The journalist and author chooses his six favourite children’s books. His new book, "The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading", examining classics from Aesop to "Harry Potter", is out this week.
Peter Pan
Much, much wilder and stranger than Disney would have you believe, Barrie's original "Peter Pan" is dangerous, exciting and also, as his creator describes him, a "tragic boy". It's a complex and magical piece of work.
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Available on The Week Bookshop
The Once and Future King
T.H. White, 1958
Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" pushed through White's bizarre sensibility. Radiantly well written, deeply moving, morally serious and wildly funny in the silliest ways possible, it's like nothing else.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Grinny
Nicholas Fisk, 1973
Weird sci-fi/ horror alien home-invasion fantasy. What if a Great Aunt Emma you'd never heard of turned up on the doorstep and said, "You remember me?" and your parents came over all weird and asked her to stay? It traumatised a generation.
Watership Down
Richard Adams, 1972
Adams’s bizarre but thrillingly successful book asks us to take the lives of rabbits as seriously as the lives of Homeric heroes. It’s gripping, punctiliously realistic about rabbit behaviour and biology (except for the, um, psychic one) – and the final page will break you.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Tom's Midnight Garden
Philippa Pearce, 1958
Heartbreaking time-slip novel about the friendship between a modern boy and the Victorian girl he meets when the clock strikes 13 and he finds himself wandering like a ghost through the formal garden that once stood where he’s living. "The Time Traveler’s Wife" for pre-teens.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, 1947
On a skim, this postwar children’s picture book is a mimsy bedtime story about a bunny. But what’s going on with the vanishing and reappearing objects and figures? The more you examine it, the more you see. “Goodnight, nobody.”
Available on The Week Bookshop
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