The 19 Best Read Aloud Books For All Ages
Our favorite all-ages bedtime scripts.
by Rachel Shukert
October 2, 2008
We all know that reading out loud to your child is the best thing you can do; if the psychologists (and my mother) are to be believed, it’s the only foolproof way to make sure your kid grows up to be a productive — not to mention brilliant — member of society, instead of an indigent criminal lying unconscious in a gutter somewhere. But when you just can’t face the 999th reading of Maisy the Mouse — or even better-known classics (your Where The Wild Things Are, your Alexander and the Terrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day), or when the soul of your child is crying out for something finer (or just a little more involved) here’s a list of great books sure to fit the bill. Some are famous, some less so — but all guaranteed to stoke a child’s imagination and development. Whether they’ll fall asleep is another story — it all depends on delivery. — Rachel Shukert
1. Half-Magic by Edward Eager
Like the E. Nesbit stories he so lovingly pays tribute to throughout his work, Edward Eager’s saga of fanciful magic is one of the greatest and most overlooked contributions to children’s literature. Almost every single one of his books could appear on this list (and one other, The Knight’s Castle, des) but Half Magic is the Ur-text in which four siblings—adventurous tomboy Jane, practical Mark, dreamy Katherine and Martha, the baby) find a small silver coin, engraved with mysterious writing, that has the ability to grant wishes. Perplexingly, the coin can only grant half a wish at a time, leading to all sorts of fanciful mishaps. Eager’s tremendous facility with language (not to mention the 1920s setting) makes it a prim delight to read out loud, and his endowing of ordinary children with extraordinary powers is sure to assuage (and comfort) even the most die-hard Harry Potter fan.
2. They Came From Aargh! by Russell Hoban
Since my mother first read this book to me in 1983, it has haunted my dreams, my speech, my very soul. It is hands down the best picture book I ever read, and I insisted we check it out from the library so many times that finally the librarian told me to just take it home with me and never come back. It has since been lost to the sands of time. In They Came From Aargh! Russell Hoban continues the gastronomic theme he began in his Frances the Badger series (bread, jam, eggs and things), as three intrepid space travelers (i.e. small children attired in goggles, helmets, tin foil, and other intergalactic accoutrements) voyage to another dimension in order to sample the cheese omelets and chocolate cake prepared by a galumphing extraterrestrial giant called a Mummosaurus — a word my mother still uses to refer to herself. It’s out of print and almost impossible to find, but it’s worth the search—and who knows? You might even find a churlish librarian sick enough of your kid to let you keep it.
3. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
More elegant and slyly surreal than the better known Where The Wild Things Are, this book is a perfect bedtime story when you want your children to have very interesting dreams featuring Laurel and Hardy and naked children covered in dough. On his night journey to the eponymous kitchen, Mickey (a close cousin of the famous Max) falls into the batter and risks being made into cake himself, but thanks to the the bizarre logic of dreamsis able to construct a working airplane out of bread and save himself, to general merriment. Again, my quotable mother often still shrieks “Milk! Milk for the Morning Cake!” while fixing her cereal each day.
4. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The movie is a perennial favorite of course, beloved by a strange trifecta of children, gays, and in at least one case (to my knowledge) by a severely mentally handicapped man who believed if he only yelled loud enough, he could sufficient warn Dorothy of the Wicked Witch of the West’s imminent arrival—and when he failed, removed his penis from his pants and rubbed it against my bare ankle in frustration. But that’s a story for another time. The book, written in 1900, is far weirder and yes, more wonderful. Children can marvel over all of the details left out of the movie—the Silver Shoes, the Quadling Country, the dainty people made out of China—and you can puzzle over whether the whole book, as has been hypothesized, is really an elaborate prairie allegory for the end of the Gold Standard.
©2008 Babble
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