Book of the Week (38): "1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up" edited by Julia Eccleshare

If there's one thing the editors of the Ultimate Book Guide series know (and there may well be just the one), it's that any selection of books to recommend will be just that - a selection, a limited personal choice from tens of thousands of possibilities; and that there will always be things other people agree with, and things they don't. And the ones that they'll write in to tell you about will always be the latter.

But it is also precisely part of the fun in leafing through Julia Eccleshare's superb new doorstop volume - 1001 Children's Books... - to see what she has included and what she hasn't, and to allow oneself a little bit of feigned outrage each time her choices don't precisely match one's own. (Fire-Eaters instead of Kit's Wilderness? No Coraline? Sneetches? Shocking! I'm appalled! Speechless! Hmph!) But as I say, the truth is there's a lot of fun to be had from just that exercise; and as one would expect, Eccleshare's selection is brilliant, expert, and probably as close to that impossible perfect selection as it's possible to get in the real world...

Among the 1001 titles reviewed by Eccleshare's team of experts (and a few by some of the biggest names in children's books today - Eric Carle on Struwwelpeter, Judy Blume on Madeline, as well as Pullman, Almond, Morpurgo, Wilson, etc.) you'll find a surprising number you don't recognise mixed in among the indusputable classics, among the Narnias and Sendaks and Gruffalos and the like; the range includes a large number of non-Anglophone writers, which tend to get very little prominence in the Anglophone world - I'm delighted to have been led to some things I might not otherwise have found (though in the cases where they have been translated, I would have liked some reference to the fact and to the identity of the translator, but then I suppose I would...) - I've dog-eared lots of pages that recommend books I didn't know but like the sound of and must track down sometime...

The reviewed books are divided into age bands - 0-3, 3+, 5+, 8+, 12+ - so it's user-friendly for anyone who wants it as a practical guide to find things for today's children; but I suspect many of the people who will love this book the most will be those who haven't been children for some time; yes, it's about books for children, but this beautifully put together object, richly illustrated in colour throughout its 900+ pages, should find its way into a lot of adult-sized stockings this Christmas, too...

Recommended by Daniel Hahn