Jean Nathan is the author of The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll, a biography of the children’s author Dare Wright. Here, Nathan names her first- and still best-loved books.
Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt (Golden Books, $10). The premise is a bit weak—“Here are Paul and Judy. They can do lots of things.…” But Dorothy Kunhardt’s brilliance was in not shutting the littlest ones out of the game. This interactive book performs a noble task: providing a baby with his or her first taste of literary life—even if it is licking the pages.
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Goodnight, Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Clement Hurd (HarperFestival, $8). The get-a-kid-to-sleep standard. The sight of its talismanic objects (the comb, the brush, the bowl of mush) flooded me with a sense of comfort when I was a child, as did the incantatory rhythm of Brown’s words.
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown; illustrated by Clement Hurd (HarperFestival, $8). A little bunny tests his mother to see to what lengths she will go to find him—should he run away. An all-is-right-with-the-world classic, and another Brown-Hurd masterpiece.
The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss (Random House, $9 each). Or anything else he wrote. Seuss’ language is a sort of cracked poetry at the nexus of nonsense and sense. T.S. Eliot for kids.
Buy The Cat in the Hat at Amazon.com
Buy Green Eggs and Ham at Amazon.com
Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman (Random House, $9). A well-intentioned mother bird feels the egg beneath her beginning to hatch, and takes off to find him something to eat—unwittingly abandoning her baby at his very entry into the world. I always found his elemental confusion nightmarish. And I melted with relief when mother and baby finally reunite.
The Lonely Doll
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Fannie Flagg’s 6 favorite books that sparked her imaginationFeature The author recommends works by Johanna Spyri, John Steinbeck, and more
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Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
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Patrick Hemingway: The Hemingway son who tended to his father’s legacyFeature He was comfortable in the shadow of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway
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Fannie Flagg’s 6 favorite books that sparked her imagination
Feature The author recommends works by Johanna Spyri, John Steinbeck, and more
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Jessica Francis Kane's 6 favorite books that prove less is moreFeature The author recommends works by Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie-Helene Bertino, and more
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Keith McNally's 6 favorite books that have ambitious charactersFeature The London-born restaurateur recommends works by Leo Tolstoy, John le Carré, and more
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Garrett Graff's 6 favorite books that shine new light on World War IIFeature The author recommends works by James D. Hornfischer, Craig L. Symonds, and more
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Helen Schulman's 6 favorite collections of short storiesFeature The award-winning author recommends works by Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, and more
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Beatriz Williams' 6 timeless books about history and human relationshipsFeature The best-selling author recommends works by Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, and more
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Aysegul Savas' 6 favorite books for readers who love immersive settingsFeature The Paris-based Turkish author recommends works by Hiromi Kawakami, Virginia Woolf, and more
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Geoff Dyer's 6 favorite books about the realities of warFeature The award-winning author recommends works by Ernie Pyle, Michael Herr, and more
