Wash. Post Enlists Parents to Build the Definitive List of

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from The Washington Post. The original article was published on Dec. 6 and updated on Dec 19, 2022.

This holiday season, let’s press pause on one of the culture wars.

Recent tussles over the “appropriateness” of kids’ books obscure the genius and joy of so much children’s literature. As a reset, we asked dozens of parents across the political spectrum to share the children’s books they love best. They did, and reaffirmed an essential principle: One of our most important jobs as adults is to help foster in children a love of reading, and the lifetime of wonder and wisdom that follow from it.

All our participants knew this list might include books they wouldn’t choose for their own families. But together, they’ve created a library in which everyone can find something to awe and delight young people.

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On putting this list together, Alyssa says:

“As someone who grew up on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, and is currently reading them to my daughter, I was secretly delighted that Little House in the Big Woods was the most-nominated book, and that the nods for it came from both sides of the political spectrum and from both fathers and mothers.

“It’s one of those series that can be read in so many different ways: as a pean to domesticity and as a testament to the backbreaking labor involved in keeping house, as a dispatch from a racially unenlightened-era and as a surprisingly prescient look at the cruelty of settlement and indigenous displacement.”

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