“I’m wondering what to read next.” Matilda said. “I’ve finished all the children’s books.”
Roald Dahl, Matilda

My mother, who reads more than just about anyone I know, is generous with her books. She reads books quickly and then passes them along, keeping only a select few. Once she’s finished a book, she sees no reason for it to take up valuable shelf space. Out it goes into a shopping bag in her garage; when the bag is full, she takes it to a used bookstore that rewards her with store credit. And of course, her friends and family benefit from her reading habit. When I find a padded manila envelope in my mailbox marked “Media Mail”, sometimes it’s from a New York publisher, but often it’s from my mother.

So when my mother mentioned that her book club asked each member to share a list of her ten favorite books, I was curious to know which ones made the cut. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that most of them were children’s books, because I suppose that many readers would list children’s books as their favorites. The books we read (and reread) in our formative years embed themselves in our hearts like old childhood friends. As adults, it’s a real pleasure to become reacquainted with the books we loved as children, and eventually to introduce them to the next generation.

My mother prefaced her “top ten” list with this comment:

Given a better memory I am sure I could come up with some different ones but these are a good start. You will notice that many of my favorites are children’s books  — childhood was when I discovered the joy and delight of reading and losing myself in a good book – which, as you know, I still do.

Clearly, my mother is better at reading than she is at math, since she gave me a list of eleven favorite books. Here’s her list, in no particular order, with my editorial comments:

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
I enjoyed Alice in Wonderland (and the sequel, Through the Looking Glass) as a child; on rereading them later in life, I was surprised at how much darker and more adult the books are than the movie versions.

Winnie-the-Pooh (the set of four books, including the stories and the poems) by A.A. Milne
These are the best read-aloud books for young children! I can still recite some of the poems from When We Were Very Young:

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.

Mary Poppins (and the sequels) by P.L. Travers
Like Alice in Wonderland, the Mary Poppins books are much darker than the movie and stage versions. Both my mother and I enjoyed Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P.L. Travers, by Valerie Lawson. Lawson wrote that while the movie character of Mary Poppins, played by Julie Andrews, is  “sweet, gentle, and cheerful”, the character in the book is “tart and sharp, rude, plain, and vain” — much like P.L. Travers herself.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
This lovely book, full of humor and wisdom, seems to have fallen out of favor in recent years. I’m not sure why — maybe because there are virtually no female characters in it? That didn’t register with me when I read it as a little girl, which is interesting because I guarantee a young boy would have noticed that he was reading book with no male characters. But what child, male or female, hasn’t been tempted to betray a confidence:

Secrets had an immense attraction to him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.”

Stuart Little by E.B. White
E.B. White’s books for children are pure perfection. My mother and I are in agreement with Stuart that “‘a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone'”, as he tells the class when he steps in as a substitute teacher. And any mother who’s ever enjoyed the early morning while everyone else is sleeping will identify with Stuart:

He liked the feeling of being the first one stirring; he enjoyed the quiet rooms with the books standing still on the shelves, the pale light coming in through the windows, and the fresh smell of day.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
My mother gave me mass-market copy of Gone With the Wind when I was about twelve (which I still have, although its pages are yellow and brittle) and I really couldn’t put it down. I think this was the first grown-up book I ever read, and it paved the way for all the other fat historical sagas I loved as a teenager — The Good Earth, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Agony and the Ecstasy, The Pillars of the Earth . . .

A Death in the Family by James Agee
James Agee died at age 45 in 1955, leaving behind a handwritten, untitled manuscript that was published as A Death in the Family in 1957. Ten years ago, a scholar named Michael Lofaro, reconstructed the novel, claiming that the new version was closer to the author’s original intention. According to the New York Times:

This tidying is good in its own right, but the main reason to celebrate the publication of this version is that it serves as a fresh reminder of the wondrous nature of Agee’s prose — unabashedly poetic, sacramental in its embrace of reality, and rhythmical as rain on a Tennessee tin roof.

The World According to Garp by John Irving
This isn’t my favorite John Irving book — that would be A Prayer for Owen Meany, or maybe The Cider House Rules — but it’s the one that introduced me to Irving and his outsized imagination. As Garp himself says, “‘Imagining something is better than remembering something.'” I think of Garp sometimes when I take a walk around the neighborhood at night and see a television on in almost every house: “His real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.”

Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk
As a teenager, I loved this coming-of-age story about a young girl rebelling against her upper-middle class family in 1930s Manhattan. In The End of Your Life Book Club (a memoir about a book club with two members: the author and his mother), Will Schwalbe asks his mother to name her favorite books of all time. Her number one choice is Gone With the Wind, followed by Marjorie Morningstar. Schwalbe read the book on his mother’s recommendation, saying: “In Marjorie Morningstar, Wouk created a huge, all-enveloping book that sucks you in like Gone With the Wind.”

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
True confession from an English major: I never finished reading A Tale of Two Cities. My mother gave me a copy, which I probably still have somewhere with the page marked where I stopped reading. Sorry, Mom! I don’t think I’ve actually ever finished a Dickens book, except A Christmas Carol.

Biographical Questioning and the Quest for the Real in Contemporary Spanish Narrative by Virginia Newhall Rademacher
Definitely not for children, my sister’s Ph.D. dissertation (all 500+ pages) is an incredible source of pride for my mother.

What books would make your Top Ten list?