"I could probably describe my all-time favorite kids' stories by saying: fairy tales, folk tales, myths, legends, and rude schoolyard rhymes. I think that pretty much covers the source material that all good kids' books come from. But if I had to name a few specific titles, my favorites would be these:

Green Eggs and Ham. By Dr. Seuss. "A personal talisman. One of the first books I read. The book that made me realize books could be goofy. The book that made 'The Stinky Cheese Man' possible."

Mary Poppins. By P.L. Travers. "A literary incarnation of the Goddess if there ever was one. P.L. (I wonder if her friends just called her P.?) always insisted that she didn't invent Mary Poppins. Mary Poppins demanded that her story be told."

The Carrot Seed. By Ruth Kraus, illustrated by Crockett Johnson. "A boy finds a carrot seed and plants it. Everyone tells him it won't grow. The boy waters the carrot seed. It grows into a carrot so huge it fills a wheelbarrow on the last page. Now that's my kind of story. Never out of print since it was first published in 1944."

George and Martha. By James Marshall. "You couldn't write more elegant and seemingly effortlessly funny stories than these even if your life depended upon it. These are the Zen strokes that you make on the page after 10 years of meditation on the nature of ink. Up there with Robert Benchley, S.J. Perelman, Woody Allen, and Will Cuppy in my book of great humor writers."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. By Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. "Nonsense, math, puzzles, poems and conundrums wonderfully told with illustrations to match. Nothing in kids' books has stood up as well as this gem."

Daniel Pinkwater books -- Blue Moose, Fat Men from Space, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. "Anarchists everywhere unite! Pinkwater is our leader!"

The Metamorphosis. "Franz Kafka's class as retold by me to my second graders. What a great story opener. Borges and bits of Cervantes worked well too."

Papa Snap's No Such Stories. By Tomi Ungerer. "Tuba-playing beasts. The blind leading the lame. A rabbit fishing without a permit. It doesn't matter. There are no fish. A collection of stunning one-page tales."

Gorky Rises. By William Steig. "All of Steig's books sparkle with one-of-a-kind language and one-of-a-kind stories."

Frog and Toad. By Arnold Lobel. Frog and Toad are friends. They have adventures. Sometimes existential dilemmas. All in brilliantly limited vocabulary and sentence structure that kept me sane and entertained through no less than 4,785,421 readings with beginning readers.

"And then there's David Macauley's "Motel of the Mysteries," Edward Lear's nonsense, Hilaire Belloc's tales, the works of E. Nesbit, Katherine Paterson, Lloyd Alexander. Am I out of room yet? Did I mention Roald Dahl? Conan, Tarzan... Flat Stanley ?

---

William Joyce | Katherine Paterson | Jerry Pinkney | William Steig