I came to the realization about a week ago that I have never actually read Alice in Wonderland (i.e. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, the actual title). I had begun thinking about books I loved as a child. I was a voracious reader, reading every book I could get my hands on as quickly as I could get my hands on them. I was reading well before I started school, and my first grade teacher would go to the fifth grade classes to get work for me to do because I was bored. My grandfather gave me a copy of Black Beauty for my 8th birthday, and my dad and I read it together (taking turns, each reading a chapter) every night before bed.
I remember The Mouse and the Motorcycle in 2nd grade, Charlotte's Webb in 3rd grade, a huge fuss over A Wrinkle in Time in 4th grade, reading Maniac Magee, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and the Great Brain in 5th grade, and the miraculous story of The Giver in 6th grade. Those were school sanctioned reading. My experience was fortunate in that many of the books we read as curriculum were/are books that are frequently banned. But my recreational reading swiftly became influenced by popular culture, and so books like Alice's Adventures In Wonderland were not even a thought. For a very long time I didn't realize that The Wizard of Oz (and many many others) were actually books, simply because I had never been exposed to the idea (in fact now I was more familiar with the opposite, seeing a book that I was familiar with be turned into a movie, rather than a movie I was familiar and seeking out the book).
So when I realized I hadn't read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I got thinking about books I want to have in my house for my children. I want a massive library, endless books. Not one essential that isn't there for them. So I started making a list. A lot of them I haven't read (yet):
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland series - Lewis Carroll
Anne of Green Gables series - Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Hobbitt - J.R.R. Tolkein
The Lord of the Rings series - J.R.R. Tolkein
Little House on the Prairie series - Laura Ingalls Wilder
Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia series - C.S. Lewis
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
One Thousand And One Nights (Arabian Nights)
Tuck Everlasting - Natalie Babbit
Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Patterson
Walk Two Moons - Sharon Creech
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh
The Mouse and the Motorcycle - Beverly Cleary
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Pippi Longstocking series - Astrid Lindgren
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
The Indian in the Cupboard - Lynn Reid Banks
Are you there God? It's Me Margaret - Judy Blume
The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Old Yeller - Fred Gipson
The Velveteen Rabbit - Margery Williams
The Whipping Boy - Sid Fleischman
Summer of My German Soldier - Bette Greene
The Egypt Game - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
A Wind in the Door and series - Madeleine L'Engle
Misty of Chincoteague - Marguerite Henry
Gulliver's Travels - Johnathan Swift
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle
Sarah Plain and Tall - Patricia MacLachlan
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (yes, I know this is a poem, but it is also illustrated as a delightful children's book)
The Swiss Family Robinson - John David Wyss
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
Peter Pan and Wendy - J.M. Barrie
Aesop's Fables
Cheaper By the Dozen - Frank Gilbreth Jr, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Winnie the Pooh Series - A.A. Milne
The Tale of Peter Rabbit - Beatrix Potter
Heidi - Johanna Spyri
Charlotte's Webb - E.B. White
Stuart Little - E.B. White
Mary Poppins series - P.L. Travers
National Velvet - Enid Bagnold
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Divine Comedy - Dante
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
Daisy Miller - Henry James
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
All Quiet on the Western Front - Eric Maria Remarq
Night - Elie Weisel
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Antigone - Sophocles
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Aeneid - Virgil
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Native Son - Richard Wright
Ramona series - Beverly Cleary
A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein
Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
Boy - Roald Dahl
How to Eat Fried Worms - Thomas Rockwell
The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier
The Giver - Lois Lowry
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and the Fudge series - Judy Blume
Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'Dell
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry - Mildred D. Taylor
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Forever - Judy Bloom
Heather Has Two Mommies :)
Number the Stars - Lois Lowry
A Day No Pigs Would Die - Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Patterson
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Wish Giver - Bill Brittain
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
For the record, I'm aware that 1) Jane Austen isn't on here. Because I can't stand her books, or the Brontes' for that matter. Not that they won't be in the collection, but I won't be promoting them.. 2) Dr. Seuss. there are just too many to list, but I'll have those too..3)this is not a complete list. No list would be complete without Pickle Things, and besides, there will never be a finite number of books that could potentially be added.
That said, please let me know if I've forgotten anything essential, or if you know of something less common that should be included!
I bought myself a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and started reading it. They just don't write books like this anymore.
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