the first time, at age 17 or so. At the time I thought I was looking into it too deeply, but I found them to be sexist, manipulative trash. For years I forgot that Lewis was responsible for some pretty good works.

                2. I wondered whether the Matt Christopher ones would hold up. If I remember correctly, I read them all in a summer and never came back to them, which probably says something.

            2. shel silverstein will also be among the classics that i'm going to have to seek out for the shelf.

              1. Absolutely. He does great work for adult audiences, too (well, everything he does can and should be enjoyed by adults, but he writes adult-only material).

                1. i haven't seen much of that, but i remember the ABZ book being pretty genius.

              2. Last night, EAR found a poem that I thought sounded like Silverstein. It was "Jim", by Hilaire Belloc.

        1. I'm glad I'm not the only one who had the pleasure of reading those tomes. Did you know somebody on the internet made a schematic of Brains' house & HQ based on all the info in the books?

      3. I tried reading an Encyclopedia Brown book to the kids and it definitely didn't age well. "Clocks tick?" "Phones dial?" It just didn't work.

        1. wow. having to explain verbs like that never occurred to me. yeesh, kids these days...

        2. I read a couple this year. I think the concept is still strong, and the stories fairly well put together, but you're right; kids these days would have a hard time understanding the ancient world it takes place in.

    3. Mike Mulligan was a fave from the Captain Kangaroo show readings. I know many of them are on video; I wonder if they're on youtube by now?

        1. Ferdinand the Bull!!!1111one1111!!!!

          Not enough to make me a vegetablarian, but I loved that book and still do love it. Don't we all just want to go sit under a tree amongst the flowers?

        2. The list also has Millions of Cats by NU's own Wanda Gág.
          Gág's few similar books, the Funny Thing, Snippy & Snappy, and Nothing at All are all great. They seem like fables, except you get to the end and there is no lesson.

          I would love for someone to make four half-hour shorts out of these books, and release those as one feature film. But that would never happen. If ever one would get made into a film, it would be expanded and ruined. So I just have to go with the movie in my head.

          1. It was already done. I think there were three stories per video; the library had them for checkout. If I remember, I'll go look up the name of the series of videos.

    4. Mike Mulligan and the other books from Burton are also popular, especially with HPR, but they've only been library books. EAR and I have contemplated buying her anthology. We got her Calico the Wonder Horse from the library, which was very different from stories about machines and houses, but as it is a Western, but HPR and I both thought it was pretty great, too.

  8. CER has been a voracious reader for more than a year now, I think she's gone through all of the Rainbow Magic Fairy books, and most of the Magic Treehouse, and lots of random stuff. On Monday, she asked if she could read my Lord of the Rings books. EAR and I discussed it and decided that she could try, by my wife said that she couldn't skip words she doesn't know, but has to ask. So she read some on Monday, but hasn't since. I don't know what will happen.

    Another source of good stories is Andrew Lang's "Rainbow" Fairy books: basically a collection of fairy tales from around the world. When CER was 4 or 5, we'd read stories from that. Some tales are for several nights, others are brief and can be read in five minutes. We recently bought a collection of stories from the series and read each kid one last night.

    1. Magic Treehouse books were golden in our house.

      LOR is darned hard slogging for a youngster. How old is EAR [edit: umm, I meant CER]? I don't think I was tackling that level of difficulty until at least 4th grade (when I read Watership Down).

      Easier entree into the world of fantasy literature -- the Artemis Fowl books and the Redwall series (very formulaic, but sword-play, adventure and cute, brave anthropomorphized animals), then maybe step up to stuff like Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series (I LOVED these as a kid; mine found them a bit too slow-paced), the Earthsea cycle, etc., before tackling Tolkien.

      1. i read the once and future king at that age, though i don't really remember it now. 5th grade was about when i got into stephan king.

      2. Yep. EAR is 33. CER is 7 11/12. I think the book is too big for her, but I wasn't going to say no. She's been needing something to challenge her. She'd pick up four new Rainbow Magic books from the library and have three finished that evening. I'm beginning to doubt she'll read any more of LOTR for now though: she hasn't picked it up again.

        I know that the first substantial books I read were Where the Red Fern Grows and The Yearling. Both on my dad's insistence. (After seeing me doing too much nothing on Christmas break, he picked up Red Fern from the library and said something like "No more TV til the book's done.)

  9. I really miss reading to my girls. It used to be a ritual, and the very best part of my day. Then they learned to read and got all independent and grown up. Time marches on.

  10. I would be remiss if I didn't plug one of the great achievements in the history of juvenile literature - Captain Underpants.

  11. I'll add to this list by saying that I read anything and everything by Gary Paulsen, especially The Winter Room and Hatchet and from Jean Craighead George I read and re-read My Side Of The Mountain, and Julie Of The Wolves. I was also into Kenneth Grahame (The Wind In The Willows and The Reluctant Dragon) and The Hardy Boys series.

    Before I could read, my dad would read to us from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Stories For Children a lot...in addition to a lot of what's been posted above.

    1. My Side of the Mountain! I've forgotten about that book for too long. Wholeheartedly seconded, along with Hatchet and The River. I believe Gary Paulson is a Minnesotan, too.

      I was actually talking about Julie of the Wolves with some friends last night; somehow we had gotten onto the subject of favorite childhood books, which lead us to disturbing books read in childhood. Anyone who hasn't read Julie of the Wolves should be aware that there is an attempted rape of the main character. I'm not saying it shouldn't be read, but that you should be prepared as a parent to explain some pretty uncomfortable parts of life.

      2. Oh, I remember Julie of the Wolves. I think I hated it. The attempted rape and then the real loss of her innocence at the end (if I remember it right).

  12. Wow, I just read the initial post. Because of Winn Dixie was Skim's go-to movie a few years ago at about age 3-4, and I almost always watched it with her.

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