Hayao Miyazaki's Top 50 Children's Books
A Japanese artist recommends 50 essential titles that every kid (and grown-up) ought to know.
“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself,” the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once remarked. Wise counsel, Shaw puts the pleasure of reading above the duty, especially with children and their first approach to books. In a similar sense, the man who changed the course of traditional animation, Hayao Miyazaki, recounts that for children in postwar Japan books became shelters from the sinister reality of the country. This is further proof of the transformative (and healing) capacity of literature.
Miyazaki’s work has fascinated children and adults for decades. It’s even the subject of formal studies examining the work’s artistic value and complex philosophy. Miyazaki’s work is open to literature in an obvious, even extraordinary way. It’s no coincidence that the artist is a great connoisseur of the universe of children’s literature and the titles that every child should know and love, first, to later fall in love with all of literature.
In 2010, Miyazaki selected his fifty favorite children’s books, as a tribute to the legendary Japanese publishing house, Iwanami Shoten. The list, abundant with solitary and orphaned children, and where animals speak (as they do also in his animated films) will charm both little ones and adults. It’s also a reminder that some of the most beautiful books written will fascinate readers of any age. What’s more, the collection of titles provides a glimpse into the purest, most admirable minds of all; those of children.
The works selected by Hayao Miyazaki
- The Borrowers — Mary Norton
- The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Children of Noisy Village — Astrid Lindgren
- When Marnie Was There — Joan G. Robinson
- Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome
- The Flying Classroom — Erich Kästner
- There Were Five of Us — Karel Poláček
- What the Neighbours Did, and Other Stories — Ann Philippa Pearce
- Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates — Mary Mapes Dodge
- The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Eagle of The Ninth — Rosemary Sutcliff
- The Treasure of the Nibelungs — Gustav Schalk
- The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas, père
- A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin
- Les Princes du Vent — Michel-Aime Baudouy
- The Flambards Series — K. M. Peyton
- Souvenirs entomologiques — Jean Henri Fabre
- The Long Winter — Laura Ingalls Wilder
- A Norwegian Farm — Marie Hamsun
- Heidi — Johanna Spyri
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain
- Little Lord Fauntleroy — Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Tistou of the Green Thumbs — Maurice Druon
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler — E. L. Konigsburg
- The Otterbury Incident — Cecil Day-Lewis
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
- The Little Bookroom — Eleanor Farjeon
- The Forest is Alive or Twelve Months — Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak
- The Restaurant of Many Orders — Kenji Miyazawa
- Winnie-the-Pooh — A. A. Milne
- Nihon Ryōiki — Kyokai
- Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio — Pu Songling
- Nine Fairy Tales: And One More Thrown in For Good Measure — Karel Čapek
- The Man Who Has Planted Welsh Onions — Kim So-un
- Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
- The Hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien
- Journey to the West — Wu Cheng’en
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne
- The Adventures of the Little Onion — Gianni Rodari
- Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Ship that Flew — Hilda Winifred Lewis
- The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame
- The Little Humpbacked Horse — Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov (Ershoff)
- The Little White Horse — Elizabeth Goudge
- The Rose and the Ring — William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Radium Woman — Eleanor Doorly
- City Neighbor, The Story of Jane Addams — Clara Ingram Judson
- Ivan the Fool — Leo Tolstoy
- The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle — Hugh Lofting
*Image: pixabay / Public Domain