20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
By Maria Popova
“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B. White insisted. “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.”
Both as a reader of them and as a writer of them, I have never considered “children’s books” a separate category of literature: The best children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, shining a sidewise gleam on the fundamental questions we live with, articulating in the language of children, which is the language of great simplicity and great profundity, the most complex truths about being human. But reducing a lifetime of reading to just twenty favorite books to mark twenty years of The Marginalian was so tortuously hard that I am sneaking in another twenty under the dubious label “children’s.”
THE LITTLE PRINCE
THE DARK WOOD OF THE GOLDEN BIRDS
MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER
THE LOST WORDS
BIG WOLF & LITTLE WOLF
THE WANTING MONSTER
CRY, HEART, BUT NEVER BREAK
OCEAN OF STARS
KENNY’S WINDOW
IF YOU COME TO EARTH
THIS IS A POEM THAT HEALS FISH
THE LION AND THE BIRD
THE HEART AND THE BOTTLE
THE OSBICK BIRD
ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
IN THE HALF ROOM
WHAT DO YOU KNOW?
SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY
AT THE DROP OF A CAT
FERDINAND
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Published October 25, 2026
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/25/20-childrens-books/
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