Last week was Children’s Book Week, but I was a little slow in finishing this post, so I’m officially extending it to make it Children’s Book Fortnight.

As such, I encourage you to check out what’s out there in children’s publishing, particularly if you haven’t looked recently. Some of it is pap and some of it is overly moralistic, but some of it is amazing. And you just won’t know which it is until you start thumbing through…

Here are some children’s books (appearing in no particular order) I’ve enjoyed through the years:

1. Horton Hears a Who!, by Dr. Seuss
2. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster
4. The Little House series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
5. Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
6. Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer
7. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle
8. Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type, by Doreen Cronin
9. The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper
10. Homecoming, by Cynthia Voigt
11. The Chronicles of Narnia series, by C.S. Lewis
12. The Great Good Thing, by Roderick Townley
13. The Please and Thank You Book, by Richard Scarry
14. Summerland, by Michael Chabon
15. Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery
16. The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot
17. The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg
18. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
19. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, by Ann Brashares
20. The Conch Bearer, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

So I’ve given you my twenty. Who wants to contribute some of their favorites?

Oxford is home to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Lewis Carroll. At one point or another I have had trouble finishing their works, but I eventually did and am so glad I did.

1. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (I read about half of it before putting it down at the start of a semester in grad school. I still haven’t gotten back to it yet.)
2. Ulysses, by James Joyce (I only made it through a few pages of it before I had to return it to the library.)
3. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (I got further into this one than Ulysses, but not much further. But at least I own my copy of this one.)
4. How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby (I hated it from the beginning. Really couldn’t get into it.)
5. How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn (I read a surprising amount of this before reaching one of those moments in the text where the main character, whom you’ve come to love, is about to screw up his life. I couldn’t prevent him, so I just stopped reading. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back.)

We’re visiting Hay-on-Wye today, so I thought I’d share some favorite authors.

1. Jane Austen
2. J.R.R. Tolkein
3. J.K. Rowling
4. Jasper Fforde
5. James Herriot

George Orwell’s classic Animal Farm turns 60 today.

I picked Animal Farm up off my parents’ book shelves in the living room when I was 10 or so. I don’t remember ever being told I couldn’t read things off their shelves, but I believe this marked the first occasion where I availed myself of the option. (It wasn’t until after my freshman year English class at Conn when three of us shared a copy of a tale of Giants in the Earth that I discovered my mother’s college copy on the shelf. Come to think of it, maybe I should read it now, since I’m pretty sure I didn’t have time to finish it before I wrote the paper.)

I’m sure I wasn’t expecting an allegory when I started and I’m sure I missed much of the undercurrent of the book (not being up on facism or socialist ideals in the fourth grade), but I do know that I understood a certain amount of the intended message. And I remember having a conversation with Dad about it while we were doing dishes one night (although I don’t recall what we talked about — 1984, perhaps, given that it would have been around that time?).

So, if you haven’t read it, do. From what I remember, it features pigs — of all sorts.

And if you have read it, feel free to do what I’m going to do at some point — see if you can track down the 1999 live-action made-for-tv movie voiced by Patrick Stewart, Kelsey Grammar, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Ian Holm (of LOTR fame), among others.

I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince early this evening. I cried.

I went two-for-five. Not terrible odds, if we were playing baseball. But not great for literature. But still a good read. Jo Rowling says she won’t start writing book seven until 2006, so I will have a while to come up with some new predictions for the final volume.

Y’know, it never struck me until right now, that both one of my favorite books and one of my favorite movies feature wizards. How odd.

Of course, Dumbledore is a very good wizard, and the Wizard of Oz was “a bad wizard,” although bad in another way.

Heading up to Bethesda now…