I so would love to visit Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory! Does he rent rooms? I'd go for all-inclusive :)

As I young girl I never was much into horses as were all the other girls from my class. This is why I never read Black Beauty. I also never saw any of the movie adaptions. All I knew was that it was about a very beautiful horse.
Reading this book I was surprised by three things: First of all, it was completely different from what I expected. I had kind of imagined a story about a wild horse. This so totally wasn't the case. The second thing was, that Anna Sewell turns out to be the Charles Dickens for animal rights! She tells about all the mischief and maltreatment that happened to horses. And this directly leads me to the third surprise: Balck Beauty was published in 1877, almost 140 years ago. I was very surprised to see some dealing with animal rights topics at this time. I had always thought this to be a much modern topic.
I enjoyed the writing very much and I so felt with Black Beauty and all the other horses. In the end I was really close to tears. Black Beauty is a novel I'd widely recommend!

All rules have exceptions, and here's a stellar example of that principle: other titles I've seen in this series have varied between dull and nauseating, but this one is absolutely terrific.

I spent an hour leafing through it this afternoon, and I was blown away by the brilliant selection. It's wonderfully balanced, and if the editors have any prejudice I didn't spot what it was. They have all the obvious old classics - Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Little Women - and all the new ones - Harry Potter, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Twilight. But they've also found an absolute wealth of more or less obscure books, including most of my Swedish favorites. These are people with enough taste and judgement that they don't think it's redundant to include Pippi Långstrump and Bröderna Lejonhjärta, or Kometen Kommer and Hur Gick Det Sen?, or Godnatt Alfons Åberg and Alfons och Odjuret. They have Tomi Ungerer's Crictor, die gute Schlange and la Comtesse de Ségur's Les malheurs de Sophie. They even had 100万回生きたねこ, a book I've unsuccessfully been trying to locate for years. Wow. Impressed doesn't begin to cover it.

I only have one criticism: somehow, they've managed to omit Ainsi va la vie. How is this possible, when they do have the vastly inferior Titeuf?? I will write and ask them. Maybe I can get them to include it in the next edition.

I think this is a very good list of children's books. I really like it much better than the adults' version. It's much more international and lists books from much more categories.
There were however a few things that bother me a bit. First, I didn't like that the list loads of books that are very hard to get or only at prices the books are really not worth. So what's the sense of listing them if hardly anyone can read them? Second, I didn't like that the authors didn't take any interest in the availability of the books in other languages. I read books in German, English, French and Spanish and I also don't have a problem with reading picture books in Italian. But many people and especially children (who are the actual target group of this book) don't. I read the German translation of this book. I know that a translation is not supposed to change anything. But it would have been great to have a version with books that are all available in German as well. The last thing I sometimes found very strange was the age certain books were recommended for. E.g. in the 3+ section you can find picture books with hardly any text in them which would as well fit into the 0-3 category. At the same time you have books with a lot of text which are also quite thick (at least for a 5+ child). This might make it difficult for parents who are using this book to found suitable reading material for their children; they just can't rely on the book really being adequate.

I love books about books.